Comment by JanSolo
6 years ago
Anyone know the reason why there's no iMessage for windows? Is it supposed to act as some kind of gateway drug into the Mac ecosystem?
Apple seems to have quite a few of these 'unspoken unfeatures'. Perhaps someone can tell me why there are no web browsers allowed on AppleTV devices?
Its because they use peer pressure to get you to buy an apple device. You can invite an android user to an imessage group but it apparently downgrades the feature set of the group for everyone, they also color messages from android users differently. Its all designed to discourage talking to android users so they eventually buy an iphone.
SMS is colored differently (green) than iMessage (blue), regardless of the device on the receiving end. I'm not sure how they would even know the recipient is on Android.
If I send an iMessage to a friend's iPhone when they do not have service it automatically downgrades to SMS from iMessage. My brother didn't run iMessage for years so group chats that include his iPhone were still SMS based.
In a group chat with non-iMessage users everyone gets downgraded to SMS. I'm not sure how else it would even work?
It doesn't discourage talking to users with an Android or any other phone. I do that all the time, it's all in the same app. If they wanted to put up barriers they could do that but instead it's totally seamless.
> In a group chat with non-iMessage users everyone gets downgraded to SMS. I'm not sure how else it would even work?
I was thinking that there might be a way around it: send iMessages to people who are iMessage capable, and send MMS to people who aren't. The people who have to send MMS will just send their replies to everyone in the group over MMS, and the messages app on the iPhone would just figure out that the messages belong to the correct group.
But then I realized that I don't think there's an analog to the "reply-to" header for MMS. So there might not be a way to send that group message to the single MMS recipient without sending it to all recipients over MMS. In order to get replies to go to the entire group, each group member has to be in the "to" field for the MMS-using phone to know all the group members.
It's a shame, because my understanding is that the MMS protocol is actually pretty similar to email in some ways... and yet they apparently left out "reply-to".
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The only thing we can conclude from this is your brother is a techie.
The Mac client already drags years behind the iOS client, I don’t have a lot of faith in Apple’s ability to maintain a Windows version even if they wanted to.
On the Mac side it might catch up in the next release by throwing out the original version and replacing it with a Catalyst port, but there’s no similar solution to that for Windows.
Nor can I see them de-emphasizing the 3rd party app integrations to make the service available to people who aren’t Apple’s customers on platforms that Apple doesn’t control.
Liked "Its all designed to discourage talking to android users so they eventually buy an iphone."
If you own an Android you will understand the above. Very annoying!
I think its only a US android user issue. Here in Australia there are more android users so everyone uses 3rd party apps that work everywhere.
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I mean, that happens to iPhone users too. That's the SMS fallback for iMessage reactions.
I wish I had an option to turn off reactions, or at least turn off notifications for reactions. When my sister gets a few minutes to review the family group chat she goes through and "loves" and "likes" and "laughs at" almost every message. My phone pings for every single one of them.
Yes, everyone knows this but you're not supposed to mention it. If you have green bubbles, you risk being a social pariah. Android use among teenagers, who are most susceptible to peer pressure, is >80%. Also I know several guys who switched to iPhones and suddenly had a much better sex life. It is what it is. Think of Apple buy-in like a tribal tattoo or rite of passage for young people.
If Apple released iMessage for Android or made it compatible with another protocol like RCS/WhatsApp/Signal/etc., then Apple would lose half of its market cap. I'm not exaggerating.
How do they manage the risk that some other chat system establishes itself? Whatsapp and Wechat had a chance because there was no open standard.
I am convinced that history will repeat itself and Apple will become obsolete again because the PC of chat will eat their Mac Chat lunches.
If their market share depends on peer pressure there will be nothing that sustains them once that pressure is gone.
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Apple is caught in the constant push/pull of "we're compatible with stuff" vs. "there's a reason why you buy a Mac." Curating apps and keeping iMessage for Mac users falls into the latter category right now. Might be different tomorrow.
Apple is the biggest example in the tech industry right now of vertical integration; that a company controls not only the end product that they sell but also the component parts.
That's why it's best to think of Apple not as a software company but as a vertically integrated hardware company: Apple provides services (iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime, Siri) to add value to their software (macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS) in order to add value to their hardware (Macs, iOS devices, Watch, Apple TV).
To answer the question of why web browsers aren't allowed on Apple TV, it's because Apple does not deem that they add value at any of those levels — the Apple TV is not positioned as a general purpose computer but more as a sort of console, suited to consuming multimedia and playing games but not for general purpose web browsing.
But it isn't as though Apple hasn't anticipated the desire to see web content on the big screen. That's why macOS and iOS devices support AirPlay Mirroring.
I think there are a couple of generations that are unused to the idea of vertical integration in technology and view it with suspicion. Once upon a time, say the 80s and prior, it was the norm: you bought a computer, could only use their OS, and in certain cases could only use their software.
IBM PCs and MS-DOS broke the industry free of that mould in a major way, but Apple has proven to have some success with it — in fact, it's almost the entire value of what they propose: tight integration between hardware and software to provide, as Apple sees it, the best experience.
To come back to the first question: iMessage is both a service and software. It benefits Apple more to use iMessage to sell Macs and iOS devices; there's no benefit to Apple for people to use iMessage on Windows (or Android, Linux, etc.). Apple is, remember, not a services company; it is a hardware company. iMessage "sells" macOS and iOS which, in turn, sell Macs and iOS devices.
In fact, I don't even think Apple sells hardware. Apple sells experiences. That might sound airy-fairy, but it corresponds well to their approach.
Contrast this with iTunes. iTunes exists on Windows in order to sell iPods (and later, iPhones and iPads) and multimedia content to Windows users. This benefits Apple in a way that allowing iMessage on Windows would not.
Same reason why Apple TV+ and Apple Music are available on competing television devices and on Android: selling subscriptions to non-Apple users still provides Apple with a benefit (and valuable opportunity to advertise) that iMessage on other platforms would not.
This approach exists in sharp contrast to both the Microsoft of the past and present, as well as web-based service companies. Their goals are different.
Microsoft made MS-DOS and Windows available on as many types of computers as possible in order to sell Windows licences; Apple tried this once in the 90s and didn't make enough money to justify the operation.
Services like Facebook, that freely provide their messenger services on practically all platforms, have a different measurement for whether or not there is any benefit: they aren't trying to sell you on hardware, they're trying to sell data to advertisers.
There are other examples: LINE, for instance, doesn't necessarily need to sell users' data to make money; instead, LINE operates a content store selling additional functionality.
Therefore, it's impractical to compare Apple's approach with iMessage to that of competing messaging services. The apps and associated services serve different purposes to meet different ends.
To conclude: iMessage is there to make you buy an iPhone.
It's the same reason BlackBerry refused to make BBM available on other platforms (although I believe they actually did just that a couple of years ago when no one even remembered what BlackBerry was, perhaps after the company name was sold to a different manufacturer).
BBM was released on Android and IOS in 2014 (six years ago), but it never caught on. It's still around in the enterprise space, but barely.
And the company name was never sold to a different manufacturer. BlackBerry allowed TCL and an India-based company (I can't remember the name) to sell BlackBerry-branded phones running BlackBerry software, but that's all.
Time flies!