Comment by monadic2

I come from a land where patents don’t really work. I often wonder, are there any examples of patents in the field of software engineering that worked like they supposed to, protecting small collectives from powerful corporations?

A lawsuit that they paid out $400 million for, even after rearchitecting how FaceTime worked to avoid the patent?

How that patent is even valid astounds me. It saddens me more Apple did not challenge the patent!

[not defending patent trolls, just poking what seems to be a hole in the concept]

> Its okay if they are actually still in the process of building the thing

what should happen with a patent holder who sells off their R&D department, and thus stops "developing things"? should they be allowed to keep their patents? (to keep receiving e.g. licencing fees for the stuff they did develop; i think that's how it works?)

As described above, the trolls play an important part of the system that does reward small players at the expense of large entities. What if you have a startup that intends on making something, but for myriad reasons you go bust, and then you sell your patent to an enforcement entity? That’s what usually happens in these cases.

They should just expire much more rapidly. 20 years is an eternity in the software world, and 10 years, or even 5 years, should be enough to develop a lead, profit a bit, and fund your next invention(s).

> Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why?

They definitely do. Not sure what your age or demographic is, but young folks do care a lot about higher social status which is tied to blue bubble because of iPhone prices. It has nothing to do with privacy though.

Individual SMS is fine. Group SMS stinks. You can’t remove yourself from a conversation unless everyone else moves on to a new thread without you. Also, you don’t get contact names for ad hoc group conversations with new people.

Trying to get people to agree to a proper chat platform is like wrangling cats. If everyone in the group has an iOS device, then there’s no decision to be made.

Definitely people care about blue vs green bubbles. Have you ever tried to send videos back and forth between the two? It looks like it was shot on my old Nokia flip phone in either direction. Plus no "typing" bubble, texts seem to take longer to arrive, group chats are degraded if even one green bubble is included, etc. It sounds like Android has finally caught up with RCS, but iMessage was one of my favorite features when I switched years ago.

MMS and SMS are extremely unreliable, especially if you were out of the coverage area when a message was sent (half the time I only receive some of a conversation and have to try to interpret what happened). RCS is supposed to fix this, but no carrier seems intent on sunsetting SMS to force Apple’s hand. At least with iMessage, I’ll eventually get the message (they’ll hold it server side, encrypted, until I get back online).

I still use SMS a lot, because it’s more important to me that I can talk and send pictures to people than worrying about them being on a certain platform or app (Discord’s notifications aren’t great on mobile if you haven’t opened the app for a while). But it’s super annoying, and if Apple made iMessage an open standard (they probably won’t, since people buy iPhones for it), I think many people on Android would move to it.

You literally answered your own question.

“... though MMS for group texting is ridiculously unreliable so I try to funnel people to Signal.”

Group texting between iPhones just works. Add an Android user to the group and all of the sudden it doesn’t work. Ergo, don’t add them.

I would buy an Android if it weren’t for the social force behind iMessage blue bubbles and the smoothness of FaceTime.

Green bubbles signal low status. It also makes it more difficult to communicate: no read receipts, no live location, photo/video/audio messages are clunky, worse emojis, no reaction option, and so on.

It’s not about Blue/Green bubbles. Everything messes up once you have one person in a group that isn’t on iMessage - including reactions to messages. Instead of getting an icon on top of message you get “John Doe liked ‘We will be there soon’”.

IME there's a loss of a number of features when communicating without someone with "blue bubbles", that you come to take for granted, and that cause a bit of friction when you realize the messages/functionality you took for granted in your exchange aren't there. If I find myself chatting with someone with green bubbles, I find I tend to transition the conversation over to whatsapp.

It's not like a "relationship killer" or something, but I imagine it is a low-level contributor to my lock-in to the platform.

99% of Americans don’t want to be funneled to WhatsApp or signal for group chat. They want it to live right next to their native texts.

Your group is likely different from the mainstream.

I was thinking about moving to Android about three years back. The thing that stopped me from even seriously considering it was iMessage.

Everyone I know uses iMessage. SMS is unreliable, works poorly in group chats, and can't easily be sent/received from my computer.

(I will still eventually need to go to Android because I'm not giving up my headphone jack, but I'll be hanging onto my iPhone 6S for as long as possible.)

iMessage has read receipts, faster and more reliable delivery, higher quality images/videos. More than just the color of the bubble

iMessage is a much better user experience. Users associate the blue bubbles with that.

For me - it's simply a question of reliability. SMS is not reliable in the US, and I live in an area with poor coverage. My preferred mode of communication is texting but SMS is a no-go.

They absolutely should care. I’m not adding you to a group text if you have an android. Life is too short to read green text bubbles.

> brilliant if your family and friends are all on iPhones, which I'm pretty sure is fairly common in most Western countries

iOS market share is 60% in the US which is the highest worldwide, and only above 50% in a handful of other countries (UK, Japan, Oz, Canada)[0]. If you have any friends who are not rich, or are European or South American, there's a good chance they won't iMessage you but try to add you on WhatsApp.

[0]https://deviceatlas.com/blog/android-v-ios-market-share

In my social circle everyone uses something completely different, not just for messaging.

I need all of Threema, Signal, Skype, iMessage and email just for my closest friends and family.

I also need Google Photos, Google Drive and OneDrive to share data with them.

Apple is the most anti-social platform of them all. I can't even use it to share photos with my wife.

I have never used FaceTime with anyone, because no one uses it, not even those who do have iPhones, because they all have to use something else to communicate with others.

> [...] which I'm pretty sure is fairly common in most Western countries.

It's really not, at least in continental Europe. Here in Germany Android's like 70% of the market and nobody uses iMessage or FaceTime.

Only 40% of people have iPhone in the Netherlands, for example. Everyone uses whatsapp.

They could bind a windows iMessage install to your iPhone the same way Signal/whatsapp do.

Or make it part of an iCloud subscription.

Maybe the marketing and “coolness” is what initially attracts them but once they try it they stay because of the user experience.

I had a non-technical friend with an Android phone (full of malware btw). She didn’t care about Apple, never used any of their products nor need it for the “social status” or anything (her friends are all on WhatsApp so no issues with iMessage). I gave her an old iPhone 7 to try out, a couple weeks later she would never consider going back to Android ever.

Can you name a single android phone that is superior in performance with last year’s iPhone? Can you name an android phone that will be stable and up-to-date 5 years after it was released?

Hi, I have an iPhone and part of the reason I bought it for those reasons. I also happen to care a bit about privacy and security :)

> They might repeat the marketing about privacy and security, but if the person actually cared about either, you'd never use Apple products.

If I cared about security, you’re saying the phone that the FBI famously had trouble breaking into is a bad choice?

If I cared about privacy, you’re saying I should prefer Android — an operating system made by the literal inventor of surveillance capitalism?

Network effects. All your friends are using iMessage.

This is mostly a US phenomenon because in other countries people had already adopted other messaging apps due to higher text messaging costs and for free international voice/video calls

The features aren’t special by themselves. It’s the features combined with the fact it’s the default SMS/chat client on a huge portion of the smartphones market.

It’s a social product. You can’t discount its social appeal.

According to their last earnings - 50% of their revenue was outside of the iPhone.

You also have to remember even the Mac by itself brought in higher revenue than all but the top 100 companies in the US and it’s only 10% of Apple’s revenue. The watch is a bigger revenue generator than the iPod ever was.

What is confusing about Duo? It's a phone-number-based video caller. It's one of the simpler messaging apps that Google has made.

Then they got hit with by a patent troll.

Sure, Apple could sell FaceTime as a stand-alone paid service but with so many free video chat tools I’m not sure they’d have many takers.

That's not how it works. I think you have little idea, if any, how easy it is to find exploits if you had a source code vs if you didn't. With source code you can immediately see the conditions that will cause buffer overruns, for example. One of the huge target has always been jpeg decoder code in Chrome. If you can somehow figure out conditions that will result in buffer overrun, you will have exploit just by creating artificial jpeg. Your victim simply needs to visit your webpage with that jpeg which even can be pushed by narrowly targeted ads, Facebook etc. Building such exploits is much harder to accomplish without having source code. This is rather outdated example but think about possibilities in JavaScript engine, HTML rendering, graphics drivers, OS calls, extensions, APIs etc. When you have 10 million lines of code, you almost inevitabily have some exploit. Such zero day are often sold for 10s of millions of dollars. Its much much harder to find same vulnerabilities without having source code.

Your argument that somehow Apple will do better than these black hat guys is also flawed. Apple can higher N security experts but Apple will always unlikely to match in number of firms and state agencies who can hire M >> N in aggregate. Think of Apple running centralize effort with N people while whole world running distributed attack every day every hour with 10X more eyes and time on hand. Also it has been very well understood within security professionals that source code gets far more scruitiny from black hat then white hat guys.

Finally, remember that people don't update their systems for months and even years. You should know that Bezos iPhone was hacked by an exploit developed by a black hat firm which ultimately cost him $40B in divorce. Think about that for a second. A single software vunerability cost was $40 billion, more than market cap of many companies and GDPs of many countries. This is a guy who literally owns huge chunk of public and private infrastructure, has the best of the best security experts at his finger tips and he got hacked.

Availability accelerates the process by an order of magnitude.