Yes, I don't want apps accessing my messages surreptitiously. Points there.
However, what's wrong with allowing another app to post messages to my messages?
If I don't want it, let me turn them off. Maybe, as a UI expert company, it's easy "block app from sending me messages" when I get a message. Seems like something that should be fairly transparent to the (potentially misbehaving) app.
I use a Garmin, and Android, and I use it for messages all the time, it's great. I can't imagine not taking them. It's easy for me to block stuff I don't want, could it be easier, maybe...
But my point is this isn't something unreasonable for a user to want.
As a general aside, it seems when I hear about Apple products anymore, they are locked down, unintuitive, and generally just unpleasant. I even tried an Apple device again recently...eugh.
Apple is only "nice" for a certain, narrow segment of the population.
That's exactly what spammers would use to send spam.
> If I don't want it, let me turn them off.
Can you it off for anyone sending you messages too?
That's the issue; you not wanting to use it does not mean that spammers won't use it.
That's the problem. You can't have nice things if some people can use it to abuse the system; and there are a lot of people who will.
> But my point is this isn't something unreasonable for a user to want.
This ignores the reality which is that doing it in a way that gives a nice user experience without an enormously painful security issue is really non trivial.
Maybe it's OK to have the choice?
...
If you love your android phone, don't care about iOS, don't like iphones.... why do you care? I mean, why does it upset android users when they see this sort of thing for people using iphones?
It mystifies me. If you love you phone, and you think it's better, then use it.
Nothing lost right?
Thanks Apple, for switching connectors on your mobile devices once in 25 years and enforcing standards on 3p peripheral and cable manufacturers, until a government forced you to change making me throw all my cables away.
This is not to say every aspect of their walled garden is good, but I’m more than happy to accept those problems in light of the benefits I personally value.
This is all to say: it’s not much of an argument to point out that one of their selling points is an aspect of their ecosystem! I don’t think you’ll get through to anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.
The App Store was an absolute revolution for mobile app developers. It is hard to overstate how much of an improvement it was over the status quo. People are complaining about Apple taking a 30% cut; it used to be that the operators took a 70% cut. Not for hosting an app store, no, just for sending the reverse-billing SMS message with the install link. You had to host it yourself, there was no store so you had to advertise your app to make it discoverable. You had to arrange (and pay for) a shortcode and SMS provider for every single country you wanted to sell in. You had to write and host code to handle the incoming message on the shortcode and respond with a RB-SMS.
Next to that, the SDK’s were absolute dogshit, phone manufacturers didn’t give a shit about apps and the phones themselves were riddled with bugs (with the notable exception of SonyEricsson, their J2ME environment was excellent). Symbian was a PITA to develop for, BlackBerry was actively developer-hostile (unless you happened to be a Fortune-500 company). Samsung phones were an absolute disaster, every single phone model had a unique set of bugs you had to find workarounds for.
So in comes Apple, they charge only 30% and for that you get a nice SDK, an App Store that distributes your app, makes it discoverable and handles payments worldwide with zero extra effort. We were thrilled when they announced it, and rightfully so.
Google then followed suit with the Play Store, effectively matching what Apple was doing.
So yeah, Apple deserves some thanks for what they did with the App Store.
They did move to USB-C, but the lightning connector was actually a great product, far superior in usability to the Micro-USB, Mini-USB, and whatever other nonsense standards that existed. When Apple wanted to move to USB-C people complained about them "changing standards all the time". There really isn't a move that pleases everyone and even when they do the "right" thing people still complain lol.
> App Store too, for all the good it does everyone in the EU
The Apple App Store is pretty great. There's a large, vocal minority of folks that want changes there, but they also aren't the ones that have to deal with grandma and grandpa doing crazy stuff. If you want another App Store just by an Android phone since that's a feature they offer. Kind of like if I wanted a phone with a larger megapixel camera or something I'd buy something else.
I couldn’t care less about Apple’s case, but the fact that this is being touted as the EU’s biggest achievement in decades says a lot about why Europeans don’t like the EU.
Apple should be able to lock down their ecosystem as a default -- plenty of people will be happy to use that default experience.
But Apple should absolutely be prohibited from not allowing users the choice of unlocking their own device, for additional functionality, if they choose.
It's also glaringly obvious that many of the "freedoms" Apple affords its users (freedom from iMessage spam!) help drive its revenue...
This example might be apples-and-oranges when it comes to the protecting Apple protecting iMessage, but they often rob the user of the choice that other manufacturers offer.
For example: Hotspot. Android hotspot can be perma-on. iPhone hotspot cannot. It will always switch itself off after some time of non-use. When I asked an Apple employee about this (This was not his dept), his understanding was that it was for not-clogging up Wifi at-scale, and for users who forget to turn it off. But what about the users who want it on always, who pay their cell provider for the biggest pacakge? My computer goes to sleep, and the hotspot turns off and I have to go manually switching it back on because "Apple knows better". I want those choices.
How can you not realize that you're being abused?
I do not want 3rd party hardware/software vendors to have unrestricted access to the messaging app on my phone that is the only option my bank and PayPal and a bunch of other critical services use for 2FA.
Especially not when the software they want to run is JavaScript, with all it's well known npm dependancy nightmares, _and_ from a founder and team that openly admit iPhones are a second class citizen in their development planning and resources.
And especially especially not when the founders have previously shown their colors when they rugpulled all their customers and effectively bricked all the devices they'd sold.
Even with the limited iMessage/SMS access they have now, I wonder how long it'll be before we see a supply chain attack against Pebble exploiting some 11th level deep npm dependancy on something dumb like leftpad.js, that exfiltrates SMS 2FA codes and first anybody knows about it will be when a bunch of CryptoBros start complaining about their exchange accounts being emptied...
As a Pebble user for a long time, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about here. If you're talking about Fitbit halting services, I can't exactly blame the founder of Pebble for that. Can I blame him for the poor business decisions that led to needing to sell to Fitbit? I guess, but I'm not a business person nor a CEO and have no idea what transpired to lead up to that. But I'm reasonably sure it wasn't malice as you seem to imply.
We're going to have to do insane things to get them working. Due to how ANCS works, we're considering developing an ANCS "doohicky" (either a BLE pop-socket, smart-ring, or mag-safe wallet) which gets notifications via BLE & relays them back to the iPhone, to then send to the glasses. That would just get us the raw notifications, though, and wouldn't solve the issue of replying. The other option is a Beeper-like system in the cloud to bypass iOS entirely, but that also has downsides.
It's a total mess, especially compared to Android where you can just easily listen for notifications & send them to the glasses without much pushback from the system.
Allowing devices to view and respond to messages is inherently lower risk than allowing them to freely communicate with anyone.
Phones, for better or worse, contain much more private and personal information about users than their computer I would bet on average.
So I understand the urge to make phones more secure by default and to help users avoid foot guns, even if it means restricting their choices.
You are likely not the average user, and I think it's a bit selfish to demand total freedom, that you can manage safely, when for most users they would be worse off.
In a perfect world we wouldn't need this but we certainly don't have one of those.
I suspect Apple can significantly cut down on abuse prevention measures just by making it harder to automatically send iMessage spam.
If any random Bluetooth smartwatch was allowed to send those, there's no telling how that capability could be abused, we all know how IoT vendors are with device security.
Not all corporations make better choices, however, which motivates a regulatory role. Thus is civilisation identified.
It is the responsibility of the systems designer to make sure the system is secure, not the end user.
And if you require instructions on how to secure your system, then you have already failed. A properly designed system is secure with zero knowledge.
Remember, it takes work to learn anything, and the goal of a tool is to reduce work, not to increase it.
Throw away customization. Throw away configuration. Both of those are bad design principles.
Make it work by default.
Isn't the choice to use an android, then?
- Multiple replies
- Edits
- Scheduled send
- Voice message
- Tapbacks
- Message history
- Message order is reliant on notification order
- Delays in the notification system could be different than the messaging system
- Opaque nature of message going from notification system -> messaging system, difficult if message is lost/not sent with no indication of why
(n.) A falsehood, exaggeration, or lie. "Saying you climbed a V10 after a month? That’s cap."
(v.) To lie, exaggerate, or be deceitful. "He said he coded the whole app in a day, but we know he capping."
I appreciate you sharing your experience, I just wish you could have done it without this bit.
Edit: or maybe I'm wrong. I do know one person who bought a phone because it sucked, because they didn't want to spend as much time glued to the device. It was an Android with a tiny tiny screen, though, because iOS would not be allowed to run on hardware of your choosing due to Apple's restrictions... Either way, I guess there is a market of people who do want to inflict pain upon themselves, but this really does seem like exceedingly niche argument to me. Saying that the restrictions are the reason why their demographic buys their device is just buying into Apple's lies that fund their bottom line
I understand the benefit of an open ecosystem. Use your web browser, or a third-party app. The tech adopted by the masses needs guard rails and secure defaults.
I hated Apple’s ecosystem growing up, now I think it’s necessary. We can’t trust developers, or companies, that have competing interests to do the right thing.
Funny, because the overwhelming majority of people and systems exist outside of it and are doing just fine. This sounds like the sentiment of a crab in a bucket who's feeling quite safe from the sides since it was caught.
Do you think “the masses” should not use web browsers or third party apps?
