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Beeper’s push for iMessage on Android is really over
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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The whole reason for Beeper to even exist is stupid.
It was never going to work, but they shouldn't have needed to try in the first place.
Beeper Mini, I can agree the reason for existing is stupid. Not Beeper as a whole. I greatly like having a one stop shop for all of my messaging platforms. It's a straight up fucking pain in the ass to have Messages, Messenger, Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram, LinkedIn, and more all having their own specific applications with separate lists of people in them. Gaim/Pidgin/Trillian/Adium had the right idea back in the day and if it isn't done at an application level like Beeper, then I would really like it done at an OS level where all apps of a communication/chat type have their notifications and interactivity bundled. There's going to be platform exclusive features that don't have parity that wouldn't be able to be part through or presented the same, but communications are such a base level function of these devices and the generally one-application-at-a-time type of display of phones makes the balkanization of communication mediums even more annoying.
I think Blackberry had the right solution with their Hub app. It was just a big inbox with a lot of integrations. It would show you all the conversations from different apps (including email) with all the typical filtering, sorting and searching. You had a single screen to see all your conversations nicely organized but clicking on a message would take you to the external app to send messages. It was super useful but of course apps had to provide some API for this to work and BB wasn't popular enough so at some point it just stopped working. Android could easily do this but I think they are just not as good at UX as BB was (seriously, BB OS10 had lots of great features iOS copied a decade later and more, it was really nice).
Yeah also iOS is getting RCS support soon so the whole point is moot. The whole blue bubble thing is a lot of people with way too much time on their hands to get worried about stuff that doesn't matter at all.
The bubbles are pointless. What matters is that apple will not send media like videos or pictures over anything but sms to android users, which means it gets transcoded down to 2.5MB max. This means that any media, which is a lot of what people send nowadays, looks like absolute trash going apple to android.
Its a sleazy, underhanded way to get people to buy into the apple ecosystem so they can stop getting tiny, grainy videos of their friends/family.
Just don't send shit from apple? If you want to send me shit, get a decent phone or don't bother?
Not sure why apple enshittifying their messages is supposed to incentivise me to do anything but ridicule them.
So your answer is "everyone I know with an apple device should stop using the thing that apple made sure works wonderfully for them and shift to another app to talk to me."
That's just not in touch with reality at all. What people actually do is keep using iMessage and sending shitty compressed media to android users. That's the problem people are actually complaining about, not some "bubble color" strawman.
It's a 40/60 split in the market. It's not like a friend group is likely to have only one android phone. Unless the iPhone users are avoiding people with Android phones.
Saying people should use a system agnostic message app isn't farfetched or selfish. It's the common sense solution.
You are absolutely correct. I’m an iOS user and have absolutely no qualms using anyone’s preferred message app (as long as it’s not WhatsApp, fuck fb).
People have always hated on apples Windows apps, the same is probably true if they have to start making android apps too.
It’s literally the correct decision for them not to make an iMessage for android, the only people demanding it are the people who aren’t buying their products!
RCS is not end-to-end encrypted, so their bubbles will remain green.
Google's proprietary extensions add E2EE, and Apple's not going to pull a Beeper on Google.
Google has been begging Apple to implement RCS for well over a year now. They wouldn't need to pull a beeper on Google since Google actively wants to help Apple implement their standard.
RCS is nothing like a proper network based messenger. It is too little, too late.
I for one will never use it.
I was using XMPP on my phone in 2010...which was years ahead of RCS even then.
RCS is still tied to a phone number... Why would I want another version of SMS?
How is that going to help if the only RCS apps for Android are proprietary Google or Samsung apps?
It's actually not that RCS. Apple is saying they'll adopt RCS the standard which would likely be a big wildcard.
Yes, so which FOSS Android app will be interoperable with the new iMessage?
Propably when Google allows Android apps to access modem-level RCS message sending. Right now Google Messages do everything via Google's some sort of a proxy server.
A whole lot of mess just like always when phone operators do anything.
Imagine how cool it could be if every mobile provider would just provide data and free XMPP account with autoconfigure instead of RCS or VoLTE crap.
I'd count on Apple making the RCS bubbles green too, just to sow further confusion.
Yeah and anybody complaining about it at that point is just being a whiny child.