I don’t understand why the article writes that iMessage is the only way for encrypted messaging between Android and iOS. I can thing of several off the top of my head:
- Matrix
- Signal
- Facebook Messanger (very soon)
- Threema
- Telegram
- Viber
- Line
- Skype
And there are surly more …
cause of lazy iOS users that can’t be bothered to use anything else
Then why are we shaming Apple and not the iOS users? I think Apple is totally reasonable here.
Apple’s biggest crimes here are creating a proprietary platform with an exclusive protocol and making it the default messaging protocol on their devices. None of this is really new, though. All that shit is common. We need Signal or Matrix to improve in user-friendliness and even do some marketing to the point where they become viable solutions.
The default messaging protocol is SMS. Unless you are talking with another Apple user
I can send pictures and video over SMS that are viewable anywhere. An iMessage user can only send a patch of 64 color changing macro blocks with some audio. While it’s technically true it’s the default. it’s purposefully degraded to the point of unusability.
Really? That seems odd. I’ve never had a problem sending reasonable quality photos to Android users and I can’t see a business reason why Apple would degrade image sending purposefully- it would drive its own users to get third party apps.
iMessage degrades images and video on MMS regardless of the capability of the network.
The photos are less the issue than videos. But they definitely reduce the size of them far more than other clients do. At least for non iPhone/ iMessage users. It gets so bad that family doesn’t share videos with many of us anymore because of how difficult it is to use something other than iMessage. Or Facebook. But that’s a whole other problem.
I can’t see a business reason why Apple would degrade image sending purposefully- it would drive its own users to get third party apps.
Depends on what the majority of people are using.
In markets where iPhone users are not in the majority, that’s exactly what’s happening: iPhone users are switching to third party apps.
If iPhones users are in the majority, though, then people will just default to iMessage, and non-Apple phones get associated with poor messaging quality. Which creates social pressure for non-iPhone users to buy an iPhone.
So it makes perfect business sense for Apple to degrade the messaging quality when a non-Apple phone joins the conversation.
in other words: the default messaging protocol is imessage, unless that’s impossible, in which case it falls back to sms.
I am not an Apple fanboy at all, I have used iPhones for work previously.
RCS debuted three years before iMessage, Apple developed iMessage because no one could get RCS standards together. We still don’t have this, Google has theirs, Samsung has another. Not all manufacturers support it and neither do all carriers. In my country it does not exist.
I use SimpleX, but when I used a company iPhone, iMessage worked very well, and it worked everywhere regardless of carrier. RCS does not 15 years after its introduction.
None of this is to say there should not be interoperability, clearly there should be. Historically at least, the blame lies with Google and mobile carriers.
I’m not letting Google off the hook, but Apple could also open the standard for iMessage and bypassed the whole problem. But they’d rather lock in customers than allow everyone to communicate securely and effectively.
More marketing would be nice
As for features, an easy remote backup solution (similar to be bettet than WhatsApp) is the big one for me. Especially on iOS
Android has an easy remote backup system built in. You can save a file to any location, including cloud locations, as long as the cloud service provider plugs into the API. Signal actively disables this feature because they would rather spite users than risk even the shadow of a chance that a user upload an encrytped backup to an internet service that could theoretically then be hacked and hypothetically maybe one day decrypted.
Matrix doesn’t have this issue, it just stores encrypted messages on servers.
I’m not sure about Signal being the one, then we just give the power from one company (Apple) to another (Signal). If we want to improve then we should push open protocols where people can host their own infrastructure.
Ideally, I agree. In practice, until federation / decentralization is completely transparent to the end user (unless they choose otherwise), it’ll never be adopted at a large scale. IMO that’s one of the main obstacles of Lemmy, Mastodon, and others.
Signal is only relatively popular among the privacy-respecting options because setting it up is as easy as setting up WhatsApp. Just by adding a “choose your instance” step, you can cut your user base by an order of magnitude. And that’s not mentioning the quality of service, which is much more achievable on a centralized platform, whether that’s in terms of feature parity, uptime, bug fixes, or cross-platform support.
Message works, it’s seamless and does a good job. Sure I’ll change to something else if I need to send images or group chat with Android uses, but in the UK that generally means WhatsApp, which I am definitely not keen on.
There is absolutely nothing reasonable with using an inferior and outdated standard compared to what literally everybody else uses.
Most of those are proprietary. My list:
- Matrix
- Session
- Signal and signal clients
- Simplex Chat
- Jami
- Briar (android only)
- Nextcloud talk (needs nextcloud)
- probably a lot more
telegram is not encrypted by default, and does its best to make you forget to enable it for each individual contact. if you want to do a group chat, you’re out of luck.
Telegram is only (partially) secure for pedantic power users, which most people aren’t.
telegram is encrypted, but not end to end encrypted by default
so, relative to pretty much all other messaging services, it might as well not be.
You’re saying “by default not everyone can read your messages, only you, the recipient, telegram themselves and anyone who they might decide to share them with, with neither your consent, nor knowledge”
When compared to “nobody except you and the recipient” that becomes effectively equivalent to “nothing”.
also, not end-to-end ever when it comes to group chats
Almost all services in that list are closed source, so even if they use end-to-end encryption nothing stops the client from sending all your messages to anyone they like after decrypting (in fact some of them already have it as a built-in feature in the form of backups).
that would be very quickly caught by a network sniffer, because it would have to be sent from your own device. Otherwise they’d just be sharing the undecryptable ciphertext you sent to their servers
Just encrypt it before sending it to their servers. How would you tell that apart from any other traffic it sends? (E.g. to check for new messages, to update who of your contacts is online, etc)
what does that have to do with anything? if you have to encrypt your messages manually yourself, that kind of proves the point that the service itself is not secure. And it’ll still show up on a network sniffer that they’re sending it to two places
Technically, yes, this is a solution.
Socially, no. This is not a solution. People are just too lazy.
I assume that if people are too lazy to switch to a solution which works for every one then they are not very interested in talking to you anyway.
Except it’s not a solution that works for everyone. It’s 9 solutions. If it were one it would be a lot easier.
7 once you take out the ones owned by Facebook.
XMPP
Apple protecting it’s precious garden.
Oh look, a weed slipped through.
Must eradicate it.
For the safety and security of our users!
For the greater good
takes out flame thrower
If only there was a secure and open standard that would work on any platform, regardless of ecosystem…
Oh well!
If you are talking about RCS - the encryption aspect is a google proprietary extension
Probably meant Matrix.
Or Signal.
or XMPP/Jabber.
God, no. The corporate chat that my employer uses is based on Jabber (if anybody cares: it’s Estos ProCall) and on mobile it’s just hell where the connection gets lost all the time and messages arrive late.
To be fair that might just be a poor implementation? XMPP can support push notifications just fine now:
https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html https://modules.prosody.im/mod_cloud_notify
There are some remaining issues with push (mostly on iOS as far as I know), but it’s all to do with OMEMO. OMEMO is kind of like the signal protocol but in XMPP. This is kind of moot for corporate XMPP, though, as you probably aren’t using OMEMO.
The OMEMO issue is that the contents of the message are end-to-end encrypted so you can’t simply send the notification to devices. I believe conversations on Android may just keep a socket open (or maybe that’s just the fdroid version?) so it just manages it with background tasks. And on iOS monal does what signal does and will use push notifications as a trigger to pull messages from the server. Siskin on iOS just sends you a “you have a new message!” notification instead because they don’t want to spin up the radio to fetch messages in order to preserve battery life. So basically push works fine on monal, and Siskin also has working push but you don’t get message contents.
To be fair that might just be a poor implementation?
Maybe. Given that ProCall is a commercial product, it surely just reuses whatever MIT/BSD/Apache-licensed code exists instead of developing their own because that costs money.
True, but the Apple RCS announcement said that they were going to work with the GSM association and google to build it into the base spec
Thought RCS used the Signal Protocol?
Edit for source: Technical paper: Messages end-to-end encryption
It’s not natively supported by the base RCS standard, in the section at the end of the paper in the section titled “Third Party RCS Clients” Google explains that they’ve built the e2ee their Messages app themselves, (on top of standard RCS).
A developer has to use Google’s implementation specifically in order to send and recieve e2ee messages to Google’s Messages app (and Samsung Messages who also implemented this recently)
Although the e2ee implementation is using the Signal protocol under the hood, it’s for message content only - this is what is transmitted in cleartext (taken from the paper)
- Phone numbers of senders and recipients
- Timestamps of the messages
- IP addresses or other connection information
- Sender and recipient’s mobile carriers
- SIP, MSRP, or CPIM headers, such as User-Agent strings which may contain device manufacturers and models
- Whether the message has an attachment
- The URL on content server where the attachment is stored
- Approximated size of messages, or exact size of attachments
Without using this implementation of the Signal protocol on top of RCS, the message will deliver to the contact’s phone, but shows up as unencrypted garbled text
That is a very useful resource though, never knew there was a paper available on the implementation. Saving 😁
Signal
The problem is actually getting people to use it since they’re all too busy arguing over the color of a message
We took steps to protect or users by forcing them to communicate to Android phones using unencrypted channels. After all, those peasants are not iPhone users, they deserve to be spied.
our walled garden*
Aside from the obvious reasons of competition, Beeper also used Apples infrastructure, that Beeper was then going to monetize. Not too surprising they shut it down.
No, they were charging money as they had their own APN to BPN bridge. Plus the usual cost of development and more.
To keep Beeper Mini running, Beeper uses a Beeper Push Notification (BPN) service to connect to Apple’s servers and notify you of new messages.
And it uses Apples gateway service for setup.
Yes. I did mention APN (Apple Push Notifications) to Beeper Push Notifications which then routes via FCM for Android. The whole setup does require active server cost + time to work on the app to bring it to parity with iMessage Features.
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Apple already knows that iMessage, alone, is a huge selling point for their iPhones. They held out for a few years keeping iTunes away from the rest of us before finally giving in, but I very much doubt that they’re going to open up iMessage any time soon. It’s pretty much the only thing that keeps iPhone users in their ecosystem anymore.
iMessage keeps in ecosystem? I’m using iPhones for 10 years. Sent my first iMessage 2 years ago. Definitely not a main ecosystem feature for me
That’s true, but it would be more Applelike to develop their own app. They obviously know how to do it, then they could have 100% of the profits and not have to deal with a partner. But Tim Cook said they re not interested in doing anything like that.
our shareholders*
At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe.
At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading vendor locking tactics to distance our brand from other lesser ones.
We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage.
We’re not letting anyone breach this walled garden, but nice try.
These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.
By using these tactics we can keep our users away from solutions that have any interoperability whatsoever and keep promoting decade-old features as new, as our
sheepahem user base don’t know any better.x
So many of these comments are pulling up the other encrypted alternatives that you can use between iPhone and other platforms. But few seem to actually be addressing the problem of actually getting other non-tech savvy people to use this stuff because they don’t actually see a problem with what they have.
You may not realize it, but not everyone is thinking about whether or not their messages are encrypted. My own family looks at me like “🤨” when I try to convince them to use something encrypted, like I’m trying to hide a crime or something. And I’ve only gotten my parents to use other services (WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger with end to encryption turned on) by digging my heels to get them to stop using SMS. I still haven’t convinced my almost 16-year-old sister (she doesn’t really message me that much anyway. But she’s in that phase where she thinks she’s all independent, and her first places are the simple stuff she knows).
Might I add that digging your heels at every attempt for someone to use SMS isn’t socially acceptable. I’ve only done it because they’re family and I love them
Funny how the EU just recently found them to NOT be gate keepers.
Text messaging market in EU is totally different from in the United States. This is because US texting was cheap always— not so with the EU.
TBF Europeans just went wild with SMS. Omg. Nowadays it’s all WhatsApp, which I am not happy with.
They’re not gatekeepers in Europe because nobody uses iMessage over there. Their predominance in the US market is outside of the new EU laws.
Gotta protect your users from fake blue bubbles, I get it I get it
Serious question since I don’t use iMessage whatsoever, what’s going on with the iMessage stuff? Seems like multiple companies recently have tried to make apps that connect to iMessage, but there’s nothing I’ve heard about Apple opening that up. Did something happen for this to suddenly pop up more frequently?
Someone (possibly recently?) figured out the protocol and how to register a phone number without needing an apple device. Older versions of stuff like this required having a Mac virtual machine and routing messages through it using a user’s AppleID, so this was much easier. I saw a video that was bragging about how this new method would be very difficult to block because doing so could affect regular users, and I just kinda laughed at the naivety.
In the US it’s the messaging standard because they are too lazy to install a cross platform messenger like everybody else in the world. So Android has a 40% market share there, which is the minority but not a crushing minority like Windows–Linux but for whatever reason American society rather focuses on iMessage than just to install Signal or whatever.
Pretty much it’s the Beeper devs and one other. But the initial setups were really nothing more than using a Mac on the backend with a an adapter to Android.
Beeper and one (maybe two) other were pretty effective at it.
Beeper Mini is a different thing altogether. It uses a service to translate ANP (Apple Notification Protocol?) to GCM (Google Cloud Messaging), which are the respective notification handlers.
The Android client is able to comm directly with iMessage servers, unlike the original Beeper and the other ones.
not surprising, but super disappointing. Beeper Mini was a dream come true
You need to dream bigger. That should be the companies (Google, Apple, carriers, etc) working together and using a non-proprietary standard (an open RCS). Mini Beeper, to me, was just a proof of concept to show something akin to what Apple could do.
Obviously I want RCS. But I’m realistic in what I have right now. And right now what I got was working group chats
For those not in the loop, why? It seems like people who want to use Apple products would just buy a iPhone.
Those of use who have friends or groups of friends that use iPhones but us ourselves do not. In the US, iMessage is the #1 way to create a group chat, and if you don’t have an iPhone you’re often just excluded and rely on someone else to update you about plans, etc.
If I had friends that would rather exclude me from communication than either use a different app or find some way to include me then I would absolutely not want those people in my life.
You can create a group chat using standard MMS. I have never heard of this being a problem.
Like I said, maybe I’m out of the loop or just lucky.
Meanwhile, in the UK WhatsApp is the default
That’s worse as it doesn’t even have sms
You would be right if SMS was still relevant in Europe (and asia and africa, I think). That would be kind of like saying a phone isn’t very good because it doesn’t support usenet.
Well nothing else is standardized in the same way SMS is. I don’t want to be forced into one application. SMS and MMS are older but they work across all devices.
There are plenty of standardized communication protocols. There are far less in the smartphone world, which is why we have this problem. Imagine if you couldn’t do voice calls between AT&T and Comcast, North America and Europe, or Apple and Android. Now why on earth would anyone think that text messaging should be that way, or shouldn’t have been standardized decades ago?
Some of us like control over our hardware but still want feature parity with our friends and family.
Lots of sarcastic comments in here, but Beeper’s method was to literally spoof the serial numbers and whatnot of real machines. Do people really not see how that would be a problem?
Do people like relying on service that requires their real device’s serial number to function?
You can use any apple device to use iMessage, your account isn’t only usable on your device. They were effectively stealing people’s machine IDs to provide this service. That’s fucked up.
“Effectively stealing” means the original machine ID can’t be used by the original machine after it’s stolen, right?
Former Apple engineer here. This architecture isn’t ideal if you intend the service to be portable - but we didn’t! Knowing the messages can only originate from a sealed application on a first party device eliminates a whole class of spam and security problems.
Beeper’s implementation spoofs Mac keys and requires you trust them with your Apple ID credentials if you want to be able to take full advantage of iMessage.
It’s just pointless. A huge security risk for Apple users and to zero benefit for Android users. Let Apple implement RCS as they promised and move on. Isn’t everyone on Telegram or WhatsApp anyway…?
but we didn’t!
Well maybe that was a mistake.
Knowing the messages can only originate from a sealed application on a first party device eliminates a whole class of spam and security problems.
It conveniently appears to also eliminate some amount of responsibility. Seriously? Was it not known that it’s possible to debug even 1st party apps? Was it not already obvious that walled gardens are only good before they got cracked?
A huge security risk for Apple users
I wish engineers would stop using the word security just because they like it. Apple should try to prevent threats like pegasus instead of telling everyone that blue bubbles are a security risk.
and to zero benefit for Android users
Yeah, it’s more useful for apple users so they wouldn’t need to resort to unencrypted messages when talking to Android users.
Let Apple implement RCS as they promised and move on. Isn’t everyone on Telegram or WhatsApp anyway…?
Heh. I wish to see apple say the same in their statement of decision to shut down iMessage.
It’s just pointless.
Yeah. Apple doesn’t understand the community concerns, it only understands court decisions. Though sometimes these two have some connection.
I think everyone saw this coming
Beeper already fixed iMessage on Beeper Cloud and is working on restoring Beeper Mini. Might take some back and forth but it still wouldn’t be surprise if it makes their reimplementation more resilient to Apple tampering.
Until Apple will inevitably litigate them to death when they figure out they can’t out engineer them
Isn’t Beeper Cloud the one that uses Mac Minis? Obviously a solution that uses Apple hardware works.
Apple broke Beeper Cloud too. If I had to guess, if Apple changed something that broke two different methods at the same time then it might be easier to fix by deducing from what they have in common.
If I’m not confusing Beeper Cloud with something else and it’s indeed routed through real Mac, it block Apple uses may just be blocking the IP range.
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