Thank you for the respectful responses, even though I started off with a little bit of attitude in the conversation. It has been a pleasant surprise today.
I agree that that’s what they’re trying to do, but I think that what we are experiencing is exactly what was obviously going to happen with the measures they put into place. So I place the blame on the EU, because they put laws in place that have made everything worse for everyone in predictable ways.
I also blame all the sites that make it hard for me to just visit them, but less so, since every individual site creator that uses cookies needs to do that, even if they are benign, and they have to deal with other regional laws such as California’s weak as all hell version intending to do the same thing.
The USB-C argument is a great example of how most of these things have happened.
Apple is basically responsible for USB being the industry-wide standard to begin with. It was developed by Intel, and not widely used before Apple put it as its only option on the iMac, effectively forcing the tech into the industry.
It also provided a large portion of the engineers who developed the USB-C specification for the standards board. They effectively invented the standard alongside Intel. It was also the first to announce a laptop using the standard.
It seems like they were building the the Lightning cable at the same time in-house, possibly to hedge bets, and it was objectively better by far than what the original USB-C spec was doing at proposal time. And since USB-C wasn’t adopted as a standard by the standards board yet, they chose the better product path.
By the time USB-C was formally adopted, 4 years after Apple launched its first Lightning cable-based phone, there was already tons of e-waste to contend with and it didn’t have obvious benefits for the customer to make the switch, so why would they go choose that expensive, wasteful, option, that harms their users?
The same is true about the blue vs green circles. If you read the history of RCS it’s like a circus show act.
It is not some open standard alternative to iMessages, like people seem to love to claim. You cannot host your own RCS server.
It doesn’t support the features iMessages does, such as E2E encryption. That is a proprietary add-on from Google’s chat app, not part of the “standard.”
Google had to buy Jibe mobile and push hard to get this “standard” to be something serious, and it now profits off it by being basically the only one who runs the proprietary infrastructure. That purchase was 4 years after iMessages was launched.
Major telecom companies tried to band together to create their own RCS infrastructure and official app, and they bumbled the whole thing in 2019. As a result they’re all centralizing on Google’s Jibe platform.
All that for a product that isn’t as good as what Apple put out in 2011.
I know I have biases towards the products I enjoy more, but it gets frustrating to not be allowed to enjoy them and also be on platforms like this where it’s constantly twisted, revised history, in favor of much more evil companies because Apple Bad seems to be the mantra here.
I think maybe you’re still missing the field for the trees. USB C oddly as it’s named has for almost all of it’s life been a connector standard, of which open connector standards (that arguably weren’t as good) existed back then in the form of micro and mini usb which for charging would be more than adequate vs rolling your own connector. I think the thing apple pursued here by rolling there own wasn’t even the royalties on it, but direct control of the 3rd party peripheral market (music docks, etc, etc). They’ve always made safe choices to ensure their market dominance through secondary market forces vs primary ones. Fwiw I’d have had no criticism for Apple regarding lightning if they opened the standard and shared it.
Now. As far as RCS goes. That’s just the fault of the people. It takes legitimately 5 minutes at most to download and sign up for signal, or another secure message provider, and the average user has chosen to completely ignore this and use whatever standard their carrier sold them with the phone. Yes carriers, Google, and everyone else should shoulder a ton of blame for settling on such a paltry default, but it’s as easy and seamless as it can possibly be to switch off that default and rather than migrate to another (like most other countries) the US population has decided to firmly stick their heads in the sand and use only the default, going as far to forgo “difficult and complex mfa security keys” (not even that difficult. Just scan a qr code and cloud sync for your mfa app) in favor of expensive, insecure, and quite frankly stupid mfa through sms. Its just not a tech issue at this point, but a user issue because people get too attached to defaults or too insistent on not changing. Just look at internet Explorer. Msft had it at end of life status for nearly a decade and people still insisted upon using it, right up until they ripped it from the os, and having worked in the industry I can assure you the users with the firmest grip on IE didn’t want it for compatibility reasons. They wanted it because the disliked change.
Thank you for the respectful responses, even though I started off with a little bit of attitude in the conversation. It has been a pleasant surprise today.
I agree that that’s what they’re trying to do, but I think that what we are experiencing is exactly what was obviously going to happen with the measures they put into place. So I place the blame on the EU, because they put laws in place that have made everything worse for everyone in predictable ways.
I also blame all the sites that make it hard for me to just visit them, but less so, since every individual site creator that uses cookies needs to do that, even if they are benign, and they have to deal with other regional laws such as California’s weak as all hell version intending to do the same thing.
The USB-C argument is a great example of how most of these things have happened.
Apple is basically responsible for USB being the industry-wide standard to begin with. It was developed by Intel, and not widely used before Apple put it as its only option on the iMac, effectively forcing the tech into the industry.
It also provided a large portion of the engineers who developed the USB-C specification for the standards board. They effectively invented the standard alongside Intel. It was also the first to announce a laptop using the standard.
It seems like they were building the the Lightning cable at the same time in-house, possibly to hedge bets, and it was objectively better by far than what the original USB-C spec was doing at proposal time. And since USB-C wasn’t adopted as a standard by the standards board yet, they chose the better product path.
By the time USB-C was formally adopted, 4 years after Apple launched its first Lightning cable-based phone, there was already tons of e-waste to contend with and it didn’t have obvious benefits for the customer to make the switch, so why would they go choose that expensive, wasteful, option, that harms their users?
The same is true about the blue vs green circles. If you read the history of RCS it’s like a circus show act.
It is not some open standard alternative to iMessages, like people seem to love to claim. You cannot host your own RCS server.
It doesn’t support the features iMessages does, such as E2E encryption. That is a proprietary add-on from Google’s chat app, not part of the “standard.”
Google had to buy Jibe mobile and push hard to get this “standard” to be something serious, and it now profits off it by being basically the only one who runs the proprietary infrastructure. That purchase was 4 years after iMessages was launched.
Major telecom companies tried to band together to create their own RCS infrastructure and official app, and they bumbled the whole thing in 2019. As a result they’re all centralizing on Google’s Jibe platform.
All that for a product that isn’t as good as what Apple put out in 2011.
I know I have biases towards the products I enjoy more, but it gets frustrating to not be allowed to enjoy them and also be on platforms like this where it’s constantly twisted, revised history, in favor of much more evil companies because Apple Bad seems to be the mantra here.
I think maybe you’re still missing the field for the trees. USB C oddly as it’s named has for almost all of it’s life been a connector standard, of which open connector standards (that arguably weren’t as good) existed back then in the form of micro and mini usb which for charging would be more than adequate vs rolling your own connector. I think the thing apple pursued here by rolling there own wasn’t even the royalties on it, but direct control of the 3rd party peripheral market (music docks, etc, etc). They’ve always made safe choices to ensure their market dominance through secondary market forces vs primary ones. Fwiw I’d have had no criticism for Apple regarding lightning if they opened the standard and shared it.
Now. As far as RCS goes. That’s just the fault of the people. It takes legitimately 5 minutes at most to download and sign up for signal, or another secure message provider, and the average user has chosen to completely ignore this and use whatever standard their carrier sold them with the phone. Yes carriers, Google, and everyone else should shoulder a ton of blame for settling on such a paltry default, but it’s as easy and seamless as it can possibly be to switch off that default and rather than migrate to another (like most other countries) the US population has decided to firmly stick their heads in the sand and use only the default, going as far to forgo “difficult and complex mfa security keys” (not even that difficult. Just scan a qr code and cloud sync for your mfa app) in favor of expensive, insecure, and quite frankly stupid mfa through sms. Its just not a tech issue at this point, but a user issue because people get too attached to defaults or too insistent on not changing. Just look at internet Explorer. Msft had it at end of life status for nearly a decade and people still insisted upon using it, right up until they ripped it from the os, and having worked in the industry I can assure you the users with the firmest grip on IE didn’t want it for compatibility reasons. They wanted it because the disliked change.