DannyMacNothing Phone builds a blue bubble iMessage bridge while Google and Apple fight over RCS
orclevI predict one of two outcomes once Apple becomes aware of this. Either they’ll modify the iMessage protocol to break Nothing Phones compatibility, or they’ll sue Nothing Phone for violating some kind of IP law. Apple absolutely wants to maintain their walled garden and letting a non-Apple product transparently interact on equal footing with Apple products runs counter to that.
The messaging is provided by a third party who is dedicated to working on their iMessage compatibility. Apple has no reason to stop this because this is a good move for them in the larger battle between mobile messaging standards.
Google owns Jibe, the company behind RCS messaging found on all Android phones and an emerging, competent product from the only game in town that can compete with Apple. Google has decided to take this to the government level and push for a unified phone messaging standard, normally a good thing, but people their own RCS solution.
Apple is pushing iMessage as a protest against Google and their inevitable lawsuit to conform with RCS adoption. Android may win unless Apple shows it has parity and provides a non-legislative option: if enough people use iMessage then governments don’t have to make any laws or enforce changes. The company Nothing is using iMessage, which helps Apple prove there is both a significant user base, which would cause a burden on Apple and it’s customers to change, and there is no monopoly on iMessage or messaging in general. So if enough people use iMessage, Apple sees it as a good thing.
RCS is not a Google product, see en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSMA
Apple has been pushing iMessage for quite some time, but they want to keep it just to their platform and have made no attempt to make it open to other users. That’s Apples way and it’s not as a “protest” to Google lol
That’s like saying they made the lightning port as a protest to USB standards, nah they just want their proprietary shit.
gregorumApple’s ideology behind not expanding iMessage to other platforms has been - at least in part - due to the security of the iMessage platform and how it authorizes senders and recipients. Apparently, Apple has low confidence in the diaspora of Android devices and just decided to forget even trying to create a client for Android it could tie down to hardware authentication due to not having a reliable hardware base. This was many years ago.
I don’t know if this is still true or even necessary today, or if they’ve even bothered to explore it recently, but that’s Apple’s main issue. Sure, it also benefits them in other ways such as driving users to their platforms, but this is their main issue.
Not according to the leaked emails…
x.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609?s=20
Clearly they also saw the benefits of keeping it to Apples platforms, but that doesn’t remove the technical limitations, at least, early on.
Like I said, I don’t know if those limitations still exist. Clearly, the profit motive would if it weren’t for all of the legal and regulatory liabilities that exist abroad. This is why I suggested in another comment that purchasing this compatibility layer would be a good workaround for them in that regard.
The limitation was added after the fact anyway, like I mentioned in my edit, secure enclave wasn’t added until the A7 chip, which was first used in the iPhone 5S in 2013, two years after iMessage became available.
Although true, it was added to make iMessage (and every other service) more secure, not just as some sneaky way to keep iMessages off android devices.
It’s really not necessary though, it’s just a justification after the fact. There are several secure e2e apps available without utilizing a special chip to house that data, even Google has e2e with their RCS implementation