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.
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.
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.
