Not surprising considering iMessage is nearly irrelevant outside the US.
US is still stuck on SMS, so much that they even made an upgrade to it with RCS.
It felt like an upgrade to the DVD disk when you have the Internet.
IMHO, I’ll gladly take RCS over the world’s most popular messaging clients - Meta products.
I don’t know why people have more faith in cellular providers. They have been selling all of your data before Meta was a thing.
DVDs are still not bad if someone really wants to buy a movie. Cheaper than BluRay and with much weaker DRM. Video is very low quality in today’s standards, but bitrate and autio quality is better than any streaming.
I know a nice comparason, faxes. Imagine a fax 2.0 protocol released just before sending documents by email become normal that do not got adapted, but all of a sudden Google start promoting it as nudging Apple to adapt it. Advertised as a better quality, faster fax, with (yet ro standardize) encryption.
DVDs are still not bad if someone really wants to buy a movie. Cheaper than BluRay and with much weaker DRM. Video is very low quality in today’s standards, but bitrate and autio quality is better than any streaming.
DVD bitrate is only 9.8 Mbit and uses this very inefficiently due to the use of MPEG-2 encoding. When DVD was invented we did not have the processing power in affordable hardware for better codecs. Streaming services can do at least twice that bitrate and with much, much better codecs. Audio quality is similar, streaming services actually have higher bitrate audio than most DVDs (AC-3 at 448 kbit on DVD vs ~770 kbit EAC-3 on streaming). DTS could have higher bitrates (it was either 768 kbit or 1.5Mbit) but only supported 5.1 channels.
There’s better standards than rcs? Over here Google’s been taking ads out begging apple to switch over
They finally compromised and Apple agreed to jump over if the parts of RCS that Google was gatekeeping were opened up.
Phase 1 of RCS on iOS will be sans E2EE sometime this year. Likely iOS 18 this fall. Phase 2 will roll in the security once the new open encryption protocol is good to go.
All in all, RCS looks like a lock as the next thing. All the major players are in.
The Nordics are an exception to this - SMS and iMessage are prevalent here.
Sms prevalent? Where? All I see is WhatsApp and people get annoyed if you don’t have that.
I may have been speaking too broadly when mentioning Nordics - I’ve only heard some rumors from Norway from an acquaintance that lives there, but for Sweden it’s definitely the case. I have not found WhatsApp-use to be common here.
I’ve neverd heard of anyone using iMessage and SMS is only used to confirm doctor appointments lol. Not sure where in the Nordics you’re from
I’m more disappointed by their decision to not consider Microsoft’s Edge and Bing as core platforms, even though the former is being pushed way too hard in Windows and the later is used as part of other search engines’ indexes (ie. DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Qwant)
Qwant actually have their own indexer, but even then I feel like Microsoft can push their own products as they want given you are free to ignore it… It’s not like there’s no alternative browsers, search engine indices or operating systems, and loads of other products are built off shared technology without it being an issue that it’s closed off generally
I think the core platform user threshold is a sensible way to determine core platforms. I don’t know if bing has so many users and what its market share is.
I think the situation with edge is different though, it should not be allowed to be forced down to windows users by bundling without allowing the user to decide which default browser to use first.
There are only like 4 actual search indexes online (Google, Bing, Yandex, and I can’t remember the 4th), and every other search engine just uses one or more of those for results.
stract.com has their own indexer, fully open-source.
I think Baidu, Qwant, Mojeek & Brave all use fully independent indices, but there are likely more. This is excliding eg. Kagi who use a combination of their own and other indices.
Too irrelevant to be covered by the law
Because that way you’re always chasing the problem instead of anticipating it. We know how Apple/iMessage behave, there is no point in waiting for them to become a problem.
I have been following the DMA closely, and so far it has been a big disappointment, just as I expected.
The way the EU approaches this walled garden problem, is to try and offer ways for other competitors to tap into the user base of the bigger players instead of trying to allow all EU citizens to chat with any other EU citizen who uses META Products regardless of their host platform. meaning “us” people who wish to self host an xmpp or Matrix servers and chat with facebook friends, It won’t be straight forward or entirely possible for us to do so. unless maybe by doing a KYC with META. and signing up very stringent service agreements.
Meta will be creating all sorts of hurdles the DMA laws will allow them to, to cripple interoperability, from making other plateform signing up to special permissions from Meta, to hiding interoperability settings and making them opt-in, and building a scary rhetoric why you shouldn’t be allowing other people outside of META to get in contact with you. There are some valid concerns, but I suspect Meta will implement the most spiteful procedures they can get away with, then spin up a rhetoric about proving their users being massing against interoperability.
It’s funny how a few short years ago both FB and Google ran with jabber and jingle and we were accidentally chatting between one another.
Seems they just need to roll the code back and they’re set.
Makes the upcoming spite just a little more bitter.
Messages on OSX (pre-iMessage) supported ICQ and jabber too if I remember.
The way the EU approaches this walled garden problem, is to try and offer ways for other competitors to tap into the user base of the bigger players instead of trying to allow all EU citizens to chat with any other EU citizen who uses META Products regardless of their host platform.
Probably because of spam? I don’t think you can open up all the communicators to every self hosted server there is. It would be a disaster.
That’s a very bad call from them. I’m disappointed.
