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After years of refusing to activate iMessage – even when I'm using an iPhone -, I've activated this little rocker button and I do not know when (or if) I'll ever be able to. turn off again. .
The decision to use iMessage is extremely minor for the vast majority of people, especially in America where Apple's messaging service has the strongest use base. But for me, it's extremely correlative and unfortunately instructive about the state of messaging in this country.
my The decision to return to iMessage (and deal with the effects of this action, which I will address) was not due to the social pressure of the blue bubble; turning on iMessage would subtly increase the likelihood that my own family will talk to me more. It was not because iMessage is a better product than other chat applications, even though it's a lot from the point of view of an ordinary user. And it's not that I love Animoji.
It's just that: I came to think that using a secure chat application was becoming more and more of a moral imperative, and I totally failed to convince enough people of my social network to switch to an encrypted chat from end to end, third. app. Since I can not get my network to use anything else, I have to use what they can not turn away from.
In recent years, I've dropped iMessage to make it easier for iPhone and Android phones to bounce. I'm looking at phones to make a living and so I need to change a lot of phones and I prefer not to have two. Although Apple has slightly facilitated the disabling of iMessage, there is still a ton of worry. For me, it was better never to use it and therefore never feel locked into the Apple ecosystem.
When I finally felt the inconvenience of carrying two phones against the fear that my contacts are not using a private and secure method of discussion with me, privacy and security have won.
More than anything else, it's my personal charge against Google for not finding a viable alternative to iMessage for Android users. Yes, many chat apps used successfully on Android are used around the world. But, again, in the United States, the application of chat with the most powerful network effect is iMessage.
Name an email application, I used it and tried to have it tried on my friends and family. Most will try their luck, but most iPhone users do not want to manage a folder of chat applications and remember which contact uses which application. They just want to tap on the icon that says "Messages" and send messages.
And I must admit that iMessage is awesome. It works seamlessly on multiple Apple devices, including the Apple Watch. It's fast, reliable, extensible, secure and simple. That's all that Google could have had if it had not wasted GChat in Hangouts then in I do not even know what. It's exasperating, because, no matter how important iMessage's network effect is in the US, it has nothing to do with the potential network effect of Android, which accounts for over 80% of the global smartphone market .
But Google does not try to exploit this power on the market. In fact, it seems he is afraid to do it. Instead, he chose to act as if that power was not real, perhaps to avoid even more antitrust oversight. It's a reasonable thing to worry about, but it sucks anyway. Instead, Google lets phone operators drive, with results that are too predictable and hostile to the consumer.
A little over a year ago, Google had announced its messaging plan: it was integrated with RCS, the new generation protocol designed to replace SMS. The deployment of RCS has been slow – very few people have seen the word "text" turn into "chat" in their email application, which is the subtle indication that the conversation is now going on RCS. This does not only happen carrier by carrier, but telephone by phone.
The worst: RCS is not encrypted end-to-end. It follows the same rules as standard SMS text messages. Providers can keep copies on their servers, perfectly readable by anyone with access, fully available to any government that has successfully issued a subpoena.
Indeed, Google has yielded the entire market after years of self-inflicted failures in messaging. This year at Google I / O, head of Google's communications group, Hiroshi Lockheimer, admitted he was not happy with the pace of RCS adoption. He also suggested that it would be possible to overlay end-to-end encryption on RCS at a later date.
Unfortunately for Android users, the widespread adoption of RCS and the glimmer of hope that it could be secure by default one day are in the hands of operators. These operators have other priorities in the running: mergers, 5G services and television services, to name just three of them.
According to the cliché, I have nothing to hide from a government (although, as a journalist, I guess it's not quite true). But as the answer says, it's wrong. Everyone deserves and should expect a basic level of privacy protection, and the encrypted end-to-end chat should be the rule, not the exception. Privacy is not just for people who are used to using the right application or pressing the right button.
It should be simple. It should be easy. It should be the fault. Such is, at least, the genius of iMessage. I hate lock-in. I hate the fact that it cooperates with text messaging so as to invisibly invite Apple users without their active choice. I hate the fact that this product is only available on Apple products. But I love the fact that iMessage makes it easy for my text messages to my friends and family. That's why I've changed.
my prefer The SMS application is Signal, but the barrier to bring iPhone users to the United States to pass is still too high. This is a remarkable thing to say because I do not know how it could be much lower: you install a free application and you plug your phone number. Done and done.
From a legal point of view, I do not think I can say that iMessage is considered as a kind of monopoly block, feels like a. This is the power of the default value. If you want to draw a parallel with the concerns about the default browser on Windows in the 90s or on Android phones in the EU today, I would not argue energetically.
As for me, I'm committed to having an iPhone in my pocket for the foreseeable future. This does not mean that I will not have an Android phone in another pocket (which is usually the case). I am privileged to be able to make that choice, but there are millions of people who, for whatever reason, can not switch from Android to iPhone. That's why I argued that while there is no business case for integrating iMessage with Android, there is a moral solution.
Three years ago, my friend Lauren Goode talked about her inability to leave the iPhone, calling iMessage the glue that kept her stuck. For me, the appropriate metaphor is not that of glue, but that of gravity.
