> Not sure what to make of your "if facts were different, then things would be different" - I still think the analogy holds up ok.

It’s a common pattern for people to state that if X was different in some way, then there would have been a different story to tell. Something else would have changed if only X was different, so yeah; if facts were different, then thing would be different. If that car were red instead of blue, it would be a red car, which is true, but useless, because it’s not a red car, it’s a blue car.

You opted for an analogy that involved HTTP versions, including a hypothetical one, and a hypothetical CDN. The 30ish year history of web browsers is already littered with examples of browsers that did everything you were describing and some things that you didn’t. IE6 was famous for its stagnation because Microsoft dissolved the IE team to try and accomplish what you said, and you know what happened? The market reacted, forcing Microsoft to put the band back together, who then spent years trying to play catch up before eventually abandoning both IE and then it’s replacement in order to build a Chromium shim. Now I have government websites complaining that my browser isn’t Chrome rather than my browser isn’t IE. Y’know, the more things change, the more they stay the same and all that, but at least the banks don’t demand I have a browser with ActiveX controls so there’s been some progress.

So to bring this conversation back on track:

> You could say that things have changed as users have become more aware of the difference over the years, but honestly, if your initial expectation was the default message application on my phone does what I have known as texting (which is/was SMS/MMS) which is a part of my phone plan that I pay my provider for and then you start doing something wholly different with that communication, I would consider that some sort of hijacking.

So keeping in mind what I said about this being one of those “if facts were different thing would be different” things, who is complaining that Apple is offering them an improved messaging experience?

1. iPhones already offer the means to disable iMessage. At any point, you can disassociate your phone number or email address with the iMessage service.

2. It is part of the on-boarding process to opt into associating your phone number with iMessage, and if you don’t, then you will be sending and receiving SMS/MMS messages through the Messages app.

3. Despite having to opt-in to iMessages, and despite having the ability to disable iMessages at any time, iMessages is a popular service, at least in the US, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s better than SMS, it’s better than MMS, and when the other person also has iMessage enabled, you don’t have to worry about character limits (which are really byte limits, try sending an SMS with anything except ASCII characters), and you can send that 4K video or the last 20 pictures you took or whatever because it is a quality of life improvement that doesn’t require you to seek out an alternative.

You can still seek out alternatives. Literally billions of people use message protocols that are not iMessage, even on iMessage-capable platforms, so your conjecture that Apple hijacked SMS is an academic point at best, but honestly it’s just a dead end. Apple could not remove SMS/MMS even for just pragmatic reasons, and probably contractual and legal ones too. Neither of those are solid reasons to not develop a new message protocol as a feature for their phones because they are in the business of selling more of their phones.

So they evaluated their options, made a business decision, and accepted the trade offs by delivering a QoL improvement to their paying customers without disabling their ability to send text messages to other phone numbers that did not have iMessage installed, and created a visual distinction between the two types of message formats so people could come to recognize using basic human pattern matching when and how they can take advantage of the improved message format.

> Optimally? Switch over to an RCS implementation. If existing rollouts of RCS don't support enough of a feature set to please you (looking at E2EE), push to get that done.

Sure, they could, and there’s a case to be made that maybe they should look at implementing RCS, but why would that be at the expense of iMessage? Apple’s customers like iMessage. RCS looks like it could be a solid replacement for SMS and MMS eventually, but I think it’s really just going to live on phones alongside SMS and MMS for the foreseeable future, so this would be an additional protocol to support rather than a drop-in replacement for anything.

But there doesn’t seem to be a slam dunk case for RCS and the reason for that is that Google seems to be the only one that has a good implementation. If the carriers were clamoring for RCS, and I’ve seen no indication this is a priority for them, that would be a stronger case to support RCS. If Apple’s customers were clamoring for RCS, that would be a stronger case to support RCS.

But cross-platform rich communication with push notifications is already a solved problem, it’s just not solved by iMessage.