Where did they say it would be an open protocol? I went and found the WWDC 2011 announcement [0], and they described it as a "new messaging service between iOS users" (big bold text from the slide). I watched all the way through the end of the demo, they never said anything about it being an open protocol. In fact, right at the end he said they were "building this on the push notification system that we built", which implies that it's using internal iOS systems, not something they ever intended to make public.

Even if they had said it would be open, changing their minds later wouldn't be a lie, it would be... changing their minds. I'm not an Apple user or fan, and I dislike iMessage's weird half-baked integration with regular SMS, but this feels like an overreaction even if there was a place where they claimed it would be open.

[0] https://youtu.be/LPMjUtfQPks?t=4296

The link above will take you right to the part about iMessage.

>They said in the iMessage announcement that it’d be an open protocol.

Do you have a reference for this?

At the Facetime announcement, Jobs said that would be an open protocol. Then they ended up in a big patent suit over Facetime and it didn't happen. Not sure how much the suit influenced the decision, but for whatever reason the Facetime protocol was never opened up. I don't remember a similar announcement about iMessage.

As far as abuse, how so? They provide a messaging app. That app is compatible with SMS. There are several alternative messaging apps. Where is the abuse?

> That and the way they remove you from group chats if you ever try to turn off iMessage makes the whole thing feel like a dark pattern to me. Apple really has us hostage as iMessage users.

They have to do that since messages are encrypted. If they left you in they’d either have to send messages insecurely or warn everyone that the entire group was now insecure due to you. There’s no way that wouldn’t be decried as a dark pattern, too.

I’m deeply invested in iMessage portability but I think you might be mistaken. It was FaceTime that was announced as a to-be-open protocol but didn’t see the follow-through.

You mean in a timely manner, right? Because the crazy thing is that they did follow through on FaceTime. It just took them nearly a decade. Seeing all of this now, one might wonder if there were certain legal motivations for that.

Allowing people to join Facetime calls through a browser is not "opening up" the platform. Until they have an API I can write a custom client for it's just a different kind o closure

Yeah, I debated commenting about the somewhat-crippled cross-platform support that recently landed, but that was really just in response to Zoom taking the ball away from their court and Apple being desperate to try and get it back.

I don’t think it had anything to do with their earlier promise (and I’m also not convinced patent issues were the real crux of the matter ten years ago).

> Yeah, I debated commenting about the somewhat-crippled cross-platform support that recently landed, but that was really just in response to Zoom taking the ball away from their court and Apple being desperate to try and get it back.

Not really; Apple simply doesn't move that fast. You can certainly see projects get more resources as a result of trends, but that isn't necessarily going to move the release forward a year.

You’re thinking of FaceTime not iMessage. FaceTime however was blocked from being opened up due to patent trolling that required a different implementation.

> They said in the iMessage announcement that it’d be an open protocol. Really duplicitous.

Source?

I think you might be thinking about FaceTime. At announcement, Jobs said on stage that it was going to be an open standard, which came as a surprise to the developers. I don’t believe iMessage was ever announced to be open.

They absolutely never said this.