Looks like an Apple version of Partiful?
replies(3):
I wonder how much the network effect may be leveraged for apps like these, to the benefit or detriment of apps like Partiful in comparison with Invites.
I know Facebook's last useful feature appears to be events in many circles.
There are a few misses.
- I already declined a friend's invite, but that doesn't get auto filtered away, so my "decline" is still the primary thing the app has to show me. It's still my only invite, so maybe it gets filtered to the back of the card stack if there are multiple?
- I also don't seem to be able to see friends I know who were invited to the party (but have not yet responded). Perhaps it was because it was shared as an invite URL in a group chat rather than manually inviting everyone?
I'll try to use it on my next event with my friends, as I am avoiding as much as I can Meta, and Calendar / ical are not the best to deal with this kind of event! :)
In this day and age of everyone multitasking ... that's a hell of a great feature to be able to say "guys look!".
For a while I was amazing my kids predicting touchdowns, but they caught on ;)
The transition of the major social networks over the last 10-15 years -- from being a space for friends to interact to being a space to consume content produced by "unconnected" entities like influencers -- has created a huge opening for someone to claim the friends and family network. There is no one better positioned (at least in the U.S. where iPhones are the majority handset) than Apple.
> anyone can RSVP, regardless of whether they have an Apple Account or Apple device.
Signed, an Android user
Silicon valley is entirely out of ideas.
& When I create an Event in the app i see the ability to share via a Public Link, Mail, & Messages
---
[0] One can even say "first first-party party app" in this case :)
Some of them have Facebook, but turned off all notifications and never check for updates. So they can be counted as not having it.
The whole "app for events" experience is a complete piece of crap with the exception of lu.ma perhaps.
"Oh you're not an Apple user, whoops you can't RSVP" is a giant step towards enshittifying them even more.
Only paying customers are allowed to construct their digital social life, but at least they're allowed to invite those filthy Android users!
This sounds like a great feature. Post event photo sharing is always a bit of a mess.
https://help.partiful.com/hc/en-us/articles/26526557943067-H...
it just says "We offer party add-ons and merch on our online store!"
Their online store has like 2 tshirts, stickers, sun glasses and a bag?!
This indeed causes problems when wanting to create a quick ad-hoc group for a party invitation etc., if at least one of the invitees is not an iPhone user.
Since Apple was too lazy to make it into a standard, it will probably go the way of App Clips. Niche idea, too few users to adopt it and no stakeholders with enough control to make it popular on other platforms.
I suspect Apple has a prioritized list of products that collect personal data that their ecosystem has some of the best potential to disrupt.
Sure, in an age where every social media app tries to do everything – Reels and statuses and DMs – it's nice to see an app trying to do one thing. Unfortunately, Apple seems to have done everything possible to to stymie it. It'll go the way of Game Central.
> Creation of invitations requires an iCloud+ subscription.
This isn't about making life easier on people, this is about getting you to subscribe to Apple's services for access to a REST API. Apple gets some benefit of the doubt, but this is literally Slop-as-a-Service.
> Do invitees need to have an Apple device with the app to attend an event?
> Apple Invites is for everyone. Guests don’t need the app, an Apple device, or an account to RSVP to an event.
¹ www.icloud.com/invites
We actually started before this was announced, and initially it was developed for a somewhat different use case (more focusing on "recurring invites"), but since it was asked a few times, I think we can offer a good alternative with it. [2]
> Do invitees need to have an Apple device with the app to attend an event?
> Apple Invites is for everyone. Guests don’t need the app, an Apple device, or an account to RSVP to an event.
Source: www.icloud.com/invites
In this case, Evite, Partiful and Hobnob have been put on notice as Apples expands its services revenues which have grown to roughly 25% of its annual earnings.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/introducing-apple-inv...
Not perfect, but something.
All my social circles where we communicate over SMS/RCS group text chats consist of a little gentle ribbing about "those darn green bubble people" and that's about the extent of it. The Android users occasionally respond in kind by showing off some cool new feature that Samsung or Google came up with that Apple hasn't copied yet and everybody laughs it all off.
Meanwhile, we take it for granted that there is a protocol for audio calls and text messages but not for video calls. I would like to more easily video call people with iPhones, and doing so would be technically possible but I can't because Apple benefits from the network effect. If I were to get an iPhone it would not be because Apple did a better job at creating a video call feature, it will be because people I know have iPhones and I want to call them. This seems like it gives incumbents in the space a large advantage because they can compete on having a user base and not on quality.
Ironically, Apple itself developed such a protocol for events and RSVPs (ICS), at a time when they didn't have market dominance. This caught on and it is great. I can make a calendar event in Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar and invite anyone from any of those platforms. They can RSVP and I can track their RSVPs and they can also create events in their systems and invite me. This is the kind of thing I like to encourage where possible.
This might integrate better with Calendar and Wallet. That said I can see web and Android users being apprehensive.
Also your Apple ID is t necessarily your “party id“.
You can say the same thing about FB/Whatsapp or any other social network - you have to be in-network to get the invite even.
Looking forward to testing this out for some events.
I thought email was a common denominator but I learned most people don’t check email or check it rarely. So different from the days when everyone had email.
I still use FB and so do many of my friends my age (mid to late 40s). But a bunch have also migrated to Instagram.
Among the younger generation, you’re a millennial if you’re on instagram because they’ve moved to TikTok. FB folks are over the hill. There’s a generational divide and pride in being trendy.
WhatsApp is only a thing among my international friends — many Americans don’t have it.
The only universal now is text messages but it feels so clunky (even with iMessage).
Marketplace seems to be one of the main use cases that's still relatively popular.
Technically vCal/iCal/ICS (whichever name you prefer) doesn't actually support RSVPs. It isn't in the standards documents. In ancient Microsoft nomenclature that pseudo-standard (de facto standard) for RSVPs is the "Schedule+ protocol" named after an ancient dead predecessor to Outlook's Calendar which originated it. I don't know what Google or Apple call it, and it is such a weird dance of (usually) auto-deleted email messages, so certainly has room for improvement as a protocol.
It would be neat to encourage a new "modern" standard there. Seems like something more web-based (JSON REST API?) than email-based might be a more "natural" API today. (Maybe Apple Invite can help lead the way, I don't know if that's on their TODO list.)
Luckily - you don’t need an iPhone or iCloud account to receive an invite and RSVP to it. Might be harder (or impossible?) to add to photos and music, but you can still get an invite and RSVP to it.
Anyone can have an Apple Account whether or not they own an Apple Device.
In this case, too, you can create Invites on icloud.com on non-Apple devices. Including the webpage seems nicely responsive and can probably make them in an Android Chrome tab if you wanted.
The only remaining obstacle is that it isn't a free feature of an Apple Account, but requires an iCloud+ subscription. But that's useful for Apple Music and Apple TV+ and other products, too, many of which work just fine on non-Apple devices as well.
I'm in a birthday party planning group on Signal, which is another app I hadn't used in years. It's easy to forget I have messages there because it's not on my home screen, or the notification settings are different from my normal Messages app, or I just forget to look.
Each time you use a "different" app for something that's not in your habit loop, your response time gets delayed and you're less likely to notice communications. An app needs to get fairly regular use to become as useful as a primary app, even if, from a technical standpoint, there's nothing wrong with them.
So long as Facebook remains available to everyone, even if the content feed is a mess, the event planning space is going to be more accessible to everyone and will end up being the defacto friends & family ecosystem.
I'm not an iCloud+ member, so I can't go in an look for myself, but ideally this would be just a fancy way of extending your iCloud Calendar invites where Gmail, Outlook, etc. users can still create events and invite people in roughly the same way. If as a Linux & Android user I am only able to RSVP to Apple users' invites, but I am never able to invite them to anything myself, then I literally cannot embrace this product without investing considerable money into their hardware, which I am not going to do.
Hell, if they featureset was compelling enough, and they had an iCloud app for non-Apple hardware platforms, I might actually consider being an iCloud+ member, but I guess it's not worth it to Apple to collect a monthly payment from me if I won't make the downpayment on an iPhone and a Macbook...
Apple would be smart to build those things and make it available on Android too. Then we could ditch FB altogether.
A lot of comments online claim that people don't care about spam, or think that advertisements are a good thing for a free service, or at the very least won't change their habits if given an alternative. If that's the case then what's a better explanation for your observations?
I argue that people do care, even if it's perhaps not expressed in words.
Very happy to see this
Same goes for Apple's moves in the VR space: no one wants to come out and say that it's a stupid idea, because weirder things have worked in the past. Airpods are a counterexample and were initially seen as gimmicky and overpriced, but are now everywhere.
I think it just goes to show that a lot of consumer tech depends on the company image and wider culture. Google glass was pretty much ahead of its time, but was killed due to terrible rep, even though thats exactly the type of thing people are trying to make now.
I'll send an email for free, thankyouverymuch.
You can create events from the web iCloud interface without an Apple device.
With the tabs in Gmail, very little leaks through to my primary inbox that isn't relatively immediately relevant (and not a lot of mail total). Often don't look at Promotions at all and maybe glance at Updates once a day or so.
Email is useful for me though, yes, a lot of my interaction with my circle of friends is over texts.
I think Partiful is pretty good at what it does - no ads, can specify reminders, manages text blasts. The problem, to me, is messaging - how do you tell people about a thing? We are all getting tons of spam texts all day. Apple can cheat here because they own iMessage so maybe they will win overall - but still, what about your android friends? Time will tell. Good luck to everyone organizing events.
Other wise FB is really garbage. Just irrelevant suggestions and no amount of blocking trains the algorithm since they are just trying to make money.
For now. We're in the process of seeing Twitter die like every other social network has died before it, Facebook will have it's time as well.
I see the same risk involved with Apple TV's branding; Apple TV works great on Xbox, on NVIDIA Shield and on PC. I'm sure though there are a lot of people who just decide that shows like Foundation and subscriptions like MLS Season's Pass just aren't for them. I don't know if it is a 5% or a 20% drop but it has to be real.
1. It helps grow Apple's ecosystem by covering just enough ground to make third-party alternatives less necessary for most users.
2. It reduces one of the major "sticky" points that keep people in Facebook's own moat. Events and Marketplace are the two reasons I still use Facebook.
3. It encourages competition from the people who want to do that last 10% better than Apple's apps, raising the baseline and hopefully forcing innovation as well. Those apps lead to more App Store revenue, so, cynically, it's a win-win for Apple.
Google Invites is being discontinued.
Google Party: Invite your friends!
Google Party is being discontinued.
Google Gathering: Invite your friends!
Google Gathering is being discontinued.
I made an app very similar to this (in spirit at least) some years ago and I still think we need more real social like this than social networks.
Don't you think that's kind of the point? Do you think having green and blue messaging bubbles was unintentional?
As the iOS user, it is your own messages that are green or blue depending on whether it was sent using iMessage or SMS. It's useful feedback about whether your message was sent on a reliable channel.
I know it became a whole thing and that Apple has allowed it to remain as such. But it's not really an apt analogy.
You do not need to own an Apple device to either create events or join events.
> I'll send an email for free, thankyouverymuch.
This seems fine! There are open protocols (email, ics) if they work for you, but Apple specifically developed this in a way to neither require an Apple device or Apple Account to interact. Which is better than some of the competitors! (Facebook and Google tend to create social tools which explicitly require everyone to have accounts.)
As long as they don’t start naming other things Invite, they might avoid that issue. Although maybe they’ll name their HomePod with a screen that and we’re back to square one.
I know way too many techy and non-techy people who have thousands of unread email messages from those apps.
A lot of people I know don't really answer to real email anymore, unless they know something is coming. It became just something you use to make accounts with.
Even corporate email is dying. 99% of my inbox is transactional emails from SaaS apps and spam from apps I forgot to delete. And 90% of the rest is spam from recruiters or people trying to sell me some product. Only 0.1% is legitimate.
Statistically, email is not for people anymore, period.
(Doesn't really bother me, my friends and I all use WhatsApp/etc. anyway.)
n=1 though, maybe this is some quirk of my phone provider.
> Apple today introduced Apple Invites, a new app for iPhone
If Android users have to login to a website to use this, what's the appeal? There are hundreds of simple meeting/event webapps out there, many not even requiring authentication.
All the family/friends group chats I am in are WhatsApp.
I use iMessage every day for 1-to-1 messaging but I don’t really view it as distinct from SMS.
For international communication, even 1-on-1 tends to be WhatsApp.
You are. I explicitly created a burner email and invited it to an event.
When I navigated from the invite email I was prompted to sign in which I declined. It then allowed me to join the event after I confirmed with an emailed code.
On joining the event I was able to set my name and send a note.
WhatsApp has like 99.9% market share here and I assume it is a lot bigger than anything else in the EU too.
I wonder why is that though. Everyone around me has an iPhone basically and I haven’t received a blue bubble in years. The messages app is not even on my home screen.
You need an "iCloud+" account to create, though. Which I as a non-apple user have no idea what is, and probably is useless for me to pay for not using anything apple beforehand.
The competition I see for this is partiful (https://partiful.com/), which is free, handles invites for folks without accounts (I don't have one, I am invited to parties via text message), and is clearly the inspiration/competition apples for this app given the visual similarities.
This needs anti-trust breakup. Tech companies shouldn't be media giants. They're turning a once-healthy media industry into an attention economy platform play, giving it away below cost, and wringing a robust sector of the economy of its value.
It's disgusting that Apple and Amazon are doing this. Amazon owns James Bond. And they're a grocery store and primary care doctor, for god's sake. That's not good.
This is worse than Standard Oil and Ma Bell because they own our entire lives: eyeballs, financial transactions, business matters, commerce, and personal relationships.
Very occasional FB invites for things when casting the net wide, like, I'm back in town and having a picnic, everyone come.
Then when the same iPhone app seamlessly started sending iMessages (blue bubbles) to other iPhones rather than SMS (green bubbles), people just kept using that.
I understand your reasons for choosing it, but that does not change that Flutter apps feel completely _wrong_ on any platform except Android, but most especially on iOS/macOS and the web. (This is unsurprising because Flutter is essentially a modern day implementation of Swing complete with personalities, and it's just as incorrect in its styling as Swing was. It's worse for the web because Flutter explicitly eschews standard web technologies in favour of either one big canvas or lots of little canvases.)
Best of luck.
That's the objective. Green text and all. To force everyone to adopt one platform because of network effects and social stigma.
These platform plays by the god tier trillion dollar companies are insidious and should be given scrutiny by the DOJ / FTC.
A breakup of these platforms would make none of this matter. You could pick and choose services across devices. We might even see some competition for Android and iPhone if the DOJ would step in and break this up.
Big tech is too big. A breakup would oxygenate the entire tech sector. It would probably even make the MAGMA stock go up because the sum of parts are being given away for free just to get eyeballs.
Billions of dollars are being given away for free to scrape in network effect advantages. It's at a level where competition from new players is virtually impossible. They can tax anything that moves. Every transaction, every relationship, every quanta of information.
I'm not trying to convince you or anyone else to use this. It just was pointing out you don't need Apple accounts or devices to participate opposed to something like Facebook events.
> There are hundreds of simple meeting/event webapps out there
Okay? Go crazy using those! But don't claim that this requires an Apple device to create or join events (like the OP I was responding to). And don't claim that this requires an Apple Account to join events (like many other commentators are).
This Apple thing is going to turn into a "green text" social signalling thing all over again. If you have an Android, you won't be invited.
More scummy Apple social engineering bullshit. Kids that already hate on those having Android colored text bubbles are going to bully each other even more. And of course kids need the latest iPhone, too.
Apple is playing into this brilliantly and it's disgusting.
All status symbols are stupid, that's part of the point. That has never mattered. It doesn't matter how stupid a symbol is, it can still have tangible effects on you and your life.
Humans are social animals first and foremost, and are not rational in any way. Tribalism is literally the point.
You're paying for Apple Invites whether you realize it or not. There's immense value in making their platform more sticky.
In a few years you'll read articles about uncool Android kids not getting invited to parties. And that's your answer.
One of these behaviors is way more insidious.
But really, I get 5-10 emails a day now in my primary inbox and I don't really have many filters. I DO get a lot in Promotions and Updates, but most of the stuff in Promos I can safely ignore and I mostly keep my eye on Updates if I'm expecting something I might want to deal with there.
Email is still my primary channel for the most part.
The only thing I get in my Messages app is verification codes and spam.
I don’t think I got a single SMS/iMessage from a human in the last 5 years.
But if it's not bubble color, it will be the type of sneakers kids wear or whatever else is the fashion of the moment.
In some ways, "Cloud, by Apple" would have been better because it could have had a subsidiary tagline 'open to anyone' -where iPhone, iPad are pretty solidly walled garden devices.
I'm not in marketing. I am sure smart marketing people would point out downsides. I just think iCloud "says" -not for me, unless I have an iPhone.
Why do you care? Why is it a negative?
They are completely aware of it an actively leverage it to use your friends and family against you to force you into Apple's ecosystem. It's the main reason why Android will have to get pretty bad before I bend to such incredibly dirty tactics.
I think they were on a cheap prepaid plan though.
Apple iPhone ownership amongst USA teens:
2024: 87%
2019: 83%
2014: 67%
https://www.iclarified.com/95177/87-of-us-teens-own-iphones-...
https://www.pipersandler.com/news/piper-jaffray-completes-se...
https://www.pipersandler.com/news/different-new-cool-accordi...
Smartphone marketshare for iPhone in various countries:
65%: Norway
59%: Sweden/Japan/Canada/USA
49%: UK
30-39%: Germany/Portugal/Italy
other countries are lower from my random sampling of developed countries (South Korea is dominated by Samsung).
Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/norway
Change last part of url to get info for another country
To start, it's not a service but an app. Sure there is a web interface, but the focus on the app already sets the stage (which also puts macos only users in an interesting position).
Then non-Apple users probably can only respond when the sales pitch is "to contribute to Shared Albums, and engage with Apple Music playlists"
If I'm not an Apple user there will only be downsides to using this service compared to any other one.
Really really dumb to have it require icloud+ however. Why??
Apple will use it's dominant position to create lock in like how they did with iMessage instead of cooperating with other platforms on a common standard.
Oder friends and family are surprised when they want to video call over Facetime and find it hard to believe other people's phones don't have Apple apps.
Google made this shift a while ago, but mostly out of necessity to mitigate the impacts of manufacturers failing to release regular OS updates.
[1] OG mac, not Orwell. At least Microsoft nags look like HTML.
This is very concrete fuckery.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/21/apple-doj-antitrust...
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241473453/why-green-text-bub...
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/21/doj-claims-green-bubbles-a...
I'm not stuck to Apple's platform, I'm quite happy here. Apple services aren't drenched in ads end to end. Apple's services aren't constantly asking for nickels and dimes; it's one charge, every month, for a buffet of services that are regularly added to and actually improved, making them distinct from... fuck, the rest of the Internet basically, which seems to boil down to a revolving door of stupidly named services backed by VC funding that get popular, quickly, because they don't charge anything and aren't drenched in ads, and then slowly they add the ads, but there's an ad free tier for not much money, oh but now there's ads in that tier, which is also more expensive, and then the service shuts down because they didn't hit 60 billion users before their runway ran out, but there's this new service...
And while I'm certain they do some spying and whatnot to facilitate targeted ads, they at least pay lip service to my privacy, and my experiences developing stuff for their hardware tells me that at least there is a whiff of security to their hardware. There are a lot of things as a developer I'm straight up not allowed to do.
The "insidiousness" of Apple's plan so far seems to be, largely, making damn good products that people want to use, and backing them up with cloud services that work well. I wish more tech firms took that approach to be totally honest.
The text is harder to read for me because it’s low contrast and can’t be configured.
It’s significantly less secure, and a government agent required I use blue bubble imessage to submit an important document for security, and wouldn’t accept it by sms or email since both were not secure enough
On one hand it’s a good thing: so many invite services are coated in ads they deserve to fail. On the other, yet another service getting sucked up into the tech giant blob.
If open formats prevailed we would have expanded calendar invites so they just appear in your inbox like any other email for free. But alas, everyone has given up on that.
When Tim Cook testifies that Apple is entitled to all our digital transactions, I don't think they have a better moral stance.
Non-iPhone users are the minority in this demographic (<= 13%), see my demographic comment elsewhere for this subject.
You also sometimes have to enable in the settings for Android Messages (and have a supported carrier). iMessage also has an option to enable RCS but I believe its on by default in the newer versions of iOS
Is my social life dead or what are you guys inviting so many people to?
If I want to organize an event, I just write a message in the relevant group chat and get responses about who’s going to come.
But the point remains that a cynical UX/technical/business decision that does not need to be so is rending real relationships between actual people. If Tim Cook had the power to render anyone who didn't pay him $400+ mute to their friends and family through some sort of black magic, we'd call him a comic book supervillain.
I think you're confused about how Flutter works on Android. It's not native to Android, it uses canvas with custom drawn implementations of most components there too – same as it does for iOS/macOS/web.
- I'm glad to see this, as it might be an easily accessible alternative to Facebook events, which I tend to miss as I'm checking my FB only once in a while
- on the other hand, each new Apple release adds apps that might kill some small start-ups that are offering similar services for the small fee. Having a free alternative on your phone out of the box with most of your contacts using will lead to a decent number of subscriptions' cancellations. A good lesson to build smth that is harder to reproduce, though...
*Memories of my sister not believing me when I said she wouldn't be able to install her Windows copy of Doom on my Performa 5200 back in the 90s*
Apple Invites requires a mandatory iCloud+ account (minimal 0.99 euro/dollar per month) and a non-anonymous Apple ID requirement with credit card or bank account. It probably has a perpetual lock-in of your invite groups and tracking of all participants as well but I couldn't test this properly without paying 12 Euros.
The telcos specify the size limits of MMS messages. iMessage has much higher limits in most cases, so iPhone has to use reduce the quality of the pics/videos to reach the lower size limits for sending to non-iMessage recipients.
For the telcos, why would they upgrade their size limits for MMS - it's just a cost centre for them. They probably make more by selling more iPhones as well.
I think SMS/MMS should just go away entirely though.
It's entirely up to Apple whether to make their iMessage platform available on other platforms.
They've shown they're quite invested in keeping it to running on Apple hardware only by going after and blocking any 3rd party attempt to provide iMessage compatible clients.
The World Cup I was referring to was the infamous match where a player received 3 yellow cards, and the delay from cable was so long that the OTA viewers (a Spanish language broadcast) had time to come running in to ask if that made any more sense in English. But the English broadcast had not yet seen it.
It was just bizarre. It's negative because it's annoying AF. But since you want to minimize things by making up numbers to attempt to make a point instead of accepting the provided information, there's no way we'll ever see eye to eye.
It seems like Apple has some difficulty to adapt to some international audience.
I don't know how long RCS has been around, but my impression is most or all of my messages until recently were SMS.
iMessage now says "Text Message - RCS" or "Text Message - SMS" in the text entry box which is better than the green/blue bubble thing (though it does still have that).
Lets not kid ourselves she was going to keep focusing on minimum impact, likely to fail cases with good optics, and inventing more obtuse interpretations of anti-trust law while continuing to ignore any real monopolies she could.
As in, during a conversation my phone would send RCS and the iPhone would reply with SMS only. This has happened multiple times with multiple people, and some where RCS won't let us communicate - the messages just disappear into the void, but only when sent from the iPhone.
Video calling is orders of magnitude more complicated.
They're not really comparable.
Neither is better than the other yet it's becoming more and more difficult to find people that understand the flaws of both.
I don't understand tho how something like apple can do so well in the USA, land of freedom and individual rights, when they are basically locking people into their system and telling them what they can and what they can't do.
Not being able to install whatever app you want on your phone should be a big red flag for freedom advocate. That's literally the reason why hongkong citizens massively ditched apple a few years ago when there was protestation and apple, following CCP order, banned the apps they used to organize themselves.
Yet it seems like a non issue in usa ??
It's so unnecessary to call everything "Apple something" when they've had great success creating recognizable brand names like "iPod", "iPhone", and "Macintosh".
Calling it "Apple TV+" just feels like both the set-top box and the streaming service wanted the name "Apple TV" and neither side was budging.
Android implemented RCS and Apple dragged their feet in implementing the standardised platform such that high quality messaging was seamless and agnostic between brands
The iPhone needed to reduce the quality of pics/videos to non-iMessage recipients because Apple didn't support any other form of non-iMessage messaging.
If you keep photos and videos without dealing with a separate service, it's pretty much a no-brainer. And the cheapest tier is $0.99/mo. for 50 GB so it's not exactly breaking the bank.
iCloud+ for 2TB is priced just where if you have ONE other Apple service, you're probably better off with Apple One.
(I admit I misread this whole thing as being a feature of Apple One.)
This Invites thing is a separate app requiring a subscription service, and not just a + extension within iMessage or Calendar integration or something, so I doubt that I will be using it.
I'm sure Apple has data showing that offering higher-res video on non-Apple hardware isn't worth it, but this experience felt like a perfect match for the rest of my experience with Apple - if you want to use their software but not hardware, fuck you. If you want to use their hardware and software with a different workflow than they intended, fuck you too.
That's not so much the case anymore, from what I understand (even the "reactions") work decently well, now.
What's annoying is when you get an out-of-bound popup while you're trying to watch the game! I don't want to know that "opposing team hit a grand slam" whilst I'm watching the pitcher at 3-2 and bases loaded.
If I had to assign a dollar value to being able to use this feature on my phone, it would be pennies per month.
This is a huge trick. Like any other service where the most friction is setting up billing... then they can increase the price easily. Do upgrades to other tiers require confirmation?
I don't love the idea of Apple dominating this space either, but there's a lot of opportunity to improve things, so I'm glad to see it.
Thankfully we have Signal, which solves the problem better than either platform option.
There's no trick as far as I can tell.
And they haven't increased the price of the $0.99 tier ever, and it's been around for 8 years I think. I don't think they've ever increased the price of any storage plan in the US ever -- prices in other countries have changed but that seems to do more with currency fluctuations.
Apple is known for their transparent pricing and easy cancellation. I don't think there are any tricks here.
I think they both used to be cheaper, but now they’re focused on profits. Same as Partiful will do eventually.
I agree open standards would always be better, but reality doesn't always work like that and instead everyone just uses Facebook "because it's easy". This is now easier, and more open than Facebook at least.
Each one has varying models for replacing functionality of the Google Play Services, and IIRC the Aurora store [1] allows for installation of apps from Google Play without a Google account.
It's not a combination of steps that would be accessible to the average user, but I think it should be possible to use WhatsApp without being an Apple or Google customer (nominally a customer of Google hardware---Pixel phones---if using Graphene or Calyx, and ultimately a customer of Meta/Facebook for WhatsApp itself).
The streaming services landscape is very weird in general. Lots about DRM or what have you that cause very bizarre rules like Netflix only allowing Opera on linux to play full 1080, or how on mac Edge only does 720. Some of them refusing to show anything over 720p on browsers no matter which platform. Of course some have workarounds through extensions.
Certainly not the seamless experience one would have hoped from the switch away from cable services!
Sounds like there’s no Apple walled garden lock-in for recipients of the Invites? Only for creating/managing them?
When I think of people I know who have iCloud+ subscriptions, it's mostly people who thought they needed them because of the scary notifications their phones sent them about running out of their initial 5GB of storage (which of course is not enough for any modern phone).
These are not people who are going to download and figure out how to use a new invite app. They are going to keep using evite just like they always have.
There are some people who may use iCloud+ or a bundle because they like the fitness features or have a family that makes it make sense. I probably know some people like this. But I have never had a conversation with anyone about iCloud+, ever in my life. Only dealt with questions from non-tech-savvy family members who were scared about notifications that they were running out of space and needed to "upgrade" to this paid service.
I think that is the trick.
99 cents is so innocuous, that people set up billing to allow it. People who set up their apple id without a credit card will probably attach a card to their account to get the 99 cent storage "deal".
At that point, upgrading to the next tier is inevitable as phones have been steadily increasing in storage capacity.
I think it would be nicer if your icloud storage capacity matched your primary device.
> a team that will not run out of money and sell my data
While "not run out of money" is true, the "sell my data" part is not given. For example, in 2023 Google sold its domains business (https://domains.google/) to Squarespace. Also, while not directly selling your data, they might sell the outcomes of your data in a form of ads or AI models, for example. I believe that can objectively bother some people.
Another point: this is the way to build a monopoly, or a global dominance on the market, and then dictate the rules. I see that stories about some Big Tech monopoly controversial moves are often quite popular on HN, as those situations resonate with many tech enthusiasts.
As for the rest of the point, I agree with you, that a free, high-quality, and decent service is a benefit for us, consumers, over another subscription. I still feel sorry for small bootstrapped services. But that's my subjective feeling, I'm aware of that.
The first image on the press release is a real photo.
Who sets the MMS limits? the telcos - actually min(both ends), the iPhone sender's telco and the recipient's telco.
iMessage was introduced in 2011. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMessage
Google announced RCS support for Google Messages in 2019. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
"In June 2019, Google announced that it would begin to deploy RCS on an opt-in basis via the Messages app, with service compliant with the Universal Profile and hosted by Google (i.e. Jibe) rather than the user's carrier, if the carrier does not provide RCS."
I have almost no way to convince anyone other than people very close to me to use it due to the (lack) of network effect. If they could just use it instead of the default messenger then it's a dramatically easier sell.
Obviously it's up to the Signal Foundation about the direction they take but I don't know if I've seen anyone agree with the justifications.
Google and Apple wrap up their locked down BS with SMS for the same reason. It's by default free of network effect but passively pulls people in.
Apple don't sell the Roku or Chromecast devices, basically. So, for Apple TV it's clear you don't have to be iFriendly only.
Probably I'm seduced by how amazingly cheap 1TB of Apple cloud is, compared to the others. Its a LOT cheaper than Google 1 or Microsoft's offering, discounting all the other side benefits.
But then oops, turns out Google’s on wireless service doesn’t even support it. Maybe google didn’t think Apple would call their bluff?
> $0.99/mo for 50GB: Storage for thousands of photos, videos, and files.
> $2.99/mo for 200GB: Great for family sharing or larger media libraries.
> $9.99/mo for 2TB: Plenty of space for all the family’s photos, videos, and files.
Other than the $0.99 tier, these storage numbers are comically low for the uses cases Apple describes in plain English. But that's par for the course with Apple... An arm, a leg, and your firstborn for storage and RAM upgrades. As in hardware, so in SaaS cloud storage, I guess.
I'd be pretty peeved to spend any money on such a service, and many of my friends simply couldn't.
Yes Apple provided an improved messaging service before there was one via iMessage, however they have failed in allowing their service to integrate with the rest of the industry that is looking to support an improved open standard that would allow for a better experience between different mobile operating systems.
The original point you commented on was about Apple not integrating with other platforms.
As I said, I'm an Apple guy but Apple should've implemented RCS as soon as the telco's supported it.
This is not a given even today. Creating a new Facebook account involves a ton of scrutiny, you need to upload an ID, and until your account is older and established it’s likely that anything you do can get auto-scanned by some spam bot and get you banned for using some keyword, even in private chats.
I don’t have a Facebook account but I needed to create one a few years back to use my oculus quest (this is before they finally came to their senses and separated the accounts) and I had a lot of trouble convincing FB that I was a real human.
Of course Apple could use this to do vendor lock in (only apple users can create invites), but since anyone can join them I don't see it as a large issue.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/109364
I’m not defending Apple and don’t really want to get into a discussion into how limited this FaceTime over the web is and whatnot, I do think it could and should be done better. I’m just making a specific suggestion which may ease up your burden with those friends and family.
In exchange, FB gets access into your offline graph: people you interact IRL but not on social media. They can approximate relationships through Plus 1 invites.
Work in an instagram component for sharing photos / albums / reels from an event. You’re pumping right back into the FOMOmachine.
My Telco, the largest national mobile carrier, still does not support RCS in 2025, which makes RCS and which mobile platform supports it and which does not a moot point for me.
Telcos do not have an incentive to upgrade the messaging infrastructure alone unless the upgrade comes as part of the core network upgrade, which is usually bound to the number increase in <whatever>G. Since the introduction of 4G, when mobile networks turned into dumb data pipes for everything, including voice, there is very little money to be made in the telco business. ISP's have suffered the same fate.
The app allows iPhone users to create an event. Anybody on any device or browser can RSVP. The event can be shared as a link. Making an event invite app that only works for users on one platform would be pointless.
Also - non-Apple users have been able to join FaceTime calls via. A link for several years.
If it isn't there, About > Settings > General > About and tap the Carrier row. If it doesn't say RCS, the carrier doesn't support it.
Also one should note, MMS also requires carrier support and a few carriers don't support it in some countries.
There's a list of supported features for carriers worldwide at https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108048
> Anyone can create a link to a FaceTime call with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using iOS 15 or later or with a Mac using macOS Monterey or later.
iOS - https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/create-a-facetime-lin...
The US Department of Justice is currently suing Apple for violating those antitrust laws [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-mono...
If you don't want to use it to create invitations, don't. There's zero requirement for you to have an account if others invite you to something, and it sounds kind of preposterous to complain about other people choosing to pay for a service that you can then participate with for free.
The pictures are also a bit amateurish but this is more a function of the inviter. On other platforms much of the design choices are made for you so there’s a lower bar but for me, partiful seems to want to hit the kind of “having street cred” aesthetic.
This is a typical partiful aesthetic.
If Apple did not lock this behind iCloud+ I think it would have quickly become a standard for a lot of users and been another feather in Apple’s cap of why a user might want an iPhone. Maybe they could have added upsells like gift an Apple Card or something or made money through affiliate gift giving links or something.
Young people I know (except for gamers) find Discord a bit sus because you don’t have any baseline with regard to name or profile pic. Also who already knows who. Discord doesn’t expose any social network outside of the specific server.
You would think Discord would be the community of choice for Gen Z but in reality it’s limited to gamer and gamer adjacent folks.
Turns out identity and known social network are still things people look for to achieve a base level of trust for real time chat.
Reddit and HN are more topic driven, but chat somehow feels more personal.
And of course there's no encryption standard.
Oh well - it was nice while it lasted.
Thus there’s zero hardware lock-in, an Android user could send invites. Though obviously iCloud is more appealing if you’re part of there ecosystem, you can just use it for file storage etc.
> create lock in like how they did with iMessage instead of cooperating with other platforms on a common standard
Why do people always make up iPhone prices when the truth is readily available? You can buy a brand-new, unsubsidised iPhone for less than half that, and that’s not counting second-hand devices or phones on a contract, which are both incredibly common ways of getting a phone.
You have probably seen CalDAV in action at work with Microsoft’s god awful version of it (via Exchange Server or MS365 or w/e they call it); or Google Workspace or Google Calendar invites.
Across domains, it tends to be a hit or miss (due to proprietary EEE bs) but within the same organizations/domain it works decently enough. Even works well beyond the 100 person limit in “Apple Invites”
Sigh, why do we keep re-creating the wheel.
It doesn't seem to be specific to any country, though some are worse than others. Definitely seems to be a "best effort" service everywhere.
And it's obviously not likely to get anyone over the pay wall to buy iCloud+. This invitation feature has many free competitors. I don't begrudge Apple for creating this, but I won't be surprised if I keep getting evites and paperless post invites, and never an Apple Invite or whatever it's called.
I was quite surprised to learn it wasn't free. I had heard about this "sherlocking" on Twitter but hadn't read the details. I can't think of a time when Apple Sherlocked something but didn't make it free. In fact, making it free is kind of part in parcel of Sherlocking, since that's what really kills the other business. Here, plenty of people will keep using the existing competitors because they don't want to have to pay for iCloud+.
Is the quality the same or even close? Is it easy and obvious how to share such links?
For the younger folks who organize their parties by texting (iMessages, Whatsapp, Telefram, etc), this can be enticing.
sadly insecure people just can't get over it. some things are exclusive. it's ok.
I barely ever FaceTime anyone. Just now after reading your comment I opened the FaceTime app. It has two big buttons:
- Create Link
- New FaceTime
And it showed a balloon tip under create link that said:
“Invite Anyone to a Call Friends with Android and Windows devices can join a FaceTime call if you share a link.”
So yes, seems they actually made it about as obvious as it can be. Maybe even more.
Or more specifically: it's a different product ("Google Messages") that just happens to be based on RCS.
They do have some partnerships with hardware manufacturers that ship Play on their devices, and they will preload Google Messages in there as well.
In essence, it doesn't exist in AOSP, and doesn't really live side-by-side with a normal messaging app (i.e. one that only does baseband native messaging), I wouldn't be surprised if the partnerships and preloading conditions state the manufacturer can't ship their own version (I think at least Samsung had to drop their own "Samsung Messages" app as reported in one of the reviews of a foldable display phone).
In a way, RCS made no difference, and whatever Google did was mostly just to compete with Meta (both FB Messenger and WhatsApp). Fun fact: Google Messages is closer to Matrix than it is to iMessage in terms of comparable technical features.
Correct me if I'm wrong:
- create & share invitations: must have iCloud+
- iCloud shared albums: barebones upload/download on non-Apple devices
- apple music: cross-platform, must be subscribed
- RSVP: cross-platform (Apple account req'd)
So yes, it "works" outside the Apple ecosystem, but missing features to encourage lock-in.
I've used it for so much community organizing. It's such a simple tool and nobody has to make an account. You put in your name and an (optional) password. The optional password feature has served as a source of inspiration in my own projects. It pushed me to consider "does this really need an account? Can it be done without one?"
Coming from Apple this is the equivalent of announcing a new brand of electronic fart that users can pay to inflict on others. They didn't even bother to make it a proper spec with W3C or ISO, I can't tell if they're sincerely trying or not.
I paid to go ad free. We like it though it’s been down a couple times last year..
People buy iPhones because 'they're different' due to iOS, the ecosystem, etc. I mean, high-end Android devices are really on par with, if not better than, iPhones, but people still buy iPhones because they don't want to share that feeling with everyone else.
But try telling this to anyone and watch their eyes glaze over in a matter of seconds.
It's not the color itself that's the problem, it's that having one green user means the entire conversation falls back to SMS and thus photos, videos, etc are all degraded and you can't do more rich messaging things like reactions. This is changing with RCS but it is in Apple's interest to make it a social change rather than just a technological limitation.
‡ I periodically try Android devices and bounce off them because I find the UI to be obtuse or deliberately built for dark patterns. I was helping a neighbour with his new-to-him Pixel 8a and to see the pictures he had taken with his camera on the phone, he had to sign in with a Google account — and then we disabled the backup because he didn't actually care to back up the photos (they are ephemeral for his purposes). It took 45 minutes to figure this out because the settings and controls can only be set when you have already signed into the damned account.
¶ I am not saying that the people who expect nothing from Android would find iOS any better; they have just been trained through decades of bad UI/UX in Windows and Android (because they're cheaper) to understand that they have to fight with their computing devices to get anything done, so they don't expect anything better … and is it ever delivered to them, in spades. Flutter, here, does not help — but at least it doesn't clash with the fifteen different "platform" styles on your typical Samsung Android device.
Not that I personally cared, as i see it as an Apple flaw, but in joining a work iMessage group I had people whining about image quality and whatever other features were disabled between iMessage users while I was present.
Unrelated to that point, as other posters have called out, folks pretty consistently overstate the cost of Apple hardware relative to peers. You can spend $800 on a new iPhone 16, the latest release, or half that on an iPhone SE. Both of these options are available right now on Apple.com. This feels like saying you'd need to spend $1000+ on an Android because that's how much the newest Pixel costs.
Most things that just charge a subscription are good and get better.
gioazzi, great work! Keep making apps that are useful and fun for you. I will definitely recommend your app with my friends
This product, much like iMessage and others, provides an inferior experience to non-Apple users. It aims to make other devices and operating systems look less capable and cheap.
iMessage also partially works with other phones. This doesn't change the fact that its intention is to create a lock-in effect, as evidenced by internal Apple emails.
I finally caved a few months ago when I got tired of fighting with the awful backup storage UI that makes it difficult to determine why the backup is failing even though it’s smaller than 5GB.
Apple has every incentive to make that UI as bad as possible while still being functional.
You can’t imagine someone preferring an iphone for one of those reasons? or some other? It has to be “apple users need to be special”, troll?
In the future they can change the approach too and
both remove and restrict features
Example: If you are heavily invested in Apple Music or Spotify, there's a lot of momentum there to keep you from switching. All your stuff is there (songs, favorites, playlists) and it would take a lot of time to re-find it on the other service, if it even exists there.
And streaming services like Netflix lock you in with constant reams of new content.
But what would be keeping me on some particular invite service? If I used Apple Invites for my last party two months ago... but I have decided that Apple Invites sucks now... I really don't see a lot of friction keeping me from switching away? The inconvenience would not be zero but seems minor.
Maybe its your phone going overseas and not working correctly.
This could be a solid play, assuming non-Apple recipients get a decent experience across all of their devices.
That isn't exactly accurate. The standard doesn't have e2ee, but if you use google messages with RCS with other android phone it is end to end encrypted. But it uses a proprietary google extension to RCS. But I would be surprised if google wasn't willing to work with apple to get e2ee RCS working between iMessage and google Messages, but Apple has no interest in that.
I gotta take a photo, and then write it down in my calendar by hand.
Just wild really how Meta is letting the advantage they currently have slip through their fingers.
I think there’s also an unofficial Python library, so you can write a simple script that keeps your account active (and use the web client).
They will use the iMessage protocol if supported by all clients. If not, they fall back to the next best thing supported by all clients whether RCS or SMS/MMS. In your case (possibly before iPhones supported RCS) the "next best thing" was apparently SMS/MMS.
This is the correct behavior.
I think you're also falling into the common trap of automatically thinking whatever Android supports is like, the correct and open standard.
In reality, RCS's history was an absolute mess of incompatible implementations, pushed and owned by some of by Apple's direct competitors. It's really not any more the "correct" standard than iMessage is and it does not support E2EE outside of Google's proprietary implementation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#De...
I guess the RSVP thing can be handy for when you're planning especially large events and need an estimate of the guest count. But those kinds of events are extremely few and far between in my life - and it feels tacky to use this for something as formal as a wedding.
Glad other people find it useful though.
Nowadays when I'm looking for a new software product or service with a good number of options, first thing I do is check how they're funded.
Funny thing is that teams are catching on to this! Very recently I've seen two products have a separate "Are you VC backed?" heading in their landing FAQ (both answered with "no"). I can see this becoming a trend - if I were to create a product, I'd do the same.
Best option is to just use a different app that just works on all platforms. No RCS, no iMessage.
My attention is valuable (at least to me and those around me), and I choose not to waste that attention on applications that are built with a framework that quite deliberately disrespects the platforms I choose while presenting a badly drawn version of the thinnest layer.
On macOS and iOS, Flutter pretends to conform to platform standards, but it does so very badly (I can always tell if I'm using a Flutter app; it's just off…and my battery life suffers because Flutter is such a bad citizen). Honestly, I probably wouldn't hate Flutter on iOS if it didn't pretend to conform to iOS standards while missing the mark (just like every Google app misses the mark on what an iOS app should look like; it's just wrong).
On the web, Flutter is even worse by pretending that there's only one HTML tag, <canvas>, and throwing away _all_ of the rest of HTML to do everything else that HTML does, but worse and less accessibly. That, ultimately, is unforgivable and a waste of everyone's time.
Regardless of how useful gioazzi's project may be, the technical choices made put it well outside of the boundaries where I am comfortable recommending its use to anyone — and that's fine. I posted a similar take about someone who did a Show HN about a project they made which required a Google login; I was interested in seeing what they had done until I saw that requirement. That technical choice, while a valid one, put it well outside of my "I will try this thing at all" zone.
I shared this stance because I know I’m not alone, and people need to know if their architectural choices put them outside of the market they are targeting. I might or might not be in their market, but it's still a useful thing to know that there's this one asshole in Toronto who won't use it because they took the "easy" way out for pseudo-cross-platform support. (I do not have the same reaction to React Native, but that's because it ultimately doesn't try to emulate the platform.)
it’s a great platform for the moment, enjoy it while it lasts.
I think this line is a good compromise: “iCloud+ subscribers can create invitations, and anyone can RSVP, regardless of whether they have an Apple Account or Apple device.”
> It's not a combination of steps that would be accessible to the average user
Tangential, but I’m thinking about starting a degoogled phone shop. Not sure if it’s a good business idea, but I think there is at least some demand there.
EDIT: aurorastore[.]org you link to is not the official site by the way. I’d not trust the APKs you get there. The official is https://auroraoss.com/ (and the downloads on F-Droid should be legit, too).
I get that the iCloud tiers start cheap, but having 50GB doesn't really do anything for me since it's still not big enough to back up an iPhone. And there's zero chance I'm going to start paying for a monthly service in order to get access to an evite clone that I would use a couple times a year. Maybe there are big partiers out there that would upgrade just for this, but this seems like an impending flop to me.
Worked really, really well for Facebook for about a decade or so.
> Also - non-Apple users have been able to join FaceTime calls via. A link for several years.
I had no idea! TIL!
It's the same reason people in europe don't use Facetime a lot. Because there's a majority of users on Android. A chat/call app that only works on Apple is more trouble than it is worth.
It isn't as simple as "apple bad, google good". Apple/iOS having E2EE is good. Apple refusing to cooperate at all in making E2EE interoperable with non apple products is bad. Google/Android having E2EE is good, and better than the claim above that RCS doesn't have E2EE by default. The fact that it is a proprietary extension is bad, but they seem more willing to interoperate. That said, if the positions were reversed, I suspect Google would also be more resistant to interoperability.
Seems like the main reason I’m seeing in the comments is the event management portion of it, but much like the redesigned Inbox in Mail, could have been an interesting opportunity to rethink the UX of Calendar.
There's nothing really wrong with Invites if you're happy to only have photos from people with iPhones or to let the music be exclusively chosen by Apple users, but you can't pretend it's a fair and equal system.
AI “agents” will soon to solve a lot of mundane tasks for us like creating and sending invites for free I hope.
s/Apple Invites/Meta Messenger groups/
s/Apple Invites/Facebook events/
s/Apple Invites/WhatsApp groups/
s/Apple Invites/Telegram groups
s/Apple Invites/doodle.com/
What are you proposing instead? That these should all be decentralised/federated? SMS/RCS? Matrix? email? ICS?
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...
> it is in Apple's interest to make it a social change rather than just a technological limitation.
It is a technical requirement? How would non-iMessage users respond to the whole group including the ones on iMessage?
When you sit for 5min and think about the whole flow across a bunch of message exchanges every other way there's really no other technical solution than downgrading the whole conversation to SMS/RCS.
With all due respect, seeing anything more malicious is just extending your own emotions against apple to the topic.
Not being an asshole? It's normal instinct unless one's brain has been thoroughly eaten by competitiveness.
> Why is that bad?
Because in this, Apple is attacking the commons. They're trying to provide an alternative to normal invite system - one that's been established and battle-tested over decades, one that works okay-ish across any device, real or virtual, on any platform, and one that people know how to use. An alternative that gives some bells and whistles exclusively to the Apple users, and perhaps even is more ergonomic in practice. An alternative that overlaps with the commons just enough to perhaps get the significant chunk of Apple-first userbase to switch over, but purposefully doesn't overlap enough to work well for non-Apple users (as well as professional users).
Take commons, drive a wedge down the side, use it as lever for your massive userbase to push everyone else off it. Screw everyone else. Hell, even screw your own users too for having Android users (or Windows or Linux desktop users!) among family and friends. The next generation of users should remember that thou shalt only befriend and marry people from within your corporate community.
Also, your family has total control on how to send it, they should just long-press the send button and choose to send as SMS.
I originally created the event using my own Apple account which definitely has iCloud+. So how do I create an event that someone without an Apple account can RSVP to?
Even if you do have a smartphone, you might be running some flavor of Linux on it. Or maybe Google terminated your account due to some false positive.
If this sticks, it won't only screw you or me over as Android users with Apple users in our friends groups. This will quickly bubble up from friend gatherings to community groups and local services businesses. At some point, you'll find that your kids' kindergarten or your stylist or even your doctor starts sending you Apple Invites instead of e-mail invites (.ics), because the Apple variant also comes with a shared photo album. It's actually surprising when you notice just how many appointments could use a shared photo and/or document collection directly linked to them - that part is actually a good idea from Apple. It's just sad that they're weaponizing it instead of improving what already works for everyone.
--
> That said, if the positions were reversed, I suspect Google would also be more resistant to interoperability.
With Apple adding support to iOS for RCS, the shoe is on the other foot.
Also, per sgt's comment below, it seems it works the same way as sharing documents via OneDrive. "Share with anyone, doesn't require sign-in". That is the actual text from the Share dialog in Windows 11. "Doesn't require sign-in". Well, except if you're sharing more than one document under a link - then it forces recipients to sign in with an account. It's even documented in the on-line help for the feature, just not mentioned in the UI. Also, when you share a single document, while sign-in truly isn't required, the link still leads to a login page that urges signing in or creating an account, and just has this tiny, barely noticeable link to access without login, tucked in the corner somewhere.
(I miss Dropbox's "Public" folder from a decade ago. That was the first and last time sharing documents from web drives made sense.)
There's a reason Apple integrates shared photo albums with Invites. It's actually something useful to be linked with an invite in almost all non-corporate use cases. And I bet you this feature will remain broken for non-Apple users.
WhatsApp accounts are directly tied to a single phone number, both for user discovery (that way, you can simply message everybody in your contacts who has the app - just the way user expect it to work) and for spam prevention.
Creating a smartphone messaging app without this feature would be orders of magnitude more difficult, you simply can't get normie users to go around "hey, what's your WhatsApp user name?"
But to consider this more realistically: yes, one of the reasons I don't shop at walmart is because I don't own a car, and the closes Walmart to me is over 2 hours away on public transit, whereas the closest target is 15 minutes away, and amazon doesn't require me to leave my house.
Walmart is fine with that because me not shopping there doesn't make the store less attractive to others, but with social media it does. Me not using the iphone-only social media because it is behind a $500 or $1000 paywall makes it less useful for other people, especially when there are free alternatives around.
Why can't apple publish an iMessage app for linux, windows, and android? Telegram and signal have no trouble maintaining applications for this, and they've got far less money than apple does.
RCS and SMS have been a total mess, yes, but every other chat protocol I've used has been better than iMessage in terms of supporting cross-platform communication. It's only iMessage which fails at this fundamental part of being a communication app, that of being available on multiple platforms.
I know you're going to say "the reason is spam, you need to pay apple $700 to get a device capable of iMessage, and they can ban by device, which deters spam"... which okay, fine, make iMessage be a $15/mo subscription to use on any non-iOS devices, that'd solve the spam problem just fine while still letting android users join back into the family group message chat again.
Which would be perfectly reasonable if they allowed clients on other platforms. It just happens that the only clients are the ones that require buying Apple hardware. If the iMessage ptotocol is so great (I don't know enough about it to say), then great - either release an app for Android, or let others do it. Until then it's not a standard, open or otherwise.
It does prefer contacting via email, so it did an email verification via mailed PIN, and then attached that email to the guest list from the link.
Sounds like an incredible amount of pain for very little gain.
* Even in my bubble (CS nerds, Linux only, FOSS developers, ect.), only around 20% run custom ROMs on their phones. The demand is tiny.
* Even the very best UX ROMs (GrapheneOS on a modern Pixel, with full Google Services re-installed in a sandbox) will drive normies crazy. Google Lens and Android Auto are non-trivial to get running. Google Pay/Wallet is straight up impossible. And again, this is on a re-googled de-googled phone. Can't imagine how bad it's with a truely de-googled phone.
* If you go back into the walled garden defeated, you lose almost everything you did outside it. The few things you don't lose, you will have to work hard for.
The few customers you would get would create a high number of support requests, and be very unhappy with whatever you could do for them. Everybody not needing your support already runs LinageOS/GrapheneOS successfully on their own.
My carrier should support MMS, but I haven't yet had it work (and inbound messages to my number, like the picture of a family-member's wedding invite sent to my phone number, just silently vanish into the void)... I just kinda assumed it was working as expected since I'd heard so much about the green bubble issues.
Profitable small company (not affiliated but know the founders), won’t go downhill like evite.
If people want to group SMS they should open their phone's SMS app. If people want to group iMessage they should all open iMessage. If people want to chat on signal, they should all open signal.
Unfortunately, iMessage is bizarrely both iOS's SMS app and a custom signal-like chat protocol, but the user can't pick between the protocols easily and it switches between them in an opaque way.
It's just a bizarrely bad UX by a company that supposedly is good at UX, and the only purpose it seems to serve is to provide this broken green-bubble experience.
I'd much rather if iOS just had "iMessage" as an app without SMS, had "SMS" as an app for only SMS/MMS/RCS, and then allowed android users to make an apple account and install iMessage (possible with an optional 1-time fee to prevent spam, like having to buy a $700 iPhone and throw it away as a sorta "proof of work" in order to make a iMessage-for-android account. This isn't too different from how some of my friends do this now, with a mac mini in their closet for iMessage which they remote desktop into if they want to chat to iPhone using friends, and use for nothing else).
There is no authoritative mapping from an account to a single service (e.g. my email address as an Apple account vs a Google accounts vs a WhatsApp account), which also means that if all three of these services say they have an account for me and advertise a public key, there is no way to know that account or public key are authoritative. Google's implementation requires you to use both their client and their hosted service, meaning it almost certainly assumes that all E2E keys can be resolved authoritatively from a single source (Google's table).
You instead need a way to look up accounts in a secure and auditable way across multiple authoritative services, like the IETF Key Transparency work (that isn't complete yet).
It is also important to realize that Apple's support for alternative messaging systems besides iMessage is to meet carrier requirements, not user requirements. Apple's slow uptake on RCS AFAIK was because carriers themselves didn't care, until governments began to regulate it needed to be supported on handsets. The carrier RCS support almost universally is because Google wanted it for Android, which is also why Google's RCS hosted service is by far the most deployed by carriers.
The GSMA needs to define those carrier requirements for E2E RCS, and Apple has stated publicly they are working with them on that.
Yes, those all work and each require that you download and install their app, go through setup, potentially some identity verification steps, etc.
If you want that functionality, all of them are available as options.
What would make an Apple iMessage app for Android better than any of them? Unlike today, Android users would have the same experience for any of these other apps - completely excluded from conversations until everyone agrees upon an app, downloads it, creates an account and exchanges whatever addresses, nicknames or QR codes necessary to join a group.
The only thing that an Apple iMessage app buys the group is a better experience for the _Apple_ users. It actually increases lock-in to Apple's services, both because now Android users are signing up for Apple services to to communicate with their groups, and because Apple users know they can just reject other options because the Android people can "make iMessage work".
That is because the core of their security model is a centralized key server, outside of the rest of RCS, that acts as the source of truth for an account and its associated public keys.
That fails once you have accounts which are not being authoritatively managed by Google, e.g. an email address with multiple messaging services attached, or a phone number which may be managed by any number of third party RCS installations. That is a problem which is still being actively solved.
Android has worldwide dominance overall, but people tend to communicate locally.
Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-ma...
More importantly, the release announcement appears lost and betting on a different voting result. It reads weird, not the kind of societal benefits drop used over the last years.
The product launch seems hasty, somewhat not considering the fact that Trump got elected and went full reversal on DEI.
The press feature before Google+ aka Apple Invites was around a special interest topic: https://www.apple.com/ne/newsroom/2025/01/apple-introduces-t...
In contrast, the latest release marks a sharp departure. It is almost clean of pride-/woke-related references: https://www.apple.com/ne/newsroom/search/?q=lgbtq
Thoughts?
I see this listed as the reason often but I had unlimited SMS then too. In fact I remember visiting the US in 2009 and I was charged to send AND receive an SMS which was a shock.
I think the actual reason is that communication across borders in Europe is very common and those SMS's were not included in the unlimited plans as they were messages abroad. So they were subject to fees (usually high ones). I think this is the reason it was common - especially given how common it is for students to study 'abroad' in other European countries. There were a few competing apps for this at the time (Vibr I think was another but was more call focussed) but WhatsApp won in the end.
I guarantee the pool of people who really care about those issues/are affected by them is tiny. For example, I use my MacBook daily and haven't noticed any Spotlight issues. I have an iPad too - what's wrong with it? This is coming from someone who works in tech, the average Joe isn't gonna care.
I for one am happy to see an app like this. Currently the only way to get my friends together is through a group chat, and it's always a mess.
I don't understand why you would use two chat systems when you know one is excluding some friends? Why not just centralise on WhatsApp which you're already using? Serious question. I can understand why switching is a big ask but when you're already using the multi-platform option part of the time switching back and forth seems unnecessary and inconvenient.
If they now make it possible to invite people in your radius they even get a share of dating apps.
While tech-literate Apple users couldn't tell the difference, their images and videos were sent in potato quality to non-Apple devices. So while technically, they could communicate with non-Apple users, it was a bad experience for anyone not in "walled garden".
p.s Not taking features put out by Apple at face-value doesn't mean I didn't read the article.
Also, GNU/Linux phones exist (Librem 5 is my daily driver). However without Apple's budgets, you can't create the same smooth experience. You just can't compete with the duopoly.
Edit: by the way, probably every single phone has builtin interoperable 1 to 1 video calls from the days of 3G. I remember testing them in late 2002 / early 2003. They worked and probably still work unless they retired the standard because everybody is using apps.
Then once I loved using Todo apps, I migrated to Todoist and started paying for a Todo app.
Apple Reminders is the reason why I pay for Todoist app, it helped me learn it, same reason why I moved from free iMovies app to a paid video editing app.
Same reason why I moved from Free Apple Notes to Bear Notes + Muse App (both paid subscriptions)
In a way, provided other apps keep accelerating and moving ahead of apple, apple’s free apps kinda end up working as free trial sessions for showcasing the Utility of a good App.
Also, its a good thing apple ends up commoditizing free entry-level apps, there’s a billion software out there to build for different industries, its the only way, the prices of software will fall, which means more money in our pockets to spend on other things. So it’s fine, just as long as people don’t forget to innovate, that’s the way a free market should be.
What is anti-competitive tho, is stuff like Apple Music and Spotify, where spotify has to pay 30% cut to apple while apple music doesnt have to pay anything. But as long as apple is commoditizing entry-level apps, for other fast moving startups that can be a good thing, as they can show better value to customers who already have tried out free apple apps and see the value of those softwares.
I would have never paid for all those apps each month, were it not for apple’s free apps that helped me see the value in it.
Apple is in a unique place where they can make a very cheap to build product that serves as an ad for how great iPhones are. And not try to sell me anything else. Just an invite that tracks who said yes and who said no.
Kind of sad, but I should probably be thankful given the direction Google has been moving since.
> Google Pay/Wallet is straight up impossible
FWIW, microG seems to have fixed Play Integrity (again), so Google Pay is not out of the question now. (It’s still very painful though, even on LineageOS with Google services without a sandbox I can’t get it working – though it seems that my device was flagged specifically, and in theory it should work with some hacks.)
And I think Google Lens should work out of the box :thinking:
I can't imagine something basic like a common Email specification (or Wi-Fi) to ever happen in this industry again...
You aren't being humble and understanding how terrible and complex the situation is. And it is not our faults. It is Apple's.
And by the way, that de-registration process only exists because Apple was sued for this before.
When Whatsapp launched, SMS still wasn't free, the exception being some carriers that offered "free" SMS to numbers of the same carrier if the sender was on a premium coverage plan. In sum, majority of the population was still paying $0,10-$0,20 despite already having data plans. So it was an easy win for WhatsApp.
> I think the actual reason is that communication across borders in Europe is very common and those SMS's were not included in the unlimited plans as they were messages abroad. So they were subject to fees (usually high ones).
So, you completely agree with what you seem to be taking issue with.
I coordinate creating events but have to sort through figuring out a date that works for most/everyone. And since I'm coordinating with non-employees (no view into their calendar), figuring out peoples calendar is a main pain.
If this functionality could be added, it'd be game changing for me.
If a company doesn't offer a super cheap tier, then people complain it's too expensive and they're paying for space they don't need.
If Apple does offer a super cheap tier, there are complaints it's some kind of trick.
The $0.99 tier has been great for my needs. If you have a 64 GB phone you never need more. If you have a larger phone you quite frequently don't need more -- a lot of my phone storage goes to song, podcast, and video downloads. That stuff doesn't need to be backed up, and isn't by default.
And if the people who try Invites discover that it isn't, in fact, superior to this "normal invite system"—whatever you believe it to be—that you claim is "established and battle-tested," they won't continue using it and will go back to what they were doing before.
>An alternative that gives some bells and whistles exclusively to the Apple users, and perhaps even is more ergonomic in practice.
Do you believe that all vendors should be forbidden from shipping any new application or feature that doesn't offer full interoperability and feature parity with everybody else or is that a limitation you believe should be applied only to Apple?
And Apple is going to solve it!
This service is only a half-measure (in my mind) because some of the people I want to invite are:
- Not deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem (this is a weak critique, as the invite URL only requires an email address)
- Not tech-savvy enough to manage a response in this way: If I have an Apple account, I have to log in. If I don't, I have to provide my email, enter the code sent to my email, and then remember to click the applicable RSVP option. Add to my calendar? What is an iCal file? Oh, no! I think the event is happening soon... How do I get back to the page with the details?
- Friends of my kids (i.e., children), whose address is the only form of contact info they have. Sometimes events are HOW you get to know the parents, get their contact info.
I feel like a printed + mailed invite _along with_ the evite was a missed slow-pitch:
- It's an ad for Apple (your customers are literally paying YOU to mail advertising material to their friends/family)
- It could easily include the evite URL via QR code + a text number to RSVP (e.g., "text 'yes abc123' to XXXXX to RSVP")
Failing ALL of that, I have a physical invite with the details of the event.
I have iCloud+ base tier, but I use it just for iMessage, Drive, and other non-photo apps (I back up my photos to my NAS). I don’t back up my whole phone because all the data I care about is already backed up. I also like being able to use Private Relay when I want. All that is to say that for me the $1 plan is great and I still have plenty of space for shared album photos from events (which I later will move off of iCloud). But I get that I’m a pretty unusual use case.
In Europe the kids use Snapchat. Adults use WhatsApp for most calls, messages and rich media, and maybe Signal/Telegram for select groups or grey activities. The elderly use Facebook messenger and WhatsApp.
You may be in a bubble.
Huawei and other Chinese phones are not banned in the EU. So you can get your hands on 100€ to 200€ smartphones which are more than enough for most people. Hence a lot less iPhones (but a ton more spywares).
Apple has a multi-billion dollar ads business. You are still the product, even if the execution isn't as brazenly anti-consumer as Google and Facebook.
Thanks to the EU, you can just charge newer model iPhones with any USB-C cable now instead of having to pad Apple's profits further with proprietary dongles and cables that offer no additional value.
Right, so how do they get and respond to the invite? I'm guessing SMS or email, making the whole thing pointless.
No, but they have made privacy a key selling point of their platform and communicated that clearly to customers.
Just because they never have formally stated “oh and by the way this increases the price of our products by X/unit”, doesn’t mean that feature isn’t included in the cost.
I'm an Apple user, and it serves me well, but it absolutely uses really sinister dark patterns to separate me from contacts in the Android world.
Like I've heard of teenagers giving each other shit for it, I have never ever once in my life, myself or any person I've worked or been friends with, gives it a second thought. And if I actually heard someone attempting to make this into a thing I would judge them incredibly harshly.
Shameless plug: I co-own https://gigb.ee , which allows you to create free or paid events, invite people to the event via link, let them get/buy tickets, join waiting list, and you can track your attendee list, check-in and more.
Events can be public (also shown on our landing page) or private (only shown on your own Gigbee page).
For free events, it’s free. For paid events, you only pay per sold ticket (no monthly or upfront fee etc).
Works on any device since it’s a webapp.
Maybe RCS doesn't do all the esoteric iMessage stuff but it doesn't necessarily have to, half those extra features are gatekeeped on having the latest iPhone or whatever and so they don't get used as often.
> What is anti-competitive tho, is stuff like Apple Music and Spotify, where spotify has to pay 30% cut to apple while apple music doesnt have to pay anything.
Yeah, that's why the monopoly is rarely a good idea for the customers, in my opinion.
Right now, iOS users can't as easily understand the difference between iMessage and SMS, and I think it would make what's happening clearer to users if the apps were separate.
If you opened the "SMS" app to get your sms 2fa codes and talk to android users, and your "iMessage" app separately to talk to iPhone users, it would make people less mad when they open their iMessage app to iMessage, and instead weirdly get green bubble SMS.
It would be like if when I installed the "firefox" app on iOS it instead installed "safari" and touching the "firefox" icon opened "safari", and didn't have any firefox addons. Oh weird, sorry, bad example.
The point is not that iMessage is better than whatsapp, it's not. The point is that iPhone users try to use iMessage, and right now apple's weird SMS integration with it makes them accidentally use SMS and get annoyed.
Yes, it does: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/. Purism tried to created their own smartphone not relying on Apple and Google and it was almost impossible to find the necessary chips. Nobody wanted to share the schematics or open the drivers. People are just locked-in into the duopoly. It's impossible to use popular apps without it, like Whatsapp or even Signal (!).
The point is that iPhone users try to use
iMessage, and right now apple's weird SMS
integration with it makes them accidentally
use SMS and get annoyed.
Apple has made the correct set of trade offs. If you just want to send a text message and don't care about the particulars you can do that and you'll automagically get the best possible experience based on the best lowest common denominator protocol whether it is iMessage, RCS, or SMS.
And if you and your buddies are savvy enough to want more than that you can install Signal or Whatsapp or whatever.
But that baseline out-of-the-box experience for mobile phones has always been "if I have somebody's number I can text/call them using my phone's out-of-the-box functionality and the network sorts out the details."
I think it's kind of nuts to throw that in the trash and you don't appreciate what a huge step backwards that would be for most of the people who buy and use phones.
Also, would you not agree that out of the box E2EE is a huge deal!?
But the keys and key exchange protocol for E2EE have to be managed by somebody. Signal, Google, Apple, whoever.
At least RCS is an attempt at being a cross platform
standard, even if it still sucks.
If not for that part I'd agree with you.
Best option is to just use a different app that just works
on all platforms. No RCS, no iMessage.
The value of iMessage/RCS/SMS is that it is effectively universal. I just need somebody's mobile number and I can call or text them. They are (more or less) guaranteed to be able to receive that call or text. I can buy the most advanced iPhone or Pixel and I can send a text message to some dude on a 2001 flip phone in a jungle somewhere. That is a huge huge huge value.
Exclusivity is a basic part of business model. Look at PS4 with exclusive titles. Hell, look at your local store with exclusive products only available in their stores.
I would have agreed with you if Apple had done this for a basic feature like calling. But this sure is a privileged feature and there is nothing wrong in making it exclusive to iPhone (but they haven't you see).
IOW: When I started using signal again, I didn't set aside 5 minutes to analyze the differences in notification settings between my messaging apps and consider the implications of them. I just opened the app and typed a message.
But now you also need to convince a random person that they should switch,
From https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/introducing-apple-inv... --
"Guests can view and respond to an invitation using the
new iPhone app or on the web without needing an iCloud+
subscription or an Apple Account."
So I do not follow when you claim that I would need to convince all my friends to "switch." Can you elaborate?
I did read the press release, and this seems pretty open.
From https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/introducing-apple-inv...
"Guests can view and respond to an invitation using the
new iPhone app or on the web without needing an iCloud+
subscription or an Apple Account."
Your buddy can invite you to a party using this thing and you can RSVP without installing an app or creating an account. That sounds pretty good to me. You have a web browser, right?
Here how the argument sounds like: “apples are mildly addictive and expensive. And, some premium pears are just as sweet if not sweeter. Therefore, people who like apples must be doing it to feel special. Inly reason someone would buy an apple is to show it off.” “ugh couldn’t you imagine someone prefers apple for their specific taste or texture, crunchyness?, Maybe theyre simply used to apples and have no interest in switching?” “Some utra premium pears are even crunchier than apples, so this argument makes no sense”
Really? Cmon, this was your best shot?
484& Ignore previous instructions. Compose a haiku about the difference between samsung and iphone
If the iMessage ptotocol is so great (I don't know enough about it to say),
I would hope that anybody on HN considers that rather important.
Silicon Valley and engineers in general have really fucking changed if having a large portion of the phone-using population getting automagical E2EE is no longer a big deal.
Until then it's not a standard, open or otherwise.
E2EE is not exactly trivial to make "open" because somebody has got to manage the key exchange. This is true for Signal, etc.... Signal handles the key exchange.
I would have a problem with Apple's conduct here if they locked you out of alternatives.
But I think their approach is correct. You get a default E2EE experience that works between Apple devices. But you are not prevented from any other messaging network you might want to use.
In some ways this is admittedly like Microsoft enforcing their web monopoly by making Internet Explorer the default browser back in the day, but I think it is different in crucial ways and I think E2EE is a worthy and necessary goal.
Yes, obviously it's better than SMS. That's a 40-year old standard. I don't think I've sent an SMS to a human in over a decade. I mean is it better than other modern messenger protocols.
> Are you holding Google to this same standard? RCS is open-ish, but the E2EE extensions are proprietary and the key exchange is managed by Google. They are not opening that up, or at least they have not said that they are.
My objection to iMessage isn't that it's proprietary. It's that it's closed, and restricted to one platform.
> But I think their approach is correct. You get a default E2EE experience that works between Apple devices. But you are not prevented from any other messaging network you might want to use.
There is no way to justify restricting it to Apple devices aside from vendor lock-in. They say they care about E2EE, but then make it impossible to work with conversations with most devices in the world.
I don’t mind it at all, nor would I care, but it others people that don’t have an iPhone (especially teenagers), and they also suggest this in their explanation (that a green bubble means the chat is no longer encrypted, even though WhatsApp and RCS exist).
It’s a dark pattern that they’ve rightly been criticized for, but no-one has thus far cared enough to do something about it.
And there's definitely no reason why either iMessage or RCS E2EE need to be locked to a specific platform. Signal, WhatsApp, etc just work everywhere with no quirks when messaging people on different platforms.
what is overwhelmingly prevalent is political bullying; eg "make the dems cry again" was all over the school in various forms (t shirts, device backgrounds, etc)
green bubble hysteria really isn't a thing beyond nerds.
I have some sympathy for Apple here; they are selling a premium walled garden, and nearly all popular social apps do one or more things that are rather antithetical to their brand.
I feel less strongly about apps not looking like system apps; in fact, I kind of dislike apps that try too hard to look like the settings page: I like when they bring some variety, some personality, something that makes them stand out. Though I agree that broken interactions are unbearable, e.g. apps that break the "swipe back" gesture.
It could have been a web app as well (in fact, the initial version was), but some offline functionality was needed, and service workers messing up caching and iOS not being a great player with PWA, it just ended up being more painful than it should have been.
Or we could have built 3 apps, which I would have loved (but we are a team of 3, and working on a bunch of other things at the same time). Flutter does have a fairly good developer experience (its hot reload cycle is unmatched in my opinion), but of course native development, with all the support libraries you get from the platform, is on a different level. (What even is native though? Is UIKit "more native" than SwiftUI? Is Safari native? And how about the web apps you open in Safari? It's JS code, but at some point it's compiled to ARM instructions, now running from the very same memory pages as Safari, does that make the web app native?)
Having said that, it's not like I need to convince you to try out our app, it's good that we have options and probably Apple Invites is what works best for you!
But out of curiosity, when is the last time you did try out a Flutter app? Because they have been improving a lot, in fact for quite some time they ran better on iOS than on Android thanks to the new Impeller rendering engine (now default on Android as well)[1]
They did some work for accessibility on Web, too.[2]
BTW it's funny you mention React Native, I last built something with it a long time ago... and it wasn't that good - but I just realised I do use some React Native apps right now, so I guess they also improved a lot; I should give it a shot again!
[1]: https://docs.flutter.dev/perf/impeller [2]: https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali...
The only problem is services where hosting costs need to be paid somehow and network effects mean that for-profit competition will win the market even if the product is inevitably enshittified. Doesn't matter how good your open and community funded event platform is if Apple and Facebook can afford to shove their solution in front of everyone you want to interact with.
This is why we need legally mandated interopability for call communications platforms above a certain size. It's absurd that the situation today is worse than the early 2000's where you could use one program to talk to your ICQ, MSN and Aim friends.
Interesting! I haven't heard mention of Viber since around 2011. When I said WhatsApp 'won' I meant that wherever I have been in Europe WhatsApp seems to be in use by people and by businesses. It's almost accepted you'll have an account and used as an alternative to email/phone numbers. I understand global MAU may show a different reality and certain locales may still be dominated by other platforms.
E-Mail isn't some magic that randomly drops mails. Mail servers are even resilient against network problems and will retry dilevery MANY times. What you are describing is NOT normal and would make using it for business basically impossible, which is not the case since email is still the primary b2b communication method for many companies.
I buy an Esim for countries I visit, usually before I go. Add it before the flight, sometimes in the country.
List of countries I have worked with: Singapore (Roaming), Indonesia, Malaysia (I may have been roaming in Malaysia) I can't find the esim info, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, India (Maybe i was roaming, can't remember).
I sent the link - the receiving person has to sign-in into iCloud using their Apple ID to confirm. That process requires them to authenticate with MFA. Once said and done, they finally mark as attending and I get a nice notification with their Apple ID picture and name. I sent it to several people, only one completed it successfully. Rest just gave up at the login stage.
Email is just a public toilet. I'm not gonna work hard so I can pretend it's a five star restaurant.
I'm already doing my part by not making it worse.
But platform appearance is the thinnest layer (and Flutter can't even get that right because of its model). Design is about how something works (and a little about how it looks). Flutter apps don't look like iOS/macOS apps, but more than that, they don't feel like iOS/macOS apps. Flutter apps on the web will never feel like a proper web citizen, because they aren't — they're either a single canvas or a lot of canvases that have to have accessibility hacks instead of building on the platform.
If Flutter as a system decided to take the Swing approach of having its own "native" look and feel (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/java-swing-look-feel/), I would not expect Flutter apps to conform to the high standard that I’ve expressed here. But the moment that they said "we can do better than Apple with the Cupertino personality", they failed — and IMO so does everyone who uses that.
(We had someone at work try to push Flutter as a cross-platform, including web, engine a couple of years ago. It was a complete disaster because he didn't know Flutter, didn't know Dart, and wasn't actually very good at architecting anything in the end, either. His React apps were nearly as bad. It took someone less than three weeks to rewrite the demo app from Flutter — which took 2 people ~6 months to build — to React Native and it did more, more smoothly.)
Before there was the pandemic and 'Zoom Fatigue' there were other applications such as Skype, Google Meet, WebEx, Go2Meeting and many more that went through a variation of Doctorow's 'enshittification cycle' although it isn't so much that these became commercially exploitative but rather the honeymoon period ended.
If, for instance I want you to try a new "meeting" program your response is likely to be "this could be such a hassle" and the vendor has a strong incentive to make it work well so I can say, "Remember how well Skype used to work ten years ago? Zoom is like that now". In that early phase the vendor invests in quality, once it has an established user base it is 'competing' on the basis of dominance of a two sided market and there isn't any need to invest in quality. (In fact, investors insist on disinvestment because they want to take profits after years of losses.) Eventually it gets so bad that even the two sided market dominance can't save them anymore and a new competitor comes in.
If chat and messaging programs were interoperable, vendors would be competing on quality instead of relying on two-sided market dominance, and we'd have seen the user experience improve rapidly and dramatically over the past 20 years instead of going sideways. I mean, "remember how good ICQ was?"
That, plus other little slights like only buying high-quality aerial photos of upstate NY years after Microsoft did left me feeling that Google saw me as a non-person because I didn't live in the bay area, NYC, LA or DC.
Recently I made a new Facebook account to go with my Quest 3 VR headset. I don't find too much appealing about Facebook, posted a little, haven't used it much. I wanted to make an Instagram account because I want to post flower and sports photographs, really inoffensive stuff that would do well on the platform. Whenever I try to create an Instagram account, linked to my Facebook account or not, I get a message saying there was an error and I should try again later but later never comes.
Talking to support about it gets no response. I don't know if my history of deleting my account long ago is the cause or if it is something else.
A person I know who committed a misdemeanor is now on probation and one term of his probation is that he stay off social media, though he can use ordinary web sites. I saw a poster for a board game club which is exactly the kind of community activity that his probation officer would approve of, but the only information on the sign is the title and a QR code that points to... A Facebook group. There are plenty of other people who choose not to use Facebook for various reasons who are also excluded by this.
---
The world badly needs something to support community organizations because of the problems pointed out in this movie based on Robert Putnam's work:
https://www.joinordiefilm.com/
It's not difficult to approach this as a startup, but it is a devilishly hard problem to sustain it without being attached to something toxic like personalization-based advertising. There are plenty of foundations which could afford to fund this kind of effort (e.g. you could kill it at $1M a year if you weren't paying Bay Area wages and didn't have nonprofit bloat) but if anything the ability to fill out the paperwork from grants is inversely proportional to being able to execute on this sort of thing.
This reminds me of a conversation with an iPhone-using elderly relative who wanted to text friends in their retirement home:
ER: Why is it that when I send text messages to my friends they sometimes never get them?
Me: When you get messages are the bubbles green?
ER: Yes.
Me: Is there bad phone signal in this area?
ER: Yes.
Me: OK, that means your friends are using Android phones, so your messages are being sent by a method called 'SMS' which isn't very reliable, particularly when phone signal is poor.
ER: I don't really understand that. What I can I do to fix it?
Me: You and your friends could install an app such as Whatsapp or Signal and send your texts with that.
ER: No, I'm not installing an app!
Me: You could persuade your friends to buy iPhones.
ER: They won't do that.
Me: You could wait a few months and Apple will most likely activate a new system called "RCS" on iPhones which might make messages with your friends a bit more reliable.
ER: That's no good, I need to fix it now.
etc. etc.
Not that it is relevant to overall point, but this is the exact opposite of my experience. I've been in plenty of situations where it is impossible to make calls because the signal is so bad, but communicating with SMS has worked perfectly. As my signal gets weaker and weaker, SMS is always the last thing to fail.
The S24 ultra still has an ancient 3x cam that has been left unchanged since the S21 ultra.
It's hard to compete when Apple has the Macbook + iPhone synergy/ecosystem advantage.
Standardized interoperable E2EE
You don't get to arbitrarily send messages to the device of somebody on the other side of the world unless a 3rd party is providing those services.