Exactly. Also what is wrong with SMS? In the UK, and I'm sure most of Europe, you can get plans with hundreds, thousands or unlimited number of SMS - can you get the same in US? SMS is essentially free anyway.
Secondly, and I raised this again - data is not cheap when roaming and that's probably when I most use SMS.
AT&T charges $20 a month for unlimited texting. That's $240 a year. In the two years of your contract, $480. Free texting would "pay" for the iPhone twice over.
It looks Sprint charges around $10 a month for unlimited messaging (the basic plans are $10 cheaper than the basic + unlimited messaging). Though you can also add unlimited messaging to a basic plan for $20... Odd.
That really depends. Everyone I SMS right now has an iPhone. So, for my purposes it isn't limited at all. And since it's free, the iOS requirement doesn't hurt me as a user anyway. The moment this switches on, 99% of my texting stops costing me money. A network of 200 million users isn't a bad starting point.
No, it's Campos. Nice to meet you. You can handicap my remark by observing I live in the Bay Area, but even my parents have iPhones, entirely of their own volition.
Haters gonna hate, but Steve just saved me a bunch of money, completely transparently. While pissing off a bunch of incompetent, exploitative carriers. I'm pretty pleased.
I'm not hating, I just think it's weird that everyone you know have iPhones, when Android devices are outselling iPhones 2:1 and have now a bigger market share than iOS. Yet it's still possible. I'm just impressed.
I'd read that again. Everyone I text has iPhones. With a possible exception every couple months. I don't live in IPhone Bubble but I certainly communicate inside of one. That doesn't strike me as terribly unusual.
And even if it were only half, I'm still saving money since I don't have to change my habits. Pretty good deal. If you're not a carrier.
I have to say this is an important distinction. Nearly everyone I /text/ has an iPhone, because they are the ones that text back. The exceptions are both Blackberry users.
All of my dumb-phone friends (and my single Android friend), will just call me back if I text them, so I might as well dial them in the first place.
I agree, and it's tough because someone needs to be the middleman in all this when it comes to messaging, because with messaging there is a guarantee of delivery even if the other party isn't online.
It doesn't mean that Apple, MS, Google, RIM can't all be a middleman for their respective users, but they certainly didn't mention that in the keynote.
One of the nice things about SMS is their reliability. Not having to think about whether or not your message arrived because of a friends device is nice. Maybe a fallback feature would be nice here?
Except that SMS is not guaranteed and becomes less likely between carriers. "Message delivery is "best effort", so there are no guarantees that a message will actually be delivered to its recipient, but delay or complete loss of a message is uncommon." [1]
The other problem is that iMessages will require data connection. When you're roaming abroad, SMS is pretty much the only affordable solution.
Especially as you cannot easily restrict the data connection to only one app, and so you'll easily end up with some interesting surprises in your phone bill.
But it’s not just that iMessages kills SMS because it’s free. It kills it because it’s better. While the sending of photos, videos, and text matches SMS (and MMS), it’s better with iMessage because it’s streamlined and simplified.
This just seems like he's throwing buzzwords around, but I haven't seen iMessages in action. What about them is more streamlined and simplified than SMS?
From what I can tell, it's a replacement for the current SMS/MMS app on iPhones (and new on iPad, sans SMS/MMSing). People you text messaged before can now be iMessaged instead for free. People with non-iOS phones can still be SMSed as usual. So it looks like the end effect for users is that they use less text messages the more iOS-using friends they have. I guess if the network effect kicks in and everyone in your social circle ends up with an iPhones/iPad, messaging each other will be completely free - no need for text message plans anymore.
I don't get what the motivation is for having another closed system when they could have added interoperability with their desktop client + aol + gmail at a very minimal cost.
Edit: I'm basing this on the keynote comment that it is based on the push notifications stack.
For people planning to use this (or any other messaging service): please be aware that this encryption doesn't mean that your chats are private. Apple still has access to the data, and so the US can probably request access to your chats from Apple, even if you don't live in the US. Your local government probably also can make a claim on this data.
Facetime was supposed to be a cross platform protocol. Remember? The reason it's marginally used now is because it's restricted to iOS devices. This feature will be equally marginal.
Complaining about an MG headline being sensationalized is redundant but this one is way out there.
Apple has stuck zero daggers into anything. This is just a nice iOS to iOS messenger app. You could say the same thing about GTalk, Kik, Whatsapp, heck... even BlackBerry messenger. None have replaced SMS and none have any pointy objects covered in blood.
Facetime needs two years to get going. It's been on iPhone4, Mac, and iPad2 for 11, 5, and 3 months respectively. Once iPhone 3G/3GS and iPad1 users get new devices and Mac users buy/upgrade to Lion, FaceTime will be available to a lot more people. So, after this holiday season, I would expect FaceTime to be a much bigger deal.
iMessages can hit the ground running from day one, since it is available down to iPhone 3GS and does not need new hardware. Also, Apple merged it with the existing Messages app, so I assume it will decide whether to SMS someone or iMessage someone for you. It's a win for iOS users either way.
It is a win for iOS users who only deal with other iOS users. Out of the people I've SMSd or IMd in last week maybe about 10% have an iDevice. And many of those have iPads that they don't always carry with them.
The availability of devices aren't the problem, it's the WiFi-only problem. The times I'd like to "FaceTime" with people the most are times I'm not on WiFi.
GroupMe has a lot to be worried about. The best part about that app is it gives groups an actual phone number so it works on any phone that can text. The problem for them is most people won't use the app through the actual interface. They get a group phone number and just run it through the native iPhone messaging app because its faster. They are going to face a tough time monetizing if people aren't staying in their app.
I don't see anything stopping you from doing that with the current messaging app, and GroupMe seems to be doing just fine currently. People are mentioning "group messaging" as part of the potential of the new iMessage and I'm wondering if people have seen or played with this feature yet, because I didn't see it anywhere in the keynote.
Another question I have: does this app make the difference between sending SMS messages and sending iMessages completely transparent for me as an end user? I hope so, but it seems like there are some interesting use cases to work out. And how do you "address" a message to an ipad user? Email address, like FaceTime?
Sorry for rambling a bit, I'm just really interested in how some of the implementation details are fleshed out.
GroupMe is doing fine from a funding perspective, but they are going to have one hell of a time trying to monetize. I think they have a great app though. Cross platform went to a must have today.
This just seems like Beluga or GroupMe or something similar. But of course it comes from Apple, so it's somehow "better", when in reality the iOS requirement makes it useless for the majority of smartphone users, and all non-smartphone users.
Don't you still need a data plan to send and receive messages? Not sure how this is more free than any other chat client such as gtalk that comes with android.
Isn't this just as fail as BlackBerry Messenger was? A lock-in iOS only service will be about as useful as BBM was, pretty useful if you and all your friends have the same phone, but not as useful as SMS because everyone else can get that too.
It's the network effect all over again, any network's value is exponentially proportional to the number of users it has and SMS has more users.
A better approach would be to work better with IM like jabber/gTalk and MSN because as we move into the smart phone era nearly all cell phone users can send/receive those so your cell phone user overlay will be much closer to that of SMS, but where it will really kick SMS is that it will also cover all your friends at a computer not on their cell.
This is useless for anyone with friends with Android phones because you'll be back to SMS for them. Special clubs are no fun if all your friends and family aren't in them.
And by just as fail I mean medicinally successful for Blackberry and it's users for a while, but completely useless at actually killing SMS which the title purports this will somehow do. With ~75% of people using non iOS devices this will never kill SMS. period.
any network's value is exponentially proportional to the number of users it has
Demonstrably false.
The most widely quoted version of this is Metcalfe's Law, that the value of a network is dependent upon the square of the number of members. However the best empirical evidence is that the actual scaling factor is O(n log(n)). Which means that competing networks of different size and coexist for extended periods of time. (A phenomena that has actually happened on multiple occasions.)
My understanding is that delivery and read receipts are features that BBM users are loath to give up. Could iMessage simply be a way to siphon off more RIM users? Enterprise IT departments might be more easily swayed to support IOS and abandon RIM with iMessage in place.
I'm thinking Apple could eventually use iMessages + FaceTime to dig into Skype's userbase. Especially if they make good on their "open protocol" promise, which would bring clients to other platforms pretty quickly.
The only thing I took away from the post is Siegler's inability to see that C(n, 2) is much, much less than C(n + m + k + p + q + ..., 2), where each letter stands for the number of devices supporting a particular mobile platform.
This makes me even more curious for what Google is going to do with Disco. It seems logical for them to bake it into Android just like Apple is doing with iMessages. What if Google flips the switch and makes it cross platform – will they be the ones to eliminate SMS from carriers?
This will be useable iff the iOS contacts list keeps track of which of your contacts have iOS devices and which don't. That will let the Messages application decide whether to send an iMessages message or an SMS/MMS, without user intervention.
Presumably that could even be automatically updated - the iOS 5 phone can contact an Apple database and register itself as "iMessages-aware", and sending devices can check the recipient phone numbers in that database.
Also, I note that sending contacts and delivery/read receipts are both features that SMS has always had.
> And here’s the real death blow: iMessages will be completely free.
Compared to the cost of my data plan (and the data plan that you'll have to buy to use any iOS5 device), SMS is essentially free. Google Voice provides unlimited messaging for free, all you have to do is download an app. Making iMessage free is not a death blow, and presenting it as such does nothing but imply messaging is a commodity. Not even fax machines are a commodity yet, you have plenty of choices as to which service to use and which machine to buy.
> But it’s not just that iMessages kills SMS because it’s free. It kills it because it’s better.
When I read a straightforward sentence that presents an opinion as fact I expect evidence. In this case the evidence we are given is a link to the Apple website [1] and an assurance that iMessage is "streamlined and simplified."
I've only been following HN for a few months now so this is a serious question, has TechCrunch always been so horrible at journalism?
TechCrunch does have pretty low journalistic standards, but in this case the piece's author is famous for his constant praise of nearly everything apple. Apparently there is a niche market that is served by a few blog authors of which he is one, where fans of the company congregate and seek out positive reinforcement.
This sounds reasonable. I had previously thought that only John Gruber belonged to that group. Is there anybody else you would categorize with him? I'm interested to see how other people write about Apple products.
According to Gruber, carriers found out about iMessage when it was announced[1]:
> (A well-informed little birdie tells me that Apple’s phone carrier partners around the world found out about iMessages when we did: during today’s keynote.)
They can't be thrilled (despite the limitations discussed here).
Apple now has a service that allows you to send text and files to other recipients that have iOS devices? So how is this any different than email? Oh right, email doesn't have device restrictions. Carry on then.
67 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadI hope this tips SMS/MMS into some competing app that is platform independent so that SMS/MMS can disappear for ever!
SMS isn't going away anytime soon.
See the bottom of this page for supported devices:
iPhone 3GS iPhone 4
iPod Touch (3rd and 4th Generation)
iPad 1 & 2
http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/features.html
That isn't a small weakness - that's a killer. A replacement that isn't device independent isn't a replacement.
Secondly, and I raised this again - data is not cheap when roaming and that's probably when I most use SMS.
This is very funny. Is your last name Jobs?
Haters gonna hate, but Steve just saved me a bunch of money, completely transparently. While pissing off a bunch of incompetent, exploitative carriers. I'm pretty pleased.
And even if it were only half, I'm still saving money since I don't have to change my habits. Pretty good deal. If you're not a carrier.
All of my dumb-phone friends (and my single Android friend), will just call me back if I text them, so I might as well dial them in the first place.
It doesn't mean that Apple, MS, Google, RIM can't all be a middleman for their respective users, but they certainly didn't mention that in the keynote.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS
Especially as you cannot easily restrict the data connection to only one app, and so you'll easily end up with some interesting surprises in your phone bill.
Local prepaid SIM is a good option, but requires you to:
a) have the time to find and acquire one
b) not receive calls or SMS to your regular number when in use (unless you have a dual SIM device)
This just seems like he's throwing buzzwords around, but I haven't seen iMessages in action. What about them is more streamlined and simplified than SMS?
I don't get what the motivation is for having another closed system when they could have added interoperability with their desktop client + aol + gmail at a very minimal cost.
Edit: I'm basing this on the keynote comment that it is based on the push notifications stack.
Complaining about an MG headline being sensationalized is redundant but this one is way out there.
Apple has stuck zero daggers into anything. This is just a nice iOS to iOS messenger app. You could say the same thing about GTalk, Kik, Whatsapp, heck... even BlackBerry messenger. None have replaced SMS and none have any pointy objects covered in blood.
iMessages can hit the ground running from day one, since it is available down to iPhone 3GS and does not need new hardware. Also, Apple merged it with the existing Messages app, so I assume it will decide whether to SMS someone or iMessage someone for you. It's a win for iOS users either way.
It is a win for fanboi hipsters.
FTFY
No, it is a win for iOS users who deal with /any/ other iOS users. I would imagine that's most of them.
Another question I have: does this app make the difference between sending SMS messages and sending iMessages completely transparent for me as an end user? I hope so, but it seems like there are some interesting use cases to work out. And how do you "address" a message to an ipad user? Email address, like FaceTime?
Sorry for rambling a bit, I'm just really interested in how some of the implementation details are fleshed out.
It's the network effect all over again, any network's value is exponentially proportional to the number of users it has and SMS has more users.
A better approach would be to work better with IM like jabber/gTalk and MSN because as we move into the smart phone era nearly all cell phone users can send/receive those so your cell phone user overlay will be much closer to that of SMS, but where it will really kick SMS is that it will also cover all your friends at a computer not on their cell.
This is useless for anyone with friends with Android phones because you'll be back to SMS for them. Special clubs are no fun if all your friends and family aren't in them.
Demonstrably false.
The most widely quoted version of this is Metcalfe's Law, that the value of a network is dependent upon the square of the number of members. However the best empirical evidence is that the actual scaling factor is O(n log(n)). Which means that competing networks of different size and coexist for extended periods of time. (A phenomena that has actually happened on multiple occasions.)
Not sure if they are trying to preempt a rumored BBM "app", or just doing more extension of their own ecosystem.
Presumably that could even be automatically updated - the iOS 5 phone can contact an Apple database and register itself as "iMessages-aware", and sending devices can check the recipient phone numbers in that database.
Also, I note that sending contacts and delivery/read receipts are both features that SMS has always had.
Compared to the cost of my data plan (and the data plan that you'll have to buy to use any iOS5 device), SMS is essentially free. Google Voice provides unlimited messaging for free, all you have to do is download an app. Making iMessage free is not a death blow, and presenting it as such does nothing but imply messaging is a commodity. Not even fax machines are a commodity yet, you have plenty of choices as to which service to use and which machine to buy.
> But it’s not just that iMessages kills SMS because it’s free. It kills it because it’s better.
When I read a straightforward sentence that presents an opinion as fact I expect evidence. In this case the evidence we are given is a link to the Apple website [1] and an assurance that iMessage is "streamlined and simplified."
I've only been following HN for a few months now so this is a serious question, has TechCrunch always been so horrible at journalism?
[1] http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/features.html#imessage
> (A well-informed little birdie tells me that Apple’s phone carrier partners around the world found out about iMessages when we did: during today’s keynote.)
They can't be thrilled (despite the limitations discussed here).
[1] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/06/06/imessage
The question is, why don't we all just use that? Is the interface really so much worse than SMS?