Not sure if you're looking for paved or unpaved backroads, but if it's the latter I recently shipped a feature at my day job (https://ridewithgps.com) that highlights all unpaved backroads, visible up to zoom level 8 (above zoom 8 we start running into tile size/data limitations).
May be useful to you or others in this thread. We lean pretty heavily into the "cycling power user" market segment, the feature set isn't always the most discoverable but it's quite comprehensive if you put in the up-front time to learn the tooling (similar to a lot of other specialty mapping apps out there - caltopo, fatmap (rip) etc)
Except that if you're a serious cyclist, spending $10/month on a really good road mapping service is worth more to you than spending $10/month on a music streaming service (or 2 coffees at Starbucks).
Don't compare RWGPS to Starbucks please... The coffee isn't really worth that kind of money. But $10 is a lot in different parts of the world. For me that is more than what I pay for my mobile internet connection that works out in the nowhere.
It's for serious cyclists, for whom $10 a month is barely noticeable, considering how much you can spend on the bicycling hobby. For example, I do bicycle touring, weeks-long or months-long trips every year, and the RideWithGps route planner/navigation tools are extremely useful when riding thousands of miles by yourself in places you aren't familiar with.
I've used ridewithGPS for multiple bike tours, the longest being a full month of unsupported riding. I also use it to scout out routes when I want to create a new ride somewhere in my area on roads I don't know already. ridwithGPS has a few features that really stand out, IMO:
* excellent, almost entirely bug-free routing on mobile
* heatmap data, because maps aren't entirely up-to-date
* multiple map styles, so you can pick what works best for your workflow and the country you're in
* easy GPX file export, I use it all the time with the bike computer (every day on tours)
* collection management, especially useful when I make per-day routes for a tour
* a healthy trial period so you can actually test it out and learn it
Basically it's just an excellent app (and site) that works reliably across every supported platform, that isn't full of spammy upselling garbage, that is clearly made by a competent team of developers who care deeply about the product they make.
Every tech product should be made like this. A lot of tech products used to be like this before enshittification really took off in the last 5-10 years.
I'm more than happy to support a great product like this, as a bicycle tourist and frequent router over unfrequented trails and dirt roads in the mountains around me. For road riders in cities, it's probably a whole lot less useful. But there are a lot of bicycle riding use cases outside of 'road riders in cities' :-)
$10 per month is the minimum price that you should use for any software or digital product. People who are unwilling to pay $10 per month are also unwilling to pay $5 per month or $1 per month – regardless of how much value they get from the product. Ten dollars is the bottom.
Why should it be a subscription instead of a pay-once app? Maps have to update as the real world updates, and probably they have other features that can't be on-device.
$10 per month might be the minimum price that is acceptable in US. This looks very different depending on your salary and if you can choose not to pay tax for health care and such. Have seen cases where different prices for different areas in the world when I was younger, not sure how that looks now.
I'm paying for $1 and $5 subscriptions (ko-fi) for things I like and use. But $10 is getting too high for a thing even though I use it every day. Within five months I'm already past the value of my bike. I need that money to change parts to be able to continue biking.
What I ususally do is a one-month subscription to support. Then I turn it off for the rest of the year.
You are the exception. Very few people who wouldn't pay $10 would pay $5 or $1, no matter which region. If your salary level makes $10 an important amount of money, then priorities should be food, shelter and such. And if you need five months to save up for bike parts, then you have to urgently try to fix your economic situation, before you put your own health and future at risk.
What's high about my horses? When $10 is a considerable amount of money for you, that means you are broke. If on the other hand, you don't think the product is worth $10, then that's it. I see it every day hackers talking about how they cannot afford $5 or $10 for something. If they are honest, then that means they are living in poverty. If they are not living in poverty, why not just say "I don't think it's worth my money". Why the charade?
There is a huge difference between $10 and $10 a month. "Afford" is not necessarily the right qualifier. Frequency of utility is pretty important here. My apple music sub costs $16 for my partner and I. We both use it extensively throughout the day. I might plan a new bike route once or twice a month.
If $10 per month or $10 once is an important amount, that means the person is broke. Like you explain yourself, it's not that you cannot afford the bike app, it is that the product is not for you, ie it's not worth your money. Most things are not worth our money. That doesn't mean we can't afford them.
I think your price analysis is predicated on the amount of friction.
For me to sign up with a 3rd party service to pay a subscription: yes, $10/month is probably the smallest fee I'd bother with.
To add a subscription through my Apple devices, where I can manage my apps in a single pane of glass and start/stop subscriptions at will, I'm fine with paying $10/year, $2/month, whatever.
I didn't downvote you FYI, but to answer your question, I run ridewithgps and as a result have a pretty in depth understanding of all the costs involved.
We have 14 machines in a rack at a datacenter in PDX, and have focused on low hosting costs since we have historically been bootstrapped and margin sensitive. Redundant switches, 2 firewall/load balancers, 4 compute machines, 3 database machines, 5 storage servers. Single upstream network provider, about to be two sometime next year. Rack space + power + redundant network is about $3500 a month. Machines have an average service life of about 5 years.
Database machines cost about $45k for a set of three.
Storing user data is non-trivial - GPS track files add up when you get close to a billion of them, photos are also very large. We use a self-hosted ceph object storage cluster of 5 machines, about $100k of hardware. it's cheaper than 20k a month in S3 bills.
Our rack all-in is probably about $250k of equipment. 5 year service life, probably $5k a month amortized out. So, doing things as cheap as possible (I buy nvme SSDs for storage cluster off ebay, and am about to buy a couple arista 100gbe switches from ebay as well) we are somewhere around $8500 a month on hosting.
We use both google maps as well as self-hosted OSM based map and routing services. About half our map usage goes to google, by user preference, and we pay them about $20,000 per month for that. Our self-hosted OSM map stuff require 1tb of ram, fast disks, a ton of CPU cores. We host 10 different planet scale routing profiles via graphhopper, which take 3 days to build every week with updated data. They also host a vector maps stack which is much more efficient, taking about 3 hours a week to build.
My last estimate of an AWS bill for all the above was $30k a month, assuming some discounts. We have grown since then and I'd napkin us to be > $40k a month at this point.
We strive to minimize any costs for third party platforms. We do use amplitude for analytics, that's > $30k a year at this point. We do use an external email service for easy marketing emails, but the majority of our millions of emails a month are sent from our own mail servers, using an in-house system we made a decade ago that still works well. We try to minimize vendor lockin and costs, where it makes sense.
Most expensive part of the entire company of course is salaries, with of course an eye to developer and related salaries. We run pretty bare bones where possible, with a flat management structure with minimal overhead. Our total staff size is 32, of which 6 are full-time end user support.
A bit of a ramble, sorry, but there's a large amount of overhead to run a system like ours. We don't just make a one-time use desktop application, we have to continually provide storage and compute for all users. If we stopped that, the entire service would fall apart. So yes, a subscription makes sense in a case like ours. You can't do what we do with a desktop app. Plus, the entire world has switched to mobile for this sort of consumer application, which is an entire rat race of it's own. You can't just release a single purchase app and expect it to be maintained, it's a massive effort to keep up with mobile development just to maintain features, much less build anything new.
I sincerely appreciate your serious answer to my serious question. I am quite surprised at all these costs considering that OSM is free, but you explained them very thoroughly and I am impressed. You have adequately justified the subscription requirement.
This post, combined with the fact that your planner actually allows me to force a path has won me as a customer. I'll also note that setting your yearly at 75% of the monthly is wise considering very low winter time usage.
For me, churn or not is going to come down to whether I can read critical details on your mobile app without having to put reading glasses on. (which is a factor that not even a $2t company like Apple can address properly)
Unfortunately we still have work to do there. We have dabbled in a separate map style, but it's really difficult to get any roadnames to show up when you start increasing font sizes in map styles. It's a sort of pick-your-poison - big maps where you can see the roads with almost no road names, or maps with smaller details with road names. The app itself should mostly scale well with increased system font sizes, but we are still carving out a couple of webviews in the app which have funky behavior. I do like to joke that with our average staff age passing 40 in the next year or two, we'll solve all readability issues....
Thanks for your interesting comment. I'm a happy customer of ridewithgps, and run a small B2B SaaS, so I love hearing details like this.
One comment: I hope you don't start emphasizing the "social media" aspects, like Strava has done, to their detriment, in my opinion. That's what prompted me to finally delete my Strava account (after uploading my thousands of activities to ridewithgps.)
Always great to see a successful “Single Rack of Failure” project out in the wild. And I don’t mean this as a negative. By being able to contain and control all the business into a single rack, you can more easily set up redundancy than trying to replicate your AWS environment between availability zones or worst, try recreating it in Azure or Google with all the different services, footguns, and so on. Just get another rack in a different datacenter and you’re set.
Congratulations to your team on keeping costs low and running a successful business out of a single rack.
We are just about finished with a total hoist into a self-hosted k8s cluster. We've gone slow due to my concerns about k8s and the additional complexity, but it's actually been pretty smooth and enjoyable. The end goal is the ability to point our helm charts at any cloud provider and have the entire infra stood up in less than a day. We already do offsite backups to rsync.net. We don't need crazy redundancy and are OK with a certain amount of risk to availability and < 1 day of data loss. Only thing that would take a long time is some GIS search data. We use elasticsearch and h3 hex strings encoded to guarantee prefix searching works for different zoom levels, which is a couple terabytes of derived data that takes a while to compute.
I have been enjoying this on-prem renaissance that we've seen over the last couple of years, makes my stubbornness around self-hosting feel smart in hindsight ;)
You forget one thing. RWGPS is (I think) one of the few training apps that can record and display all the data on the free tier. And it doesn't nag you every 5 minutes to upgrade to Pro or whatever. I really appreciate that and try to buy a one-month subscription once per year when I can afford it.
I have also worked with gps data and run my own map server (for a small country) so I know it costs money, time and effort. And thanks for the breakdown!
There’s some regulation here to contend with that mandates these EV sounds have to include a 1khz-4khz tone which is probably what you’re noticing since it’s on the higher end of the usual urban audioscape. The Verge did an interesting piece on this recently – https://www.theverge.com/24182348/ev-sounds-low-speed-survey...
Definitely reminded me of the classic Mickens usenix login;logout columns! Just overall a very engaging communication style for adding some entertainment value to what might otherwise be pretty dry to read in one sitting.
While it's not particularly surprising that the location of a piece of radio hardware that broadcasts a static identifier is trackable, it is pretty interesting how the location awareness and ubiquity of modern smartphones are effectively creating a massive distributed sensing network. The focus on this piece is mostly on how apple (by designing their api in a way that avoids apple computing your exact location on their servers, presumably in an attempt to _preserve_ user privacy) inadvertently gave public access to that sensing network. I'd love to read a piece that also games out what exactly a red team or attacker could do with _privileged_ access. I.e. "if somebody was able to compromise the location services servers, but not iOS, what exactly would they be able to do with that"...
This is the way I use most subscription products. There are a lot of pieces of software that I think do actually make sense to charge a subscription for rather than a one-time payment; almost all the software I use daily in 2023 has some kind of server-side component or ongoing maintenance/development costs and I don't mind paying for that. It's the auto-renewal aspect and all the dark patterns associated with cancellation that I really despise.
One thing that I do now is try to use iOS to initiate subscriptions as much as possible, since the Apple-mandated subscription mechanism there lets me easily and immediately cancel auto-renewals for a new subscription as soon as I sign up for it.
I don't love that the walled garden approach seems to be the only way to restore sanity here and would love to see something standards-track and cross platform emerge for signing up for, listing, and cancelling software subscriptions in one place as part of the functionality provided by your OS. Basically, "passkeys for subscriptions". Maybe someday!
I’m also curious to see some examples – I used to work at a well known software company in the outdoor recreation / fitness space that made a really big deal about social justice both internally and externally. You would think they’d also be strong on the environment given the market they operated in but the minute you brought up conservation or environmental justice in an all-hands q&a they would immediately shut the line of discussion down hard.
I’m guessing it’s a much more significant hit to the bottom line to take a hard stance on environmental stuff vs DEI/social justice etc, which kind of surprised me but I can’t think of another explanation. It’s not like they were afraid of alienating market segments due to political alignment, since their (good imho!) stance on antiracisim was definitely just as politically charged as taking a strong stance on sustainability would have been…
Politics at work are dandy, so long as they're the right politics and you agree with the company. Just like the time at a previous employer of mine, where we had a morning tea fundraiser for the national animal welfare organisation on the Monday and then a lunch with betting for an annual, national horse race on the Tuesday. Nobody seemed all that interested in the irony there. Elsewhere here in Australia, a number of fast food places made a big song and dance about introducing plant-based options For The Environment TM, but just recently they've quietly removed them from the menu. It's hard not to see any ethical comments/stance as simply an extension of marketing. At best, a company could be selectively ethical, but only where it doesn't affect profit negatively; I just can't see 99% of companies foregoing profit over ethics.
It's hard for me to imagine why this might be the case at an outdoor company...? Is this something like Trailforks and conversations about the impacts of mountain bike trails or something?
Normally these brands are the other way around (all about the environmental, less concerned about social justice).
I’m curious what their best-case outcome is here. It’s fully transparent at this point that Apple has no appetite for a third party iMessage client on any platform and will take whatever technical steps needed to prevent this from happening.
I’d wager heavily that even if Beeper plays cat-and-mouse to the point where they’ve exhausted Apple’s budget for blocking them and somehow managed to avoid Apple’s legal team putting a stop to things via other channels (very unlikely), Apple’s next move would likely be to release some kind of official iMessage Android client rather than cede control of the space to Beeper.
It’s easy to read this as a pure publicity stunt on Beeper’s behalf, but that’s not what I’m getting from the tone and content of these announcements. And I also don’t think the market for a paid all-in-one chat app is large enough to justify the expenditure that this iMessage for Android project represents, if the endgame is ultimately a PR stunt.
They seem too smart to realistically think that Apple is going to just shrug and let them continue unbothered after a few rounds of back-and-forth, so what are they playing at?
The best case outcome is to get publicity leading to US and EU antitrust regulators to file a lawsuit against Apple, both of which Apple loses. The conclusion of this lawsuit is that not only must Apple allow access to iMessage, they also must allow changing the default for every component of iOS - messaging app, browser, app store, let you replace Siri with other voice assistants - and to lower the 30% app store fee to 10%. Same rules apply to Android.
Okay, that might not be likely, but you did ask about the best case outcome.
iMessage doesn't even register as a messaging platform in the minds of most users globally.
In the US is it dwarfed by at least three other platforms.
Globally, do any of the other top ten (Apple is nowhere near the top ten) messaging apps allow third parties to spoof their service?
The purpose of anti-trust is to increase competition and prevent unlawful monopolies. Apple is a flea on the tail of an ox when it comes to messaging, as capable of influencing the market as I am.
For me, personally, it’s an SMS app not general messaging. And on iOS there is absolutely no competition for SMS by design.
I suspect iMessage would enjoy far less adoption if the iMessage features were a separate application from the SMS features, or if a 3rd party app could assume the role of handling SMS (I.E. Signal).
If Signal were allowed to handle SMS on an iPhone, ditching iMessage would be one of the first things I’d do when setting up my device.
On iOS, if I want to send a message to a phone number using a cross-platform protocol that (nearly?) all cellphones understand by default without coordinating a separate communication channel out-of-band, my option is: iMessage. That is not organic, it’s Apple using its position as the device manufacturer to force all competition out of the SMS space, and then offering a “progressive enhancement” on top of an open protocol that nobody else can compete with or interopt with.
Slight correction - you can't (or rather, shouldn't) override the SMS handling on an android phone.
Instead what an app like Signal does is request all the permissions it can from the SMS/MMS handling service of the phone - to read and send SMS entries, and to get events on an incoming SMS, and then request to be the default handler of the `sms` custom URI scheme.
But you can have any number of SMS clients at once. It is likely if Apple Messages ever came to Android, it would do the same thing - otherwise, the fallback behavior (when talking to an android user without the app installed, for example) would be sub-par.
But I do believe there's reason to consider Apple's policy relative to iMessage clients monopolistic. Apple's behavior is not significantly different from Microsoft's, which instigated US v. Microsoft [1]. That case largely took issue with Microsoft's mandatory bundling of IE with Windows and the extent to which Microsoft created an inorganic monopoly. In addition to how Microsoft's monopoly came to be one, the judge also took issue with Microsoft's methodology in quashing threats to that monopoly. One could claim that Apple is taking similar quashing action relative to Beeper now.
Microsoft of course appealed the judgement, and prevailed. But they prevailed only because the judge had broken his code of conduct in discussing the case with media; not because Microsoft's behavior was not monopolistic.
I don't believe global or domestic iMessenger usage is relevant.
This is very obvious because you have a poor grasp of the facts.
a) The issue with Microsoft was that it had a monopoly in operating systems. At the time it was about ~95% market share. Gates woke up one morning, decided web apps were a threat to this, saw Netscape as their major competitor and decided to eliminate them. It didn't try to compete with them. It went straight for elimination by bundling IE and coercing OEMs e.g Compaq to not bundle Netscape. Using a monopoly in one market to force a monopoly in another is exactly what the laws were designed to prevent.
b) Global and domestic iMessage usage is relevant. In fact it is the whole point. You need to demonstrate that there is an absence or distortion of a market for anti-trust laws to be applied.
c) Apple is not trying to eliminate Beeper, they have no monopoly in anything and there is clear evidence of a fair and functioning market by the presence of WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal etc.
a) The issue with Microsoft was that it had a monopoly in operating systems. At the time it was about ~95% market share. Gates woke up one morning, decided web apps were a threat to this, saw Netscape as their major competitor and decided to eliminate them. It didn't try to compete with them. It went straight for elimination by bundling IE and coercing OEMs e.g Compaq to not bundle Netscape. Using a monopoly in one market to force a monopoly in another is exactly what the laws were designed to prevent.
I don't dispute these facts. And I don't think they dispute my comment. By mentioning US v. Microsoft, I pointed out that there are similarities between Microsoft in the 90s and Apple today.
> b) Global and domestic iMessage usage is relevant. In fact it is the whole point. You need to demonstrate that there is an absence or distortion of a market for anti-trust laws to be applied.
Thank you for the correction.
> c) Apple is not trying to eliminate Beeper, they have no monopoly in anything and there is clear evidence of a fair and functioning market by the presence of WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal etc.
Unless one can believe that Apple is both willing to block Beeper and not eliminate it, then Apple is trying to eliminate Beeper as a Messenger competitor. From their statement: "We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage."
I think Apple has a reasonable argument for doing so. Though, in a world where Apple controls the only App Store where iOS users are blocked from downloading alternative SMS applications, they do hold a monopoly over both how iOS users install applications, and the only SMS application available on iOS: Messenger. Non-iOS users who want to message iOS users with the same quality of service as iMessages may only do so by installing 3rd party software. Otherwise they need to implicitly agree to having messages treated as second class, to Apple's likely enrichment. I think reasonable people can perceive some amount of anti-competitive intent in Apple's action. Should Apple be able to block 3rd parties from using the iMessage service infrastructure? Possibly, but it's hard to argue that doing so is pro-competition.
I think most of the concern over Apple's refusal to admit 3rd party iMessage clients will be eliminated if and when they make good on their promise to support RCS next year.
Agreed. Every single platform/device has apps that are exclusive to it. It's mind-boggling to me that people are so obsessed with Messages. I can't play thousands of Steam games on my Mac. My friends who have PCs play those games together, have fun, chat online. Should Steam be forced to "open their protocol" whatever that means?..
This is the point I am making. There are certain apps and features that are exclusive to certain devices. I can 't play the vast majority of Steam games on my Mac. Should Steam (and all game companies involved, including Valve) be forced to enable support for MacOS for all their games because Mac users have FOMO?
I am mentioning Steam as an example of an ecosystem that offers exclusive apps on different devices. The fact that I can install Steam on a Mac is sort of irrelevant considering that I can't play the games that are offered through Steam on my Mac. Many indie games are offered only on Steam, so it's a monopoly in this sense.
Apple has a literal complete monopoly on operating systems. Every iPhone must either run iOS or be cracked (jailbreak). That's not the whole story, though: Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior was not monopolizing the OS market. It was using that monopoly to promote IE.
> Apple is not trying to eliminate Beeper
They are literally eliminating one of their products. That's anti-competitive.
> they have no monopoly in anything and there is clear evidence of a fair and functioning market by the presence of WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal etc.
You just moved the goalposts out of the stadium. Anti-competitive behavior doesn't need to overwhelm every segment of a market to be anti-competitive behavior.
a) That's not how it works. You need to have a functioning market in order to have a monopoly.
b) Apple is not interfering with the ability of Beeper to sell their product or add new features. They are simply closing loopholes in their product.
c) I never said that anti-competitive behaviour needs to overwhelm every segment. In fact I said the complete opposite when I referred to market distortion.
This is a silly argument: Microsoft's bundling of IE resulted in real damage to another company (Netscape) that had a viable and independent competitor product. Beeper doesn't have an independent product: they have a hacky workaround that Apple fixed.
What Microsoft did with IE isn't really analogous to Apple refusing to let another company free ride on their infrastructure. This isn't even as egregious as patching iTunes to break the Palm Pre sync was, and the legality of that action seems pretty settled by now.
> What Microsoft did with IE isn't really analogous to Apple refusing to let another company free ride on their infrastructure.
Zoom out for a moment and take Beeper out of the picture. The issue is not Beeper specifically, it’s the underlying reasons that Beeper even exists.
If you buy an iPhone and want to interoperate with friends/family on Android, the default experience is extremely broken.
Apple’s behavior here is directly driving users away from Android, not because Apple is better, but because it’s the only way to actually use the native experience.
I don’t know if the cases are equivalent, but there’s certainly a case to be made that they’re in a similar category.
If I want to "interoperate" with friends and family who use Android, I have zero issues doing so. SMS works fine, and the default experience being "bad" is really completely unrelated to any sort of antitrust concern. If we want more features, they're an App download away.
Apple offers a product that has seen significant success in a small number of markets versus android, including the US. Dressing up what is ultimately the normal bump and tumble of competition in a market as antitrust because they're winning enough in the market(s) you care about is silly.
> …because they're winning enough in the market(s) you care about is silly
I disagree that what follows “because” is an accurate representation of what is happening, and reduces a more complex issue to an oversimplified notion of “winning”.
Microsoft was also winning in the market. How a company wins is what matters in discussions about anti-trust. If that winning is appreciably supported by anti-consumer behaviors, it becomes problematic.
I don’t know if what Apple is doing rises to the level of antitrust, but it’s certainly anti-consumer.
> Dressing up what is ultimately the normal bump and tumble of competition in a market as antitrust because they're winning enough in the market(s) you care about is silly.
Anti-consumer behavior being part of the “normal bump and tumble” is hardly a good reason to find it acceptable. Anti-trust actions have been weak or almost non-existent for years now, but again has nothing to do with whether or not the status quo is acceptable.
I don’t find those arguments compelling, and we’ll have to agree to disagree
I wouldn't categorize it as anti-consumer. Apple is not under any moral, legal, or ethical obligation to provide access to iMessage to users outside of their ecosystem. Moreover, it's crucial to note that no significant tangible harm is being inflicted on anyone unless they willingly choose not to explore more widely-used alternatives. Some individuals argue that there should be broader access, but these arguments primarily rely on appeals to emotion ("...hardly a good reason to find it acceptable") and pleas for sympathy, as your post demonstrates.
iMessage is essentially a convenience feature designed for Apple customers to communicate with one another free of charge. While some might view it as a potential loss-leader for Apple, for most of it's users it's just another feature, with a majority already utilising alternative messaging platforms.
A comparable example is BlackBerry Messenger, which initially followed a similar path. BlackBerry only opened it up to other platforms when they found themselves losing the smartphone market to both iOS and Android. In contrast, Apple does not appear to be facing the same competitive pressure, which is why they maintain their current approach to iMessage access.
Edit: In another thread, you say "They’re selling a general purpose communication device that is incapable of exchanging run of the mill content with other general purpose communication devices, and using that poor experience to drive iPhone sales." which is a demonstrably false premise. The mere existence and prevalence of more successful competitors show us this. The problem here is that there are those arguing that iMessage is the only option, when it clearly isn't.
Ultimately, whether or not iMessage is availble to Android users is immaterial. Apple are 10 years too late to the party. Add that RCS is comming to the platform (of which I am disappointed - it a half-baked solution that risks ceding control to carriers, which IMHO is a terrible idea), iMessage on Android is moot.
> I wouldn't categorize it as anti-consumer. Apple is not under any moral, legal, or ethical obligation to provide access to iMessage to users outside of their ecosystem.
Apple is intentionally degrading the experience of sending messages to non-Apple devices for the explicit purpose of driving iPhone sales. This is anti-consumer, full stop.
"They must provide access to iMessage outside of the ecosystem" unnecessarily restricts the possible ways that Apple can address this issue, and is only one of many solutions to the problem.
My point and stance is not that Apple should be forced to implement iMessage on Android, but that the intentional and artificial restrictions baked into the Apple <-> Non-Apple experience is unacceptable to me as a customer.
I've commented at length about this elsewhere in the thread, but they could:
- Implement RCS (which they're finally and reluctantly doing due to regulatory pressure, but we have no idea how much they'll hamstring it, and it's borderline ridiculous that they haven't done something yet. Too little too late)
- Allow 3rd party apps to surface messages in a unified interface like they do with other iOS capabilities (e.g. the unified voice call experience from various non-Apple apps/services)
> In another thread, you say "They’re selling a general purpose communication device that is incapable of exchanging run of the mill content with other general purpose communication devices, and using that poor experience to drive iPhone sales." which is a demonstrably false premise.
The premise is demonstrably true, and can be experienced by trying to send someone a text containing an image or video using the phone's native capabilities.
I think it's worth reiterating here that Apple has explicitly restricted the messaging experience while allowing other categories of app (Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Phone calls) to natively interact with 3rd party services from a single interface. The argument that "just use another chat app" would be a lot stronger if Apple actually supported other chat apps in their native experience.
Zoom out and stop focusing on "iMessage on Android", and it becomes extremely obvious how anti-consumer this stance is based on comparing it to Apple's own design philosophy and other capabilities across iOS.
> iMessage on Android is moot.
On this I tend to agree. But this doesn't get Apple off the hook, or make the dark patterns acceptable.
As I've said elsewhere, Apple may have every right to do this, but customers have every right to be pissed about it, especially because there are ways to solve this that don't require Apple to open the floodgates to iMessage.
> If you buy an iPhone and want to interoperate with friends/family on Android,
Then use a cross platform messaging app. FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord. I have all of them on my phone.
> the default experience is extremely broken.
It’s not broken. Apple devices have a low-friction “hot path” for communicating with other apple devices. That’s it. Want to use it? Get an apple device.
Apple isn’t obliged to make its messaging app work for everyone, on all platforms.
> It’s not broken. Apple devices have a low-friction “hot path” for communicating with other apple devices. That’s it. Want to use it? Get an apple device.
As an Apple user who likes Apple products (I just really dislike this iMessage stance), I don’t agree. When I open the app that allows me to communicate with other users via phone number, and when that experience can’t handle sending a photo in the year 2023, the experience is broken.
I’m glad they’re implementing RCS support (which seems to be their acknowledgement that there is an issue to solve), but the fact that they chose to wait until 2024 is unacceptable.
> Apple isn’t obliged to make its messaging app work for everyone, on all platforms.
That’s not what I’m arguing. The desire for iMessage is a symptom, and I’m not saying they should be forced to make iMessage work everywhere. The problem is that non-iMessage support on the phone is atrocious. They’re selling a general purpose communication device that is incapable of exchanging run of the mill content with other general purpose communication devices, and using that poor experience to drive iPhone sales.
There are many ways to solve this that don’t require Apple to make its messaging app work for all platforms. They’ve already solved this for other categories like VOIP apps, which enjoy a unified OS-level experience.
> when that experience can’t handle sending a photo in the year 2023, the experience is broken
It’s Apples fault SMS is an archaic protocol? Wow, I truly learn something new every day.
> The problem is that non-iMessage support on the phone is atrocious.
I have fb messenger, WhatsApp, telegram and discord on my phone. I don’t find having to use these “atrocious”, they’re just different apps. Atrocious would be the awful “this messenger does all chats, but awfully” experience of early Android devices, that was a dumpster fire of confusing contact details and lost messages. Also, it’s not like Android is immune from these issues: your complaint is that SMS/MMS is archaic and needs an upgrade, not that we need to make iMessage bend over backwards to support everything else.
I guess I just don’t see the argument why iMessage explicitly needs to shoulder the burden here.
> It’s Apples fault SMS is an archaic protocol? Wow, I truly learn something new every day.
Why would this only be about SMS? RCS has existed for 15 years. It has its issues, but it’s not as if there hasn’t been an option. Apple will finally add some level of support next year (yikes), but as evidenced by the Beeper brouhaha, it’s unacceptably late to the party.
> your complaint is that SMS/MMS is archaic and needs an upgrade
No, it’s really not. My complaint is that there’s been an upgrade to SMS/MMS for many years that would make the iMessage limitations irrelevant, but Apple has refused to address the issue. There has been too much focus on iMessage itself, and not enough on the underlying behaviors they’re forcing and the obvious intent behind this.
> I guess I just don’t see the argument why iMessage explicitly needs to shoulder the burden here.
I honestly don’t care if Apple makes iMessage work on Android. There are numerous options that solve this issue without crossing that line. RCS next year is a step in the right direction. They could also follow their own design philosophy and allow apps to surface their messages in a unified interface like they do for most other iOS capabilities.
I can receive a discord call and it shows up next to my normal phone calls. This kind of UX would solve the issue without requiring Apple to touch iMessage.
But they won’t, because this isn’t about security or some undue burden to support android devices; it’s a calculated decision to degrade the user experience when messaging non-iPhone devices for the purpose of driving sales.
This has even been confirmed by discovery documents from recent lawsuits.
> But I do believe there's reason to consider Apple's policy relative to iMessage clients monopolistic.
In order for antitrust laws to apply, it’s not enough to exhibit monopolistic behavior. You actually have to be a monopoly and use this behavior to achieve and/or retain it.
That's not the whole story in the United States. Antitrust law prohibits monopolization, which is monopoly power couple with anticompetitive practices, but it also prohibits various practices from companies that do not have monopoly power.
For example the Sherman Act prohibits attempted monopolization. You run afoul of that for anticompetitive conduct and a specific intent to monopolize if there is a dangerous probability that will achieve monopoly power.
The Clayton Act added restrictions on price discrimination, exclusive dealing, tying, and mergers and acquisitions that substantially reduce competition or tend to create monopolies.
Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony
— Sherman Act, Section 2
> But they prevailed only because the judge had broken his code of conduct in discussing the case with media;
You seem to think this was a terrible, terrible accident on the part of the judge, rather than just one of the many mechanisms by which the powerful evade laws to protect the weak. That is, a deliberate terrible terrible "mistake".
Even if that's a real thing and not an imaginary or minor phenomenon hyped up for clicks, it is hardly anti-trust-worthy.
70% of American teenagers may have access to iMessage due to it being on their phones but there is a 0.0% chance that, in aggregate, iMessage is in their top five most-used messaging apps.
I can't speak to the anti-trust issue but it is a real thing. My daughter couldn't join the group chat used by her (all iPhone) cheerleading team. We ended up missing last minute changes to practice locations more than once.
And, of course, there was some teasing from the other team members about how my daughter's parents were too cheap to buy them a proper phone.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their SMS but by the content of their character."
I have teen girls in Oregon. iMessage is decidedly the number one messaging app. The others aren't even close. There's no universe where my daughters use anything but iPhones. For better or worse, their friend group deliberately excludes those who cannot use the full functionality of iMessage. In case you've forgotten, teen girls are not terribly "equity" minded, particularly when it comes to tech.
I'm not sure why you're so confident in that 0.0% assertion. iMessage is integrated with the default/ubiquitous messaging app on iPhones, and I think it's reasonable to assume that teenagers are messaging mainly other teenagers who are likely to have iPhones (and thus using iMessage).
What do you think is beating out iMessage here apart from SMS? Snapchat, WhatsApp, various social net DMs? The biggest non-iMessage usage numbers I can imagine still don't exceed what I'd expect from iMessage, just based on its ubiquity in that demographic.
> Even if that's a real thing and not an imaginary or minor phenomenon hyped up for clicks, it is hardly anti-trust-worthy.
I'm in a group chat with (former) coworkers who repeatedly (albeit playfully) shame the one group member who forces us all to use green bubbles. It's a real thing
This whole green bubble equal shame thing is 100% on people.
The reason there are 2 different colors is so people can tell when they are using SMS because SMS are capped / cost money in most of the world - while iMessage messages are unlimited and free.
Your comment came across as defending the position that Apple is in the wrong for not allowing iMessage to be accessible from all platforms, my crude definition of "the aggressor" my apologies if that is not how you meant your comment to come across.
This just in, teen prefers to message with friends via Discord, but uses iMessage to message parents who are also on iMessage and not discord. We must file an anti-trust lawsuit against Apple, stat!
No where have I argued for antitrust. I'm just saying iMessage is probably the most used messaging app in the US, others are claiming it's not without any data.
> I'm just saying iMessage is probably the most used messaging app in the US
> others are claiming it's not without any data.
So quick question, why do you get to claim something without data but others have to back up their claims with data?
Anyway, I can't find anything that is specifically about the US in 2023 (so far) that isn't requiring a payment for a large sum, but everything else I found seems to back up the claims by everyone else.
Most of them don't even include iMessage in the top 10, and the one that does has it in like 8th place with one caveat, facetime itself is 2nd to Facebook Messenger which absolutely dominated the list.
its more than a shame. emoji, gifs and images are a core part of teens' communications (I have one, I know all too well), and iMessage's green bubble is also a guarantee that these things won't work, so its not just a shame, it is a hard road block.
Based on all the messages I get from my work colleagues (mostly android users much more into memes and things than I am), gifs and emojis and other features work just fine these days with MMS messaging on iPhone.
When iMessage has to send a pic or vid to a group that contains non-iMessage recipients, iMessage will fallback to MMS and may need to recompress the pic/vid to get under the MMS media limit.
MMS, introduced in 2002, has much lower limits for pictures/video than if the messaging apps were to send the media over data/internet.
Also these MMS media limits aren't hardcoded, the limits are set by the sending and receiving carriers.
videos taken on your or their phones don't show up postage stamp sized and blurry/bricky any more? that's usually how a green bubble drags an iphone group down
although the "liked your message" type stuff is also annoying.
So "monopoly" as a single entity controlling a single market is a simplistic view of the issue at hand. Anti-trust is far broader than that, where any anticompetitive action can be subject to anti-trust lawsuits/regulatory action.
So the legal argument would be that, because Apple allows for a single messaging app, and interacting with that app requires an iphone, they're effectively preventing messaging app competition.
Apple has a very, very talented legal team though, so, for this to even see argument in court someone's going to have to realllly have to want it, and be able to fund it.
>So the legal argument would be that, because Apple allows for a single messaging app, and interacting with that app requires an iphone, they're effectively preventing messaging app competition.
That is weapons-grade horseshit. You can put WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Signal on your iPhone and message to your heart's content. (I know, because I've had the first two on my phone before and they did not get killed in their sleep by Apple's native messaging app).
They don't know what they mean, because there isn't a legal precedent for narrowly defining monopolies to facets of a single company's stores and platforms. It's just wishful thinking phrased authoritatively.
IMHO, the argument is that Apple does not allow any third party messaging app to send message to the built-in messaging application (Apple Messages) on the iPhone. That is Apple ships one messaging app that is the default and may not be removed, and they also do not allow any interoperability with that one messaging application.
Apple Messages is not an SMS application; it's an internet messaging application that falls back to SMS messages when communicating with any non-iOS device. There are some situations where there may be no data network and, maybe, it falls back to sending an SMS message to another iOS device but this is pretty rare.
Facebook Messenger - approx 140 million users, then WhatsApp at approx 75 million. iOS has approx 136 million users (not sure if that includes iPad). So "dwarfs" might be a bit extreme. However, its extremely unlikely that all the iOS users use iMessage and none use either Facebook or WhatsApp. Statista has the figures, but I'm not going to pay $149 per month to find out more!
Source: Googling around, so take it for what it is!
It's not about having accounts. Again, the data source (which I admit could be wrong/misleading) all say active users, which I take mean users actively sending messages using FB messenger. The sources, by the way, are companies that sell services that market to consumers using these services, so it's in their interest to know usage stats and patterns. Admitedly finding information around iMessage usage is harder, which is why I went with number of active iOS devices. Yes, it's sketchy AF, but I'm not going to pay Statista $149 in a vain attempt to pyrricly win internet points.
How? 140 > 136! And the figure reported are active users. I accept it's back-of-the-napkin, not trustworthy sources, but even so, your math just doesn't make sense.
I'm just speculating that iMessage users use the app more then FB messenger users use FB messenger. I don't think there's anyway to know, so I definitely might be wrong.
How is Apple Messages not the #1 most popular messaging application on the iPhone? I know many people that use an iPhone and they all use Apple Messages. I know because I have an Android phone and this is the only way to communicate with them.
There seems to be a huge disconnect from people who are in countries where texting is not dominant. In the US (and apparently the UK) that is not the case, and iMessage and texting more broadly are overwhelmingly dominant from all indicators I've seen.
Does this mean that existence of Android allows both Google and Apple to mutually shield themselves from antitrust accusations? They basically get to do what they want, and argue "us refusing to give you X is not antitrust-relevant, because there's the other 50% of the market that refuses to give you X in an entirely different way".
This has nothing to do with android. iphone comes with an app store and that app store contains lots of messenger applications. Users overwhelmingly download one or several messenger applications from the store and use them instead of imessage. What's the similarity to IE here? IE had over 90% of browser share at some point.
I believe MS didn’t get nail on integrating IE into Windows - at least in the US - they got nailed on threatening to increase Windows prices for OEMs (which will ruin them in the competitive OEM market) that bundled Netscape, i.e. abusing their Windows monopoly to harm a competitor.
WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger are all free to download on iOS - heck it’s offered for download at Apple’s expense; since it’s from their App Store servers.
The only reason we are having this conversation is that some Americans can't fathom the idea that something they want is not available to them for free.
I don't see any practical difference between whatsapp and imessage. iphone has so many apis such as callkit that make apps that use them feel like first parties. I think the only real difference is that you can use the built-in messages to read and send sms... which nobody uses anymore.
Edit: wait, are you talking about iMessage being preinstalled? If so, how does iMessage being preinstalled make it dwarfed by other non-preinstalled platforms? Are you suggesting it’s human nature to use third party apps, or maybe you mistook the meaning of “dwarfed by”?
I am very curious what three other messaging application are available on iOS and have more market share than Apple Messages! Nearly every member of my family has an iPhone and they all use Apple Messages.
It's a ridiculous comparison. How do you calculate "more widely" usage? I use Messages for all SMS messages. I've had maybe 5 group chats in Messages over the last 10 years, all groups are organized in WhatsApp or Signal. So what is more widely used in my case?
Messages is the default SMS app on iPhones. 130M iPhones in the US does mean there are 130M Messages users. So what? Some teenagers are angsty because of green bubbles? FFS do we not have bigger problems to deal with?
I don't think the core motivation in this discussion (or the monetary motivation from Beeper) is due solely to "angsty teenagers." Clearly there are adults out there, with money to spend, who would prefer to send an iMessage to an iPhone owner rather than an SMS message.
While I find it annoying to constantly hear from my mother and other members of my family how messages from me are "a hassle" or "always getting missed" or "never show up in the group chat", I am not willing to spend the money on something like Beeper. But some people are spending the money, it looks like there is a market there.
In my bubble I switched everyone to Signal. I acknowledge that this is an anecdote and don't propose this as a solution. However, complaining about features in different apps is even less of a solution.
Messaging is done extremely differently in the US. All those group chats on Whatsapp or Signal would be done in iMessage because most Americans don't have Whatsapp or Signal, and Android users would likely just be left out of them.
I do live in the US. All my friends are on Signal and WhatsApp.
There are 140M FB Messenger users in the US, more than iPhone users.
This discussion is baffling to me. People buy devices that have exclusive content and features all the time. PS5 has a ton of exclusive games. So sometimes a group of friends is divided: some people have Xbox, others have PS5. Also some have no console at all. And some people will make fun of others, some people will get bullied because of that. This issue will not magically go away if we force Apple to "equalize" the chat bubble color. Some teenagers will still get bullied.
IMHO, it's unlikely anyone with an iPhone uses it "purely for SMS usage." That would mean we have an iPhone owner who only receives SMS from services, only sends messages to people with an Android device, has gone through the trouble to deliberately disable iMessage messages or lacks a data plan of any kind.
I agree with you. The problem is that we conflate SMS and iMessage usage in the Messages app. Most people do use Messages for SMS-like messages (meaning not for exclusive iMessage features). E.g. looking at my message list: at least 40% of messages I receive are alerts, payment confirmations, appointment reminders, etc. These are SMS messages in terms of their purpose, even if some have the blue bubble and whatnot. Messages is a popular app in the US, but what we need to look at is how popular it is for specifically iMessage-exclusive features, not as an SMS client.
Since I’ve moved out of the US and started using Line (the message service of choice in my country of residence) I have no idea why the US market continues to cope with SMS.
iMessage is confusing. I get constant random authorization requests on my iPad because it got un-synced. Messages never come through to my Mac either.
Line is nowhere near perfect, and the app does have ads, but it works, it’s fast, and encrypted. People even use it for calling. I’ve literally never gave my phone number to someone for communication. Not even my coworkers.
It’s so prominent that data only cellphone plans are actually usable-and cheap.
I’m not saying we should all use Line (I would prefer Matrix). What I’m saying is there are so many communication platforms out there that are way better than S/MMS.
I started looking around, I can find charts that show messaging app market share on iOS but none of them include Apple Messages. For sure Apple doesn't share these numbers, it looks like no one else has gone through the trouble to collect them.
They do supply the number of active iOS devices, though it doesn't necessarilly mean that they are all active iMessage users. 136 million iPhones in the US, ~140 million active Facebook Messenger users in the the US.
We can assume that there are close to zero iPhone owners who don't use Messages, considering that almost half of the US population has an iPhone. This calculation fails to account for the critical aspect: Messages is the default SMS app, it's not just a group chat. Comparing it to WhatsApp is just incorrect.
If it's the default app and all iPhone users actively use it, and FB messenger beats it by 4 million active users, then your argument hasn't really got a leg to stand on, especially given that the market share for iPhone in the US is ~53%.
My argument is only strengthened by your data?.. Messages app is the app every iPhone user uses to send and receive SMS messages. It's not about some exclusive features, blue vs green bubbles, etc. It's just SMS messages.
So just citing the number (130M) means nothing in this debate. WhatsApp or Signal or FM Messenger are not SMS apps, so we can't just look at the number of active users and make conclusions.
How many angsty teenagers must have an iPhone because of the color of their chat bubble? That's the number that (apparently) matters.
No. That’s appealing to emotion, it’s a fallacy and has no place in a sensible discussion.
As for SMS, I can say with a high degree of confidence that deliberate SMS sending is very low outside the US. Besides, the feature being spoofed, and therefore discussed is iMessage, which categorically is not SMS/MMS. Bringing it up is introducing a strawman.
> therefore discussed is iMessage, which categorically is not SMS/MMS
That's not the reality though, correct? When I send a message to a friend using the Messages app it's being sent as an iMessage if both of us use an iPhone. I don't care what the format is, my intention is to send an SMS. So you can't use this as evidence of popularity of iMessages.
Just looking at my message list: at least 40% of my messages are alerts, reminders, payment confirmations, etc. Are you saying in Europe people get those via Signal?
No, I’m saying it’s irrelevant what businesses are sending you. And since SMS is fundamentally limited to 160 ASCII characters, I doubt the majority cares. Getting hung up on a default SMS client feels like a waste of energy. I get that, as a convenience, you’d want one location for all your messaging needs. For an alternative view, I like the separation that multiple apps provide. I’m not against iMessage being on other platforms either. What I am against is the pitchforks and bullshit reasoning around why this is anti-consumer/trust. The whole polemic is just bullshit.
Edit: in fact I'm annoyed at myself for adding to the pointlessness of what amounts to petty nerd-rage. I apologise to everyone...
> I get that, as a convenience, you’d want one location for all your messaging needs. For an alternative view, I like the separation that multiple apps provide.
Wait wait... now I am totally confused. I don't mind the separation of my messaging needs. In fact, I use Messages only for SMS (or SMS-like) messages, and WhatsApp and Signal for everything else.
> What I am against is the pitchforks and bullshit reasoning around why this is anti-consumer/trust. The whole polemic is just bullshit.
That is what I am saying :) All this debate about bubble colors, anti-consumerism, monopolies, etc is a waste of time, we have much bigger problems to deal with.
> Globally, do any of the other top ten (Apple is nowhere near the top ten) messaging apps allow third parties to spoof their service?
The top messaging services are SMS and email. Do these allow different companies to interoperate with each other? Yes, of course.
And so should all messaging apps, regardless of how many other messaging apps there are, because they all have a network effect. They're segmented into their own markets by the act of restricting interoperability.
There is no carrier with a monopoly on SMS but Apple is trying to maintain a monopoly on iMessage. Why should that be allowed for anyone? Restricting interoperability -- i.e. competition -- is not a legitimate business practice.
I dunno, fixing the market to be “company X’s own services” doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of antitrust laws. Should I be allowed to sell gasoline at Shell’s gas stations?
You should be able to sell your gasoline to customers with Ford's cars, regardless of whether or not Ford has their own gas stations.
But why are we reaching for a car analogy? Should gmail or google.com be able to block Firefox and force you to use Chrome? Not make use of some feature Chrome has, but just purposely block Firefox even if it supports that feature or its users are content to use the service without it.
I would hope that this “best case outcome” also comes with regulations to keep other giants (mostly Google) from marketing and cross-promoting their way into dominance on iOS, creating monopolies in the process.
For instance, Google apps shouldn’t be able to drive Chrome installs by presenting a sheet offering to download Chrome every time I tap a link in them, as they do currently.
Chrome’s quality is what’s usually cited as being the primary driver behind its rise to its current position of most popular browser, but the reality is that Google’s intense marketing is at least as responsible. In-app prompts, prompts in Google search, and Chrome getting bundled in installers for every other Windows app were big contributors to its momentum.
Of course it becoming the default browser on the majority of Android devices and Google web apps underperforming in other browsers also played a role but that’s a bit of a different topic.
I have no doubt marketing played a role, but Chrome and Chromium-based browsers were the only ones with a multi-process architecture for over half a decade after Chrome's launch. That meant a bad web page couldn't crash the browser or block the UI, which used to happen frequently on other browsers.
Firefox eventually caught up, but had lost much of its userbase and mindshare by that point.
WebKit went multiprocess with the release of WebKit2 around 14 years ago, with the difference being that the multiprocess architecture is part of WebKit itself and thus easily reusable — just embed a WebView in your app and you have it. This contrasts to the Chromium implementation where multiprocess is handled by Chromium rather than Blink, meaning to get multiprocess you have to ship the whole of Chromium and can’t just embed Blink.
That said this really only relevant for Apple platforms and Linux/Android, unfortunately. WebKit for Windows is somewhat in a state of disrepair.
15% seems reasonable. They're not only charging to cover payment processing, there are salaries to pay for those developing the app stores, the human app reviewers (virtually non-existent in case of Google Play), storage, bandwidth, etc.
Granted, both Apple and Google also earn money from ads (shame on Apple's part). In that case I can sort of see the justification to lower their cut to below 15%.
Even the normal 3% overhead for credit card payment flow charged without these monopolistic practices isn’t reasonable. Even 0.1% allows the bloodsucking rentseekers a gigantic margin, as their marginal costs are approximately ZERO.
15% is pure “you have no other options” robbery, expanding on the same thing pioneered by Visa/MC/AmEx.
All of the expenses you listed are a) trivial and b) already paid for by iPhone purchasers. Apple is a hardware company with the highest margins in the industry.
They’re double dipping, and gouging whilst they do so.
The storage and bandwidth costs of the App Store are the size of a rounding error at this scale. Furthermore, the App Store is a marketing tool and value add for the iPhone, and benefits them directly. To expect app developers to pay for it is insane.
Only now, because they were forced to lower it. There is nothing stopping them from raising it again, once the prospects of antitrust prosecution disappear.
For context: Epic launched their lawsuit in August 2020, fighting the 30% cut, and less than 3 months later Apple lowered it to 15% for small businesses. Absolute coincidence, I'm sure.
I guess that depends on your definition of "forced". In my recollection, the wave of bad press was so big that they really had no choice but to give ground.
US? When has that ever happened in the last 30 years? I’d buy the EU stepping in to mandate interoperability though. I’d welcome that!
But… shouldn’t mostly everyone here view needing the EU to force the behaviour of a US company kind of against the entire supposed benefit of the US system and the purpose of the domain this forum is hosted on?
> As the wikipedia page you yourself are citing, overturned on appeal.
So the law says "Don't do behavior X", the government takes you to court, there is a judgment, you appeal, and win the appeal.
I'm not sure "dismissed on appeal" means "this isn't working as intended".
Successful market regulation includes investigating issues, prosecuting them where there is reasonable grounds to do so and it also includes a determination (either in investigation or in court) that something is not an issue.
Overturned on appeal but MS was fined heavily over the years using the same justification. The one I remember off the top of my head was the WMP fine[0].
If you have an OS, everything within should be open for competition and courts have generally ruled as such for years.
> But… shouldn’t mostly everyone here view needing the EU to force the behaviour of a US company kind of against the entire supposed benefit of the US system and the purpose of the domain this forum is hosted on?
European here. From my POV it seems as if the USA have forgotten that for a truly free market to exist, there needs to be serious oversight to prevent capitalism from devolving into "corporate Darwinism" - aka the strong ones staying strong because they (b)eat all the competition by being so strong in the first place or because they impose their externalities upon everyone else.
There is many an argument to be had if a free-market system is better than one more oriented on the government running things (obviously, I'm in the latter camp), but the problem is y'all don't have a free market at that point.
Also European^wfrom the european area (I think you get lynched here if you say that after brexit), and I completely agree. But it seems an awful lot of USian cheer for “free markets” only when it is giving the specific outcome they personally want, and I think you should mostly approach these “US Company” issues without the expectation of a Europarliament-ex-machina solution.
A capitalist economy needs the government for some very key laws like upholding private property rights but how does that extend to "mandating interoperable message systems"?
The definition of "free market" includes being free from monopolies.
If the government wants to maintain a free market, that means they need to step in and prevent monopolies, which includes preventing anti-competitive behavior.
Apple is being very anti-competitive with iMessage. It's not just the blocking of Android clients, but the fact that Apple will not let you use any other SMS app on iPhone, so users are locked into iMessage.
By simply looking at the general state of the US economy that has lost competition across the board over the last decades as large companies consolidated to form extremely large behemoths that dominate their respective markets (e.g. Boeing for aircraft, Microsoft for computer operating systems and office software, Meta for social media, Walmart for groceries, Google for search, Cargill/Tyson/JBS in agriculture, AA/Delta/Southwest/United in airlines), use both legal and illegal (such as wage collusion) tactics to cement their marketshare, and extract ruinously low purchase prices from their vendors. This shit used to be different, with lots of competition and resulting innovation, not even a few decades ago.
> A capitalist economy needs the government for some very key laws like upholding private property rights but how does that extend to "mandating interoperable message systems"?
Easy. Apple has a very popular product that they (ab)use to push its users to push their friends to get themselves iPhones. Breaking up their stronghold over iMessage would allow Android users to communicate on their devices with people who own iPhones, and it would lead to a flurry of competing messenger applications.
The same way HTTP+SSL/TLS or OpenPGP/SMIME work: by standardization. No matter if you run Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, cURL or your own client, you can connect with end-to-end encryption to any HTTP server with any kind of SSL frontend. For email, it's just the same - any client communicating with any other client implementing the respective standard can do so with e2e encryption.
Many of us on this site think modern hypercapitalism, the US system, and VC financing are basically evils, and are here for the general tech content. US regulators have been captured by monied interests, so rooting for the EU to do the job the US government won't is the best we can currently hope for.
Apple is THE consumer tech company in the USA. Its their darling. The only way the USA will rule against Apple is that if they are losing them money elsewhere.
Not to mention that virtually the entire ruling class in the USA has iphones and are largely tech illiterate so incapable of understanding nuance. Add some big lobbying money from Big Gray and Apple seems pretty safe
A lawsuit to do what exactly? Require Apple release an iMessage client on Android for free? That'd get thrown out pretty quick anywhere with a functioning legal system.
The only antitrust comparison I can see was Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer, but that doesn't really work because that was Microsoft preventing other competing chat clients from accessing the wider internet, not Microsoft's own servers. There has never been an antitrust lawsuit won anywhere that forces a company to open its own servers that its paying for open to anyone who wants to access them.
That's the best case for most of us, but probably not Beeper Mini, since the cat-and-mouse game is their killer competitive advantage. With the barriers gone the space will be totally flooded with options, not to mention just normal Android integration.
The “forcing” would likely come with conditions and some oversight. See how big phone companies in some countries are “forced” to allow competitors (eg. MVNOs) to connect to their networks at wholesale prices - do you think they chose that price point themselves?
this might be the “best outcome” for some nerds or android users, but it certainly isnt the best outcome for most consumers.
iOS has resisted a lot of the crap and cruft of windows and android because of its opinionated nature. sure, siri could use improvement, but at least iPhones never fail to call 911.
I’ll admit I’m one of these nerds but I disagree. There’s a difference between being opinionated and not allowing me to change the defaults on a device I own.
By viruses I don't only mean them in the classical sense, but also apps that steal your data, apps that mislead you, apps riddled with ads everywhere. That's the future if you want app stores with no oversight, and you will have app stores with no oversight if you put 0$ as the budget for managing the stores.
Today iOS doesn't allow running apps that were not vetted by Apple. And yet you can find loads of apps that steal your data, with ads everywhere. All approved by Apple.
In contrast, Android has multiple app stores that exclusively host open-source, non-spyware and ad-free ads.
That doesn't mean there will be an ecosystem of ethical FOSS app developers though. That will take much time to develop and it only being available in the EU will limit its growth. And you'll probably still have to invest in a Mac to compile for iOS.
I think the excellent FOSS apps ecosystem will remain exclusive to android even after Apple is forced to open up.
Ha, "wallet garden" gave me a good chuckle. I usually hear it expressed as a "walled garden", but this might be the perfect typo (or clever twist / word play).
I'm guessing it was a typo, but well done nonetheless.
The actual best case outcome is consumers become increasingly educated on these issues and use the market to not reward Apple for these practices, rather than relying on the coercive apparatus of the state that easily falls victim to corruption and regulatory capture, until such the time where we can have an actual functioning government again that isn't strangling small businesses, close the revolving door and get money out of politics and, yeah.. pigs flying and all that.
I don’t think relying on consumers to “not reward” anti-competitive behavior is a good strategy.
I own several Apple devices primarily because the UX and ecosystem is so far beyond anything Android offers (in my opinion), that I’m simply not willing to switch. Of course, Apple’s anti-competitive behavior is a big reason for that.
But I’m not willing to hurt my own daily interactions with the tech that enables my life just because the US Government isn’t willing to do its job.
I am the opposite of you, in that I refuse to buy Apple products, regardless the degraded UX I experience because of it. I will gladly suffer with a worse UX in order to vote with my $ and support vendors that align with my principles.
But I fully agree with you on this. It would be ideal for consumers to change, but it's not going to happen and it's not reasonable to expect it or demand it IMHO. If we rely on consumer behavior then things are only going to get worse and Apple more entrenched. Machiavellian behavior in business works. We have long known that individuals making microeconomic (e.g. personal) decisions can have a negative macroeconomic (e.g. big picture) effect[1]. I don't think anything will change for the better if left entirely to the market.
Best-case outcome is that Apple decides engaging in an arms race with a motivated competitor isn't worth the time or effort and they enable some (probably limited) interop.
I can imagine a "blue-green" type of message that's encrypted but not from an Apple device; Apple keeps their status symbology and users on both ends get E2E encrypted messages to and from Apple device users without Apple users switching to a third-party app.
Apple's never had to confront this because nobody's had this much success smashing the walled garden on iMessage before. If Beeper is persistent and good enough, they'll have the first foot in the door of such an outcome.
Worst case is Apple keeps escalating the fight knowing that Beeper can't outlast them. Everybody loses in this situation; Beeper and Apple both burn a bunch of money with no benefit to anyone, iMessage users see people popping into and out of chats because Apple keeps blocking them, and most non-Apple users continue sending unencrypted SMS messages because Apple users won't switch off iMessage.
Of all the moats Apple has, iMessage's "blue bubble" is by far the most arbitrary. Allowing strictly controlled interop with non-Apple devices doesn't change how good iMessage is, it only dents the ecosystem's most superficial status symbol.
I'm rooting for the better outcome but expecting the latter.
> Worst case is Apple keeps escalating the fight knowing that Beeper can't outlast them.
I feel like this is in Apple's DNA. Perhaps Beeper is lucky that Apple needs to support a lot of legacy devices and they might not be able to fully plug this hole without creating a big support nightmare.
Please explain to me why that wouldn't be in anyone's interest?
Why should I pay costs for server uptime and maintenance for clients that I a) did not authorize and b) did not pay for me keeping up my servers and c) actually accept that a third party is getting money for providing said access to my servers?
I really don't get how Apple is to blame for protecting what they pay for.
Apple also uses a lot of infrastructure that they don't pay for on their devices. Everything from open source code used in Darwin to public internet infrastructure. Besides that, if that is the reason that they don't want to offer this, they could offer a paid subscription for Android users.
The reason they block this is not that they cannot afford the infrastructure, it's peanuts for them. It's because they want to continue maintaining the schism in the US where Android users are stigmatized for green bubbles, pushing them to buy iPhones. (AKA exploiting teenagers' insecurity for profit.)
Apple has every right in the world to use open source software if they comply with the code's license. The Beeper client has no right to interact with Apple's servers in a way that involves faking an Apple authorization.
Apple has chosen not to provide an iMessage client. The mere possibility for one existing does not mean Apple can be forced into providing or tolerating one, given that it involves cost on Apple's server side, no matter how small that might be to them (how can you even tell?).
The fact that US teenages stigmatize each other has nothing to do with Apple's business. Apple has always advertized iMessage as an Apple-only messaging platform. If teenagers are to be protected here, it is up to US legislation to create a law that prevents the undesired behavior. Until such a law is present, what Apple is doing is legal, and what Beeper is doing is probably not, they're certainly creating server upkeep costs that they do not pay Apple for, despite Apple telling them clearly not to do so.
> The Beeper client has no right to interact with Apple's servers in a way that involves faking an Apple authorization.
I'm not completely down on the implementation details but is there really anything "faked" here. If they have a service that client and authenticate against using an Apple ID and I just use a different client with my Apple ID then nothing is "faked". It's just implementing the protocol.
> Apple has chosen not to provide an iMessage client. The mere possibility for one existing does not mean Apple can be forced into providing or tolerating one, given that it involves cost on Apple's server side, no matter how small that might be to them (how can you even tell?).
I agree. But if they're going to provide these servers on the Internet without any sort of paid authentication and I can utilize them with an alternative client then I'm going to do that. They don't have to tolerate it.
>If teenagers are to be protected here, it is up to US legislation to create a law that prevents the undesired behavior.
The Sherman Antitrust Act is broad and vague. It's practical definition depends on common-law precedent. While the system may seem baroque, it offers a kind of stability that has made common-law jurisdictions the preferred arena for most international business across the world. Hence, this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the relevant competition law.
> Why should I pay costs for server uptime and maintenance for clients that I a) did not authorize and b) did not pay for me keeping up my servers and c) actually accept that a third party is getting money for providing said access to my servers?
Because you designed the system in such a way that interoperability was impossible without non-customers using your servers?
"They can afford it" is a terrible argument. There's literally no upside for Apple providing their infrastructure for free to third parties, particularly given that it's a potential vector for flooding their customers with spam.
Up until quite recently, most phone carriers metered the number of texts you could send per month and then charged extra. Many still charge per text when you're roaming overseas. Perhaps Apple could offer API access on commercial terms to third parties but that's their decision.
I really don't think anybody should think about their decision, they are too big for fully owning the platform.
Additionally, iMessage is full of scams and spams already, it's not hard to buy a box of old iphones and turn them into spam relays and that's exactly what is happening now.
Of all the moats Apple has, iMessage's "blue bubble" is by far the most arbitrary.
100% I have been an iPhone user since 2009, but for me the most likely reason to go to the competition is not if it gets iMessage (I don't live in the US). The most likely reason is that Apple has become utterly boring when it comes to innovation. I recently purchased an iPhone 15, coming from the iPhone 13, I can honestly not say what has changed or improved besides the camera, the underused dynamic island, and USB-C [1]. And USB-C is nice, but pretty much a letdown because they capped it to USB 2 for market segmentation and it still has excruciatingly slow charging. At least on the Android side, for better or worse, interesting stuff is happening: from Fairphone's phone that is repairable with a single screwdriver, foldables (finally a phone that is small and big), Samsung S-Pen, to Nothing's slightly whimsical back LEDs. Also, pretty much every phone above 300 Euro has a good OLED screen with 120Hz, whereas I am still looking at 60Hz (because segmentation).
At any rate, Tim Cook will fight this nail and tooth. By now it's very clear that he has a blind spot where he thinks Apple is entitled to some things and is not sensitive to different viewpoints in other cultures/legislations. He thought Apple is entitled to a 30% cut. But he pushed it so far that the EU will regulate them. Now they have to offer side-loading and open the iPhone to alternative app stores. This will lead to segmentation of the platform, because some apps will only be available in app stores with better terms for the developer.
Ideally Apple would stop Beeper in its tracks by releasing an Android client themselves, because then they could dictate their own terms (orange bubbles, feature segmentation, etc.). Now they open up themselves to the risk that regulators in some regions will require opening up iMessage.
[1] Of course, the spec sheet contains more improvements, like a better SoC, but it is barely noticable.
> The most likely reason is that Apple has become utterly boring when it comes to innovation. I recently purchased an iPhone 15, coming from the iPhone 13, I can honestly not say what has changed or improved
Is there some law of nature that allows humans to achieve a rate of technological advancement that is beyond what “bores” you?
Is there some law of nature that allows humans to achieve a rate of technological advancement that is beyond what “bores” you?
I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say?
Are you saying that I am not entitled to progress? If so, I am not saying that I am. I am just saying that (IMO) some other companies are now more innovative and that should worry Apple more. Short term they can try retain users by locking them in, but at some point people will buy alternatives because they surpassed Apple's products at their price points.
Apple's whole schtick is that they exercise restraint on design so that it works well across many constraints, not just optimizing for one, such as newest or best feature.
I am sure engineering these devices involves lots of compromise, and maybe they did not find sufficient benefits to outweigh the drawbacks for those other features.
Maybe it is possible they swing the pendulum too far into the cautious territory, but given their track record, I would not bet on it.
> Of all the moats Apple has, iMessage's "blue bubble" is by far the most arbitrary. Allowing strictly controlled interop with non-Apple devices doesn't change how good iMessage is, it only dents the ecosystem's most superficial status symbol.
I've said this before and I'll say it again here. No Apple device user I've ever met thinks of the blue bubble as a status symbol. This is only something that Android users for some reason covet. In fact I've never heard it mentioned by any Android user in real life. This is only an internet thing that a tiny segment of people, like those who post to hacker news, seem to care strongly about.
I personally couldn't care less if Android got iMessage or not as long as it doesn't force any changes on the Apple side of things. It doesn't prevent me from communicating with Android users in any way currently. I also don't want to see any spam start to appear via iMessage, as there is currently none of it.
To be honest, given Apple has already committed to adding RCS support next year, the market for this thing is limited anyway. Apple has said they won't implement Google's encryption extension, but your average person doesn't care much about that anyway. They just want to be able to group chat and send media to their friends.
I think they ignored a rarely talked about but important aspect. iMessage is free for Apple users because it comes bundled with all Apple products. The cost to run iMessage and deliver millions of messages daily must be a significant number.
With beeper, they are enabling the functionality for android. That is every android user signed up with beeper will end up costing Apple some money to send messages to iphone (or to send messages to other android users using the same thing).
In my opinion, next step for Apple is to mandate having an apple device to be able to use an Apple ID as part of their TnC. They will keep closing loopholes in the meantime, but don't think Apple will let beeper win this, purely because of the can of worms it opens up.
Yep, I already pay for iCloud, Applecare on several devices and yet I am still punished by Apple via iMessage for using Android as my main device. (I also own a newish iPhone but even that's not good enough without workarounds to use my primary phone number with iMessage).
I don't like the idea of ever being bound to a single ecosystem and Apple's lack of interoperability by design keeps me using many Google services because they offer almost everything for both iOS and Android.
I would imagine a significant number of people would be willing to spend $5-$10/mo to be able to use iMessage + FaceTime as native Android/Windows apps (you can already FaceTime with non-Apple users via a link [0])
This aspect is ignored, because it's clear that Apple blocks third-party clients to maintain its dominant position in the US (social unacceptability of green bubbles among teens).
If cost was the problem, they could offer a subscription.
It's pretty clear why they don't want an android iMessage app.
In this case, what beeper enables (if successful) potentially is to use Apple's infra for future communication between android to android phones, or android to iMessage groups, while on Apple's infra and dime. Beeper will likely collect a fee for it as well. Thats not a position Apple would want to be in.
So I'm imagining Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp on my iPhone? And the appeals to emotion really have got to stop.
People do not by iPhones because of iMessage. I'll totally accept that some, even a majority, buy them as a fashion item, in a similar way that Samsung S series phones are, but iMessage will not be a significant driver for many.
Based on my understanding, Beeper is using false or duplicate Apple device credentials in order to authenticate with Apple as "being a legitimate iMessage endpoint".
There's no need to take the—rather draconian—step of locking out all Apple users who are using Apple IDs through the browser; all Apple needs to do is ban the false device IDs and possibly close the loophole that allows Beeper to create them.
Any time you see something that looks like a jailbreak, at its heart is a vulnerability in the device or service that is being jailbroken. That is, fundamentally, a security flaw, and fixing that security flaw is all that's necessary to prevent the jailbreak. The fact that this one is with one of Apple's services, rather than with iPhones or other Apple devices, means that they don't even have to push out some software/firmware update and hope everyone applies it: all they have to do is update their own servers, and Beeper will be locked out again.
I don't think they're using false or duplicate Apple devices for this. I think that it may be likely they are using AWS resources for it: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/
When AWS first came out with these, this was my first thought. People could spin up an EC2 instance and use it for iMessage, and Beeper came to be shortly after this feature went live in AWS.
Not fake devices, fake credentials. Beeper Mini is explicitly using a different method to access the iMessage system than Beeper and some other previous services; it's not spinning up virtual Macs and bouncing off them. Because of that, it also doesn't require you to hand your Apple ID login & password over to Beeper in cleartext just to make it work.
At least, from what I've read over the past few days.
I don't think the credentials are faked. The author's blog post seems to give the details. He is publishing a public key to Apple's servers and figured out how to read the public key of other users. It seems like he is using the normal Apple encryption path from there. Although I don't fully understand the details.
It’s actually really surprising to me (from a technical perspective) that this wasn’t already the case. Based on what I’ve read they’re basically spoofing the fact that they’re an iDevice which seems like it should be much more difficult than Beeper has made it look.
You'd think. But a great big pile of intel-based macs without TPMs are still supported iDevices. And the tail for supporting those macs (that have been on iMessage for some time) might be quite a bit longer than the tail for, say, OS updates to those macs.
So there's quite a window where spoofing that kind of iDevice will be easy.
They used this and added their own changes. From their communication about what they are doing, it's remarkably similar, and i would be very surprised if they did not see this before.
I think they’re a lawsuit startup, as in funded in service of the speculative opportunity of favorable court case and/or political outcomes stemming from their intentional behaviors. Think Uber being funded to set case precedent versus taxis, in order to pave the way to deprecating humans taxi drivers in favor of robots. VCs love speculation and Beep’s PR has been quite effective at riding the coattails of pre-existing beliefs to push for their desired legal outcomes, from which they would profit.
> Apple’s next move would likely be to release some kind of official iMessage Android client rather than cede control of the space to Beeper.
You say this as if it's a bad thing, I think that would be mission accomplished for Beeper... tbf, though I suppose their moment would be over by then.
Define "over". Opera the web browser earned $80 million on $380 of revenue and I don't know anybody that uses it. If Apple releases an Android iMessage client, but Beeper still has enough paying MAU so they can pay their employees and investors, is anything "over" just because there's competition? It isn't a winner-take-all like a game of football or something.
By over, I just mean that their days in the spotlight/media would be gone and people would generally be less aware of their existence. Not that they won't be able to compete against Apple.
If anything judging by Apple's Android apps recently, especially with my personal experience with their Apple Music app I would say they have a really bad track record thus far. It's a really buggy and almost unusable mess.
This is unrelated but I was actually duped by Apple Music, I intially thought that the audio quality was noticably better but as it turns out it was actually just louder. Raising the volume made YouTube Music sound just as good.
How many ways does Apple have of blocking Beeper interoperability without major changes to their protocol that breaks existing functionality? They've already exhausted 1 of them without much delay.
I'm just glad to see Apple's proprietary gatekeeping being challenged and this app has helped bring "green bubble bullying" to the fore. A lot of Apple fans seems to applaud Apple for acting ethically (at least relative to other big tech) and I hope they now view this marketing tactic by Apple as unethical and demand it be stopped.
Beeper seems to be masquerading as an Intel Mac. These don’t have any hardware attestation, and many of them aren’t receiving software updates anymore either.
Early versions of Trianglify supported noise addition using feTurbulence but I ultimately removed it because of some of the rendering inconsistencies mentioned in this thread, alongside performance issues on certain platforms (you would think that generating 2d monochrome noise would be pretty cheap in this day and age, but it must be part of the SVG stack that never saw much optimization because it would absolutely lock up rendering for several hundred milliseconds when applied to even moderately sized viewports).
Of course, this was all back in ~2015 so the landscape has definitely improved, but not quite to the point where I would consider adding support back in.
It's hard to pin down exactly what I find so unsettling about the practice – it's almost like the uncanny valley, but for written content that apes human expression instead of imagery?
Might not be exactly this, but it makes me feel similar to why people hate advertising. Which I believe is, people don't like feeling lied-to, and everyone knows that marketers are trying to get in your head to manipulate you into manufacturing desire or stoking insecurity, all for the purposes of getting you to buy their products.
I think people like organic word-of-mouth, but on the flipside, hate when they find out that someone was a paid shill to posture as an average consumer, but are an industry plant to trick and deceive us all lol.
But to your point about why it feels icky and unsettling for publications & media companies to just straight-up use AI to write articles... seems kinda similar. Many of us are already skeptical that journalists & reporters are being censored and manipulated into writing with an agenda. But these types of AI-generated articles feels a few degrees more dehumanizing and Machiavellian. Like, the humanity aspect can all be aped so well, that we can just manipulate the masses and assuage their needs for a sense of connection without having any souls behind it whatsoever, because the masses are viewed as a bunch of manipulable "things" to simply extract things from (like attention).
I don't like it either, and for me it seems like it's those reasons. It feels so... gross and heartless.
One of the reasons I find so many ads annoying: the copy is complete shit. It's usually vapid, kitschy, cringy garbage. Most ads are like a Joss Wheadon show; formulaic, cookie-cutter "clever" that appeals to the simplest minds. Nobody talks like that in the real world.
It also usually feels like the creative process was supervised by a bunch of people who seem to think themselves a superior sort of human.
This type of behavior will only serve to cheapen content across the board. At this point, even the word "content" betrays the emptiness of it all - people don't pay for bags and boxes of "content" do they?
AI "content" is a nothing-burger. It is inherently devoid of "value" and seems like a last-ditch effort to squeegee the remaining drops of attention off of everyone's eyeballs without actually investing in genuine creativity.
As more and more of this dross floods the Internet, the very purpose of the web may be called into question. How can we share information with each other if the world's library/archive becomes the world's bot-poop landfill?
The Internet has evolved from a shared information system to so much more, so I hope this unfortunate phase will soon pass and ML tech can be put to more appropriate use than just crapping out low-effort "content" all over the place.
> At this point, even the word "content" betrays the emptiness of it all
In all fairness, "content" telegraphed that from the first time it was used in the online sense. I still don't understand why people are willing to use it to refer to their own work.
I'd be very, very curious to hear viable alternatives to ad supported models, that aren't based on how major companies have been doing it for the past 20 years (or longer?), where they make it free, then sneak in subscriptions, then over time, start increasing subscription costs.
I feel like it's not just the companies, but consumers/ audiences don't want to pay for most internet services unless it's something like infrastructure services where it somehow viscerally seems "sensible" and "right" to do so.
All those online services, even the AI ones, need servers and bandwidth and paid people to maintain them. They need sources of income and the only reliable one known to man (today) is ads. If you have a different idea, please do explain, but before you say "monthly contributions" think twice about the reality of it and maybe also count for how many services you personally pay. Of course one could say "why do I need online services at all" but that's not a future I care about.
The unsettling thing about it is that it's a lie from front to back, intended to deceive people into believing there are real people sharing recipes, when the people don't exist and nobody has ever eaten the food.
The opposite would be great: a web crawler that digests (pardon the pun) a 5mb web page (or 20m long-winded video) on how to cook a meal and condenses it into just the relevant steps and photos.
https://mela.recipes/ does this with its built-in browser/parser thing (and it has a bunch more incredibly useful stuff).
Highly recommended, it's from Silvio Rizzi of "Reeder" fame so it's a one-time purchase built with extreme care by a solo dev with excellent product instincts. Huge fan of his work, this kind of high-craftsmanship software is just so pleasant to use.
There is a whole slew of AI based video summarizing tools in existence already, enough so that a search for "video summarizer" has a bunch of listicles in the results.
May be useful to you or others in this thread. We lean pretty heavily into the "cycling power user" market segment, the feature set isn't always the most discoverable but it's quite comprehensive if you put in the up-front time to learn the tooling (similar to a lot of other specialty mapping apps out there - caltopo, fatmap (rip) etc)