Dear Apple: Please set iMessage free

I want to direct this towards the folks commenting here who might be in the anti-Apple camp. Yes, a walled garden is no fun for anyone once it reaches a critical mass. We're sort of starting to see this with Twitter, with their recent API adjustments. Decentralized and open platforms are also really tough, just look at OpenID. The adoption is not there.<p>Apple saw that the current SMS implementation was flawed in many ways and sought out to improve/replace it. For example, all of the carriers (at least in the US, with the exception of the underdog Sprint) charge an exorbitant amount of money just to send/receive text messages. I pay $20 per month for that ability. SMS also has a limit of 160 characters. It also only works via cellular, whereas iMessage works via data connection. This is awesome for me, as I live in the boonies where I don't always have a cell connection (but do have excellent wifi). Being able to reply from multiple devices is also nice. Let's not forget all of the little 'nice-to-haves' like knowing when a message has been delivered and/or read, knowing when the other party is replying, etc...<p>Alas, they did this because the carriers wouldn't. Prior to Apple releasing the iPhone, you couldn't buy a phone that didn't have some one-off UI, preloaded with garbage apps, etc... Apple forced the hand of the mobile industry with their iPhone (this is obvious to many, but concrete evidence exists inside of the Samsung vs. Apple court documents recently released)<p>Apple is now doing this again with iMessage. They took something that really needed revolutionizing, and did it. It began as something great for members of the Apple ecosystem. They used their users and platform to prove it, and it's been successful. I can communicate via my Mac, iPhone, and iPad in a (mostly) unified experience. So, I do agree and hope that this expands to a wider audience. That being said, it will be tough. An open consortium leads to all sorts of issues (ahem, Android) and sometimes having one chef in the kitchen yields the best overall experience for everyone (Apple).

As someone else has pointed out, it's an irrelevant protocol until it's made an open protocol. This will join the pile with FaceTime, iBooks, etc, that exist merely to lock people into Apples 'garden'. People should <i>want</i> to use your platform, not be forced to remain there cause they have to. Provide an open protocol, and make people want to use your products because you have the best implementation of it.

Yes, please. And if the protocol doesn't turn out to be too horrid to work with, this will allow interoperable implementations. The last thing we need is another messaging protocol that only works with one vendor's products.<p>However, FaceTime was supposed to be submitted to be made into a standard, but I haven't heard much about that, and with the percentage of time that FaceTime breaks for me, I'm guessing that it's a pretty nasty protocol and they're too embarrassed to follow through. Hopefully iMessage is better.

Bear in mind that your telco can absolutely read your SMS messages, and does not need to play games with a CA to do so.

<i>Rather, consider this post as a plea for help. iMessage is important. People use it.</i><p>If you have a problem with a closed service working only within a walled garden, maybe you should look at an actual open standard instead, like XMPP.<p>It may not have "end to end" encryption, but at least you get to know how it works and how secure it really is.<p>Nobody is forcing you to use Imessage. Apple may encourage you, by permissive defaults, yes. But nobody is forcing you to use it. It can be disabled. You can even buy a phone not made by Apple and avoid the problem all together.

There is a simply way to answer one part of this problem (Can Apple read iMessages?): court records.<p>If Apple can read these things, then so can divorce attorneys and criminal lawyers via subpoena. There would be records of that.<p>Anyone have knowledge of iMessage subpoena results?

1. It's just a guess but I don't think many users care about iMessage's encryption. Cryptographers are the exception.<p>2. XMPP is not true peer-to-peer. If you are a fan of XMPP as a p2p "solution", and you're not the XMPP provider trying to make a buck offering this "service", then I would say you don't know enough about p2p.<p>3. If you really care about end-to-end cryptography the solutions exist. Working with the nacl library is not rocket science. It's a lot simpler than SSL/TLS. And I don't see any cryptographers cracking nacl anytime soon.<p>4. Decentralised and open platforms are not really tough if you keep things simple. But for most (but not all) designers of these systems that seems just about impossible. If it's not complex it's not worth their time.<p>The biggest challenge I see with good, easy cryptography and a decent, simple peer-to-peer platform for the general public is that you will have a huge PR problem from day 1. Because the only folks who will want to use the system will be troublemakers who attract the wrong kind of attention, and a handful of smart people, like cryptographers, who no one pays attention to.

Or just use XMPP.

I'm interrested to develop a new messaging system that truly provides end to end encryption and is as secure as possible. All that with an open source protocol. I would be glad to share the work with people sharing the same interest.

Maybe porting TextSecure would be an alternative? <a href="https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure</a>

Protocol aside is there anything significantly different in the way blackberry handles BBM messages and Apple handles iMessage messages?

iMessage fails on the security front. I have received more than one message (via wifi) after I removed the SIM card from an iPhone. This would not have happened with SMS.