In recent weeks, Apple has taken heavy criticism for its failures around Apple Intelligence. While those missteps might seem like a typical strategic blunder, it could reflect a fundamental challenge with AI products—and a trap companies like Google and Figma have fallen into as well: the AI 80/20.
Readit Newsschvenk commented on Apple Intelligence – Beware the AI 80/20 blog.dfeldman.co/apple-in... · Posted by u/schvenk
I'm assuming this is referring to utterly broken iphone/android group messaging.
..and other things that, to be fair, I didn't fully spell out in the article. I suppose I could have said "periodically confuses your friends" because a lot of it has to do with switching phones, switching numbers, having more than one number, etc.—-things that aren't everyday affairs but also aren't that uncommon.
> (and millions of others worldwide)
Where else do SMS remain common?
At least here in Europe they've been relegated to automatic communications, like receiving 2-factor codes. No one uses them for messaging. I think the app of choice is different per country, but I haven't met any non American that's still used to SMS.
To be fair, when I said "millions of others worldwide" I was making a (pretty safe) assumption. As the default messaging service on every phone, and with literally billions of phones out there, it seems pretty likely that in the entire non-US world there are millions of people using it.
"No privacy whatsoever" is a bit of an stretch of an argument to make, specially when talking to the general public. You have way more privacy when sending a plain text SMS or an email than when sending a physical letter with a wax seal, and most people would argue that the latter is "private" for some definition of the word.
I would even bet that any email leaks that most users would be afraid of are going to be caused by, in this order:
A) The intended email recipient leaking it
B) The email recipient/sender storing a copy of the email at rest (likely unencrypted, even if it was sent encrypted in transit).
C) An official email archiving policy from either the recipient or the sender's organization
And only at at the very bottom of the list "one of the intermediate mail relays being compromised and leaking the email in transit".
The thing with email is it's only encrypted (even in transit) sometimes. So it kinda has the same issue as iMessage. If you're a Gmail user using Gmail's web app to email another Gmail user, you get encryption in transit (and it sounds like you might be able to implement E2EE as well). But if you email dave@somerandomemailserver.com, you won't know until you send the message whether it's encrypted.
As for envelopes and wax seals--it's an interesting question. It requires a lot less technical knowledge for someone to open that envelope than to spy on messaging traffic. On the other hand, a lot more people have access to the messaging traffic and can bring scripts to bear on it at scale.
Great write up, and I agree with most of the article, in particular regarding SMS shortcomings, Signal and WhatsApp, but I’m not sure why I should trust Telegram *more* than mobile networks operators when messages are not E2E encrypted.
To clarify: I'm not suggesting you trust Telegram more than mobile providers--if SMS were encrypted in transit I'd have a much weaker case against it. But the point is, with Telegram you're placing trust in Telegram. With SMS you're placing trust in your mobile provider, AND your friends' mobile providers, AND an unknown collection of other entities. At a minimum, that's a lot more points of weakness, even if each individual one is equally trustworthy.
This is all well and good, but for me, it's not SMS. No one uses SMS. It's iMessage. And iMessage is absolutely more secure than Telegram, and probably even Whatsapp, so all these arguments fall flat for me.
Personally, I hate iMessage because, while I have an iPhone, everything else is Linux. But that's not really an argument I can make to literally every single person I ever interact with. :/
iMessage is indeed more secure than Telegram. Dunno vs. WhatsApp, but unlike WhatsApp it has a central message archive (and as of a few weeks ago, you can end-to-end encrypt that, too, I think).
It pained me not to be able to recommend iMessage but because it's not supported on Android, Windows, or Linux, you fall back to SMS (for Android) or nothing at all (for Linux/Windows) and then it's far worse than Telegram.