Without Interoperability, Apple Customers Will Never Be Secure

Every internet user should have the ability to privately communicate with the people that matter to them, in a secure fashion, using the tools and protocols of their choosing.

Apple’s iMessage offers end-to-end encrypted messaging for its customers, but only if those customers want to talk to someone who also has an Apple product. When an Apple customer tries to message an Android user, the data is sent over SMS, a protocol that debuted while Wayne’s World was still in its first theatrical run. SMS is wildly insecure, but when Apple customers ask the company how to protect themselves while exchanging messages with Android users, Apple’s answer is “buy them iPhones.”

That’s an obviously false binary. Computers are all roughly equivalent, so there’s no reason that an Android device couldn’t run an app that could securely send and receive iMessage data. If Apple won’t make that app, then someone else could. 

That’s exactly what Apple did, back when Microsoft refused to make a high-quality MacOS version of Microsoft Office: Apple reverse-engineered Office and released iWork, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

Back in September, a 16 year old high school student reverse engineered iMessage and released This article has been indexed from Deeplinks