Apple Invites

Everytime iMessage is mentioned, I do a double take because it is almost non existent here in Turkey. And from what I hear, seems like most Europeans do not use it too.

WhatsApp has like 99.9% market share here and I assume it is a lot bigger than anything else in the EU too.

I wonder why is that though. Everyone around me has an iPhone basically and I haven’t received a blue bubble in years. The messages app is not even on my home screen.

That's only true if everyone in the group has an Apple phone, which has decreasing probability with every additional member. Excluding people from a conversation because they don't have the right brand of phone would be pretty antisocial.

I'm still waiting for iMessage to work with Android phones.

> I think Apple already has claimed the "friends and family network" via iMessage.

All the family/friends group chats I am in are WhatsApp.

I use iMessage every day for 1-to-1 messaging but I don’t really view it as distinct from SMS.

For international communication, even 1-on-1 tends to be WhatsApp.

Nobody I know uses iMessage.

Nobody uses iMessage in Spain. People swear by Zuck's spyware

iMessage is dead/dying. WhatsApp is killing it.

At this point even my American groups have become largely WhatsApp because Android exists.

This obviously offers more than just sending an email. And since the majority of Apple users aren't very tech savvy, I can see this catching on quickly.

> 1) own an iDevice

You do not need to own an Apple device to either create events or join events.

> I'll send an email for free, thankyouverymuch.

This seems fine! There are open protocols (email, ics) if they work for you, but Apple specifically developed this in a way to neither require an Apple device or Apple Account to interact. Which is better than some of the competitors! (Facebook and Google tend to create social tools which explicitly require everyone to have accounts.)

Likely doesn't need to be said, but if you are organizing parties with emails, you're probably not the target user base of this feature.

For the younger folks who organize their parties by texting (iMessages, Whatsapp, Telefram, etc), this can be enticing.

While I agree with your points in principle, the paywall may act as a way for them to handle spam/misuse more effectively

> So long as Facebook remains available to everyone, even if the content feed is a mess, the event planning space is going to be more accessible to everyone and will end up being the defacto friends & family ecosystem.

For now. We're in the process of seeing Twitter die like every other social network has died before it, Facebook will have it's time as well.

> So long as Facebook remains available to everyone

This is not a given even today. Creating a new Facebook account involves a ton of scrutiny, you need to upload an ID, and until your account is older and established it’s likely that anything you do can get auto-scanned by some spam bot and get you banned for using some keyword, even in private chats.

I don’t have a Facebook account but I needed to create one a few years back to use my oculus quest (this is before they finally came to their senses and separated the accounts) and I had a lot of trouble convincing FB that I was a real human.

> Hell, if they featureset was compelling enough, and they had an iCloud app for non-Apple hardware platforms, I might actually consider being an iCloud+ member, but I guess it's not worth it to Apple to collect a monthly payment from me if I won't make the downpayment on an iPhone and a Macbook...

You can create events from the web iCloud interface without an Apple device.

>If they want to truly claim the friends & family network, they need to remember that everyone has friends & family that aren't in the Apple ecosystem.

They are completely aware of it an actively leverage it to use your friends and family against you to force you into Apple's ecosystem. It's the main reason why Android will have to get pretty bad before I bend to such incredibly dirty tactics.

I'm not convinced they're leaving a lot of money on the table by pitching a free app at a billion iPhone users vs. the famously lucrative Linux desktop market.

This is what it's been for me as well, for several years— all meaningful friend-group interactions are now taking place in group chats, sadly this is entirely in Whatsapp and FB Messenger for me; would love if there was a reasonable migration path to getting these interactions entirely off of Meta properties.

WhatsApp being owned by Meta likely detracts from this though.

How is it funded? That is your answer.

Our club uses Spond for invites. I'm not sure what the financial side of it looks like, but it's been great for coordinating training/games/socials.

Meetup has become the worst service I use, bar none. They pretty much doubled our group fees from $200 a year to $400 a year, then started putting giant banner ads at the top of all of our member emails, then started locking essential features (like seeing RSVP lists) behind a member-level membership and started begging our members to give them money directly.

I think Apple's right about at least part of this - something like Evite isn't an app (or worth paying for), it's a feature that needs to be stuck onside another app that gets paid for.

I see people using Luma everywhere these days

I see very little use of either Evite or Meetup at this point though I imagine if I sought them out I'd see some continued use. (I do run into an Evite signup from time to time for a paid event.)

For a short period of time back in 2013 or so, we had AnyVite, which was so much better than Evite in all ways. I wonder what happened to them. I think they basically disappeared.

partiful i guess is the hot one in SF/NYC

Seems similar to when is good, which also has allows passwordless usage.

https://whenisgood.net/

I paid to go ad free. We like it though it’s been down a couple times last year..

looks awful on mobile. i do appreciate that it’s very accessible though.

Non-Apple users are able to reply to invites so no one is going to miss any parties.

This green text thing only happens in the US. Nobody really uses iMessage elsewhere.

i read this take a lot but have never heard of it in practice (from my high school nieces)

what is overwhelmingly prevalent is political bullying; eg "make the dems cry again" was all over the school in various forms (t shirts, device backgrounds, etc)

green bubble hysteria really isn't a thing beyond nerds.

You mean, like, Google Calendar? Groundbreaking free service to invite people?

Samsung shoot itself in the foot as a phone manufacturer in the last 2 years. Battery life, forced apps, ads, and a pretty bad implementation of the Android OS while trying to sell the phone at the same price as the iPhone.

The S24 ultra still has an ancient 3x cam that has been left unchanged since the S21 ultra.

It's hard to compete when Apple has the Macbook + iPhone synergy/ecosystem advantage.

I dunno most people I know here do appear to have iphones. And many of those who have an Android seemingly have an iPhone as work or personal device in addition. So 60+ percent doesn't sound unlikely.

statcounter just uses data from website traffic, it's nothing more then Google Analytics

So the 14% increase is probably a single or few site(s) getting a insane amount of traffic.

Pretty high I suspect, since you need it if you want to back up more that 5 GB.

If you keep photos and videos without dealing with a separate service, it's pretty much a no-brainer. And the cheapest tier is $0.99/mo. for 50 GB so it's not exactly breaking the bank.

I avoided subscribing for years out of principle, just backed up my photos locally (which they make as painful as possible — afaik it’s not possible to just plug your phone into a Linux machine and grab all the new photos).

I finally caved a few months ago when I got tired of fighting with the awful backup storage UI that makes it difficult to determine why the backup is failing even though it’s smaller than 5GB.

Apple has every incentive to make that UI as bad as possible while still being functional.

Don’t you need to get iCloud+ if you want to have more than 5GB iCloud storage? I would guess it’s probably more than 80% of users.

I switched to iCloud for my personal email once it supported personal domains (switched from Fastmail). It’s all I need really. Work is Gmail of course, with its annoying-in-retrospect tagging system instead of folders, which causes havoc with traditional mail apps.

Not sure but services overall is one of Apples fastest growing business segments.

Unless you use their inferior web version that pressures you into also getting an iphone.

I wonder if it is rooted in similar things though. Right, like with email. People don't really read or check emails because spam became a serious problem. Then with social media, looking at facebook, there is definitely a big different in ad space in facebook between the time I used to use it to now. Where ads have effectively become the "spam" equivalent for social media. Ultimately, did success of these technologies also lead to its demise. Email was so good, so it made sense for a market of spammers. Facebook became a prime place for ads, and as ads become more and more of the platform, people started to consciously or subconsciously step away to other platforms.

It’s interesting that WhatsApp never caught on in the US. It’s ubiquitous amongst everyone I know. Android use also seems to be much larger in Europe

I'm in my mid 40s, my friends mostly use email for organising events more than a week or two in the future, google chat or WhatsApp for more spontaneous things.

Very occasional FB invites for things when casting the net wide, like, I'm back in town and having a picnic, everyone come.

My wife is late 40s and just deleted her facebook account, and she's the most FOMO person I know - and she did this because of zuck capitulating to trump. A lot of people have had it with companies supporting fascists.

Marketplace and groups. Most of my friends are on WhatsApp so we ditched FB.

Apple would be smart to build those things and make it available on Android too. Then we could ditch FB altogether.

It's also the only bit of Facebook that hasn't turned into an endless stream of trash. I expect that not to last either, if you're looking for an idea then a localised marketplace alternative with social proof should be on your radar.

In fact, Apple Invites appears to be a direct response to the popularity of Partiful.

My social group also uses Partiful. It works great, but it's a little worrying that it's so useful while being free: I can't see how this possibly could make money, so I assume the enshittification is coming any second now.

Partiful works but to me it lacks polish. It feels like MySpace when FB first came out.

A (for most of the world, in any case) possibly surprising fact about the US is that WhatsApp is not very popular there.

This indeed causes problems when wanting to create a quick ad-hoc group for a party invitation etc., if at least one of the invitees is not an iPhone user.

I very rarely interact with any Apple tech. Recently I wanted to watch Severance, so I signed up for a trial period of Apple TV. It even worked on Firefox on my Linux desktop. But I only get 1080p video, while my screen is 1440p. The show didn't look good, and I found that yes, you can only get 1080p if you're not watching through an Apple device. I would have been happy to become a subscriber of the streaming service, but not if it looks ugly on my PC, so I didn't continue the trial.

I'm sure Apple has data showing that offering higher-res video on non-Apple hardware isn't worth it, but this experience felt like a perfect match for the rest of my experience with Apple - if you want to use their software but not hardware, fuck you. If you want to use their hardware and software with a different workflow than they intended, fuck you too.

As a big fan of Apple TV boxes and a medium fan of Apple TV+, I can't agree with this strongly enough. It's such an unforced error.

It's so unnecessary to call everything "Apple something" when they've had great success creating recognizable brand names like "iPod", "iPhone", and "Macintosh".

Calling it "Apple TV+" just feels like both the set-top box and the streaming service wanted the name "Apple TV" and neither side was budging.

Seriously - not sure what they were thinking - but this confuses the hell out of everyone (especially if they have the Apple TV+ app installed on their smart TV directly and an Apple TV physical box hooked to the same TV)

One of the rare marketing misses for Apple is naming the app, box, and service (with + added on) the same.

It's pretty good on Chromecast, though some of the media player design patterns don't quite translate to non-apple.

> "there may be a reason for me to get an iPhone now as I assumed this would be available on apple devices only."

That's the objective. Green text and all. To force everyone to adopt one platform because of network effects and social stigma.

These platform plays by the god tier trillion dollar companies are insidious and should be given scrutiny by the DOJ / FTC.

A breakup of these platforms would make none of this matter. You could pick and choose services across devices. We might even see some competition for Android and iPhone if the DOJ would step in and break this up.

Big tech is too big. A breakup would oxygenate the entire tech sector. It would probably even make the MAGMA stock go up because the sum of parts are being given away for free just to get eyeballs.

Billions of dollars are being given away for free to scrape in network effect advantages. It's at a level where competition from new players is virtually impossible. They can tax anything that moves. Every transaction, every relationship, every quanta of information.

I'm only aware it doesn't need an Apple device because spouse does have an iPhone and was able to set it up on our Roku that way. I still assume that someone in the household does need an iPhone in order to get a subscription, although now I think about it probably that's not true.

There's a dedicated physical button for it on the Roku remote. Kind of hard to miss.

[dead]

"Conglom-O: We Own You."

...Just to highlight the absurdity of the situation. Literally cartoonish corruption.

Yes it was intentional, but this is a different case. If a meaningful percentage of people don't think they can attend an event because they don't own an iPhone, that's a big problem for adoption of this product. Whether that will happen or not, I have no idea, but I think that's what the person you responded to was saying.

Less latency is a feature, not a bug. We've just grown too used to latency in everything we use.

Sounds like a good way to ruin the excitement of watching a sports game with friends.

Though iMessage largely works in part because it's pretty much transparent if you send a text message.

Unfortunately you need an iPhone to create the invite, or contribute anything else than a reply. They have to know their uncoolness is tolerated but not welcomed in the walled garden.

Will it show them as green or blue though? :)

So that's a green bubble situation. You get a subpar experience, your iPhone friends get a subpar experience from including you, and eventually they'll yell at you "well just get an iPhone already!"

It still requires people to read a text message.

It may as well be delivered via carrier pigeon outside the US.

iCalendar files predate Mac OS X, and are an ietf standard

You're being disingenuous, or you're incompetent, if you think Apple isn't going to keep this API in their closed garden.

What a dumb take

gioazzi, great work! Keep making apps that are useful and fun for you. I will definitely recommend your app with my friends

> Flutter apps feel completely _wrong_ on any platform except Android [...] Flutter explicitly eschews standard web technologies in favour of either one big canvas or lots of little canvases.

I think you're confused about how Flutter works on Android. It's not native to Android, it uses canvas with custom drawn implementations of most components there too – same as it does for iOS/macOS/web.

But no-one without an Apple Account can create them - you can only respond to Apple-having friends. There is social pressure in that too.

I think that's preferable to them being totally unable to RSVP but you're still going to be the friend that can't make the invite. It's comparable to iMessage. You can still talk to Android users but it's a notably worse experience.

Non-Apple users cant contribute to the playlist. No mention on the impact to the shared photo album. If its just a normal shared Photos.app album, non-apple users are locked out there, too.

I would say the more a given app/feature has network effects the more invested I am in it being cross-platform. For example, iMessage and Facetime are highly social. Apple was resistant to adopting the RCS protocol for iMessage, though they eventually caved and now the experience of texting between iPhones and Androids is better for both parties so it seems preferable to me.

Meanwhile, we take it for granted that there is a protocol for audio calls and text messages but not for video calls. I would like to more easily video call people with iPhones, and doing so would be technically possible but I can't because Apple benefits from the network effect. If I were to get an iPhone it would not be because Apple did a better job at creating a video call feature, it will be because people I know have iPhones and I want to call them. This seems like it gives incumbents in the space a large advantage because they can compete on having a user base and not on quality.

Ironically, Apple itself developed such a protocol for events and RSVPs (ICS), at a time when they didn't have market dominance. This caught on and it is great. I can make a calendar event in Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar and invite anyone from any of those platforms. They can RSVP and I can track their RSVPs and they can also create events in their systems and invite me. This is the kind of thing I like to encourage where possible.

Antitrust laws to prevent companies from abusing their market position.

The US Department of Justice is currently suing Apple for violating those antitrust laws [1]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-mono...

Your friends joking with you to get an iPhone is making you sick?

I mean this completely seriously and as a concerned internet stranger...if that is literally true for you, please go seek mental health services right now. That's not normal or healthy.

All my social circles where we communicate over SMS/RCS group text chats consist of a little gentle ribbing about "those darn green bubble people" and that's about the extent of it. The Android users occasionally respond in kind by showing off some cool new feature that Samsung or Google came up with that Apple hasn't copied yet and everybody laughs it all off.

I'm skeptical of the implementation, given iMessage. I'm sure Android users RSVPs will show up in a green toxic fume cloud or some such.

The article also says "collaborative playlists allow Apple Music subscribers to create a curated event soundtrack" so there's clearly a subset of functionality that's only available for certain users. There's "integration with Maps and Weather", but how does that look like in Android? Can I still "contribute to Shared Albums"?

I tested it with a sample event and I don't see any way to RSVP without logging into an Apple account. Maybe I'm missing something?

In Apple's defense, they tend to have web versions of most of their iCloud services. They even recently released a web version of Apple Maps.

Google would stuff it full of adverts and tracking. For that reason it wouldn’t be better.

Google Invites: Invite your friends!

Google Invites is being discontinued.

Google Party: Invite your friends!

Google Party is being discontinued.

Google Gathering: Invite your friends!

Google Gathering is being discontinued.

They did, a decade ago. Google Plus invites had all these features and more, and Google decided to kill them off, in the usual fashion

I'm not a fan of either doing this. I'm watching all open protocols slowly disappear and it's killing innovation in the industry.

then we will have 2 incompativle invite systems: form Apple and from Google.

The correct way to do this is to publish an open standard/API so 3rd parties can participate.

The whole green bubble thing has got to be one of the stupidest status symbol things I've seen in a long time. Though I have no doubt there are many of them. If anything, it's maybe a good life lesson that many supposed status symbols are breathtakingly stupid to care about.

As if there was no bullying in any other age? Is Apple's walled garden really the source of this bullying? Teenagers can bully each other about anything.