I've migrated back and forth. Most things are backup to cloud now. Only thing missing was Signal messages last time and I think they now fixed that. Do people still use plain SMS now?
I've migrated back and forth. Most things are backup to cloud now. Only thing missing was Signal messages last time and I think they now fixed that. Do people still use plain SMS now?
iMessage is extraordinarily popular in the US. Its userbase dwarfs Signal by over an order of magnitude
Ah fair enough. Not as many use it here in Australia
Is there data behind that or is it just anecdata?
A year ago someone on HN said “I can confirm that iMessage is extremely common in Australia. WhatsApp is very uncommon, outside of people with European (and maybe South American?) friends or family to keep in touch with.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365562
My guess is you’re both expressing truths of your individual social circles but making unjustified extrapolations to an entire nation.
iMessage is very popular in the US but 90% of users just think they are "texting". There's no other way to send an SMS for them.
That's true . The only stats I could find are unreliable SMS marketing company ones.
I can also confirmed that iMessage is basically unused in France. (And that was a core argument in the EU of Apple against the DMA for iMessage, so even Apple admits its low usage in the EU)
The issue with iMessage outside the US is the branding, it's branded as an SMS app and SMS being dead (outside of ads and delivery drivers) doesn't help for adoption.
iMessage is popular in the US because everyone has an iPhone because everyone has iMessage and everyone connects it to social status - network effects. The same reason (besides the social status) everyone uses WhatsApp in Europe.
This has more to do with the way the iPhone was launched, and the American desire to own the most expensive product, than any technical merits.
They've also finally added RCS support so while you still get "green bubbles" you mostly avoid SMS
How about photos? Moving from android's Google photo integration to apples icloud photos integration seems.. complicated
My solution was to use both - they behave a bit differently and I figure it can't hurt to get two sets of backups (I do also get iCloud for free though).
Google photos is definitely easier to export and backup to my windows PC although Apple does provide a half decent iCloud client now for windows. It's a bit janky and took awhile for me to get a proper pipeline (you can accidently delete your cloud copy by doing the wrong thing).
One thing I really miss about Android was the ability to just plug in via USB-C to any computer and backup all the photos (and then remove them from the local phone). Google Photos would retain its full quality copy this way and I would free up phone space and have a full quality copy on my local machine (plus local external drive). Try this on an iPhone and it's slow as hell (even though it has USB-C), often fails partway through a large copy, and when you delete the photos locally I believe iCloud deletes their copy as well (even if you have plenty of cloud storage). I understand it's a "sync" tool technically but there's really no reason for it to be restricted in this way.
I don't know how to take pictures out of Google photo, but it's very easy to move outside photos into Apple Photos. I do this quite often since I'm a Sunday photographer and wrangle my images in Lightroom Classic on a Windows box.
If you have an iCloud subscription, you can do this directly with a browser, just click upload and wait for it to happen. There's also a Windows client for iCloud, but I've never tried it.
Use third party, cross platform software like ente and you have no problem moving to or from any platform. Use platform dependent services and you get locked in. It is very simple, actually.
I’m on iOS and backup my photos to both iCloud and google photos
I've always been on Google only so that helps a bit. It works to backup on iPhone as well