This is definitely going to get banned, and as a customer of Apple’s, I will be glad for it.

I don’t need more iMessage spam.

We're not encouraging spam with this. We're mainly focused on existing conversational use cases that's currently done over SMS/RCS. They can be more human and expressive when done over iMessage.

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john_strinlai 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>We're not encouraging spam with this.

what you encourage and what actually happens are two different things, though. gmail does not actively encourage spam, yet most spam emails i receive are from gmail addresses.

you have to actively fight against malicious uses, like spam. "not encouraging" is nowhere near enough.

what systems/processes/safeguards do you have in place to prevent abuse?

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garygao 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree. We're not completely self-serve right now, so we get to talk with each potential customer and learn about their use case before onboarding them onto the platform. This way, we can prevent use cases that involve spam or abuse.

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john_strinlai 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>We're not completely self-serve right now,

"right now", which implies that you plan to move to self-serve. and obviously manually checking in on each and every customer is not sustainable if you scale.

do you do periodic checkups now? hoping nobody lies during onboarding is risky, in an already-risky endeavor. have you thought about anti-abuse systems for when you go self-serve?

	▲	garygao 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We do run checkups and keep very closely in touch with our customers. We don't plan to go self serve in the near future and will most likely still have a very personalized onboarding process.

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dubcanada 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For iPhone only users, so right off the bat your product is targeting 50% ish of a companies customer base. And the non iMessage people get a worse experience?

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allthetime 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In North America iPhone/android split is far from 50/50. I have 4 different apps running and the split is about 80/20 and has been for a decade. Internationally android is used at a higher rate - but that is decreasing as lesser economies play catch up.

	▲	dubcanada an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Not sure what bubble you live in, but that is incorrect. Maybe in California it's 80/20. Every single statistic globally is nearly 80/20% for android. There is a few rich markets and they may be 80/20 for Apple, but realistically Android wins every single time, no matter what market you look at. China/India are like 30-40% of the world, and they are both under 20% usage. Europe - 60/40% split for android US/Canada - 40/60% split for iPhone Even some of the higher countries are only 70/30% for iPhone. Ignoring that is fine if your target is rich North Americans. But you are still chopping off X% of customers.

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garygao 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We have SMS/RCS fallback for non-iMessage devices. Also, in the verticals that we're targeting, the iMessage usage rate is a lot higher than 50%

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aetch 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The last thing I want is an AI “thumbs up” or reaction over iMessage