I didn't even know about the others, thanks :-)

sftpgo is a nice project to host files in a secure way without too much hassle.

While I don't agree with your first point from my experience, the second one is very true. Especially for memory consumption, your typical Java app easily occupies five times as much as something more bare metal.

There aren't many distro with a base system as tiny as Arch. It's not a bad choice at all. It's on my server since many years, working perfectly reliable. Everything except the base system is inside Podman containers. Why not?

I still hoping JpegXL will get some traction. The fact that it was removed from Chrome looks bad but they'll most likely add it again if it does. It's by far the best of all of them.

Just use the piped.video frontend.

It doesn't make sense for them to do because their customers don't seem to care.

"Malicious" implies intent.

It's just a guess but all of Googles failed messengers were probably available for iOS, too. Apple on the other hand is known to intentionally make things incompatible with other brands.

I can only tell you about Europe, because nobody here seems to use imessage. SMS are basically dead since the first generation of smartphones came out. They are used for OTP codes from banks sometimes but that's it. The only reason why people use SMS in the US seems to be Apple. They didn't make SMS worse than they were (which would be hard to achieve), but they basically force people to keep using them. Well, or abandon their apple friends. For the API, I think Apple could afford that, honestly. They don't have to handle the data between Android phones if they support some form of federation. Only between Apple and Apple, and Apple and Android. Your operator also handles SMS when they go to or come from other operators. I think Apple just likes the peer pressure they seem to create with that app in the US. From a business perspective that might be smart, sure. Still, very malicious behavior. I'm glad there's more and more regulation coming up (at least in the EU). If imessage wasn't a niche here, they'd have to comply.

An offline version of Wikipedia would be handy though.

The Tesla comparison would work better this way: while you're driving to another Tesla owner's place, you're having a smooth ride, no bumps, car works as expected. Then you put your other friends address into into the navigation and the radio switches to noisy FM and one of the headlights starts to flicker. It's lock-out because no non-iphone user can join that club. It's not lock-in, because every iphone user could easily switch to one of the "cross-platform" messangers. Not that I like Google. They're both sh*t. But just opening up your infrastructure for others doesn't mean you have to develop and maintain apps for other OSes.

Wikipedia sais WhatsApp was released 2009, two years before iMessage. So the idea wasn't new and they most likely didn't lock out Android users by accident.

Once you slightly climb the career ladder, vocabulary turns into marketing bs. Suddenly you most not say "problem" anymore. They're "opportunities" or "challenges". So at that level you don't get "fired" because that would sound bad for the next company you're going with. You're looking for new challenges elsewhere. Leaving behind a dumpster fire like in this very case.