Should Apple Let Competitors Use FaceTime? (cnet.com)

In 2010, Steve Jobs first introduced FaceTime and promised it would become an open industry standard that could be used by Apple's competitors -- not just Apple. Well, eight years later and that still hasn't happened. CNET's Sean Hollister provides a theory as to why that is: There's also an ongoing lawsuit to consider -- as Ars Technica documented in 2013, Apple was forced to majorly change how FaceTime works to avoid infringing on the patents of a company called VirnetX. Instead of letting phones communicate directly with each other, Apple added "relay servers" to help the phones connect. Presumably, someone would have to pay for those servers, and/or figure out a way for them to talk to Google or Microsoft or other third-party servers if FaceTime were going to be truly open. But that doesn't make a broken promise less frustrating. Particularly now that Apple could potentially fix annoying business video calls as well. A Skype-killing video chat service that worked on Mac, iOS *and* Windows, Android and the open web? That's something I bet companies would be happy to pay for, too.

Comments

Re:WhatsApp to the rescue

[KixWooder]

WhatsApp is owned and operated by Facebook. No thank you.

Re: Lesson learned

[angel'o'sphere]

Facetime is based on open standards:

The FaceTime protocol is based on numerous open industry standards[9] although it is not interoperable with other videotelephony systems:

H.264 and AAC-ELD â" video and audio codecs respectively.
SIP â" IETF signaling protocol for VoIP.
STUN, TURN and ICE â" IETF technologies for traversing firewalls and NAT.
RTP and SRTP â" IETF standards for delivering real-time and encrypted media streams for VoIP.
Upon the launch of the iPhone 4, Jobs stated that Apple would immediately start working with standards bodies to make the FaceTime protocol an "open industry standard". While the protocols are open standards, Apple's FaceTime service requires a client-side certificate.[10]

FaceTime calls are protected by end-to-end encryption so that only the sender and receiver can access them. Apple cannot decrypt this data.[11]

Compared to most SIP implementations, Facetime adds techniques that enhance performance at the cost of breaking interoperability:[12] port multiplexing, SDP minimization and SDP compression.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...