Germans Joyn in the operator-backed rival to Skype
Deutsche Telekom has jumped aboard the Joyn bandwagon, joining Telefonica to extend interoperable VoIP and other IP services to eighty per cent of Germans - and pushing security alongside functionality. The service is live now, for those who want to download the Joyn Android client from Google Play. An iOS version us promised …
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Deutsche Telekom reckons the more-paranoid should stick to encrypted wi-fi networks
These are the norm in Germany because of the risks associated with running open networks - you might be held liable for any misdeeds carried out by someone using your network. Doesn't stop man-in-the-middle attacks on hotspots such as those provided by Deutsche Telekom on the trains.
There's a difference between open, sign-in and encrypted Wi-Fi networks. Ideally, you'd want the latter, or more precisely WPA2 Enterprise combined with EAP-SIM for user authentication.
It's got to be better than Skype which of recent months has been unusable. The thing is, however it works, it has to have clients for Android, iPhone, and Windows, Apple, and Linux desktops. Otherwise it remains a curiosity.
They have a point
I've still yet to understand how WhatsApp recovers its bandwidth costs with such a cheap yearly subscription fee on some (not all) platforms and how Viber operates if it's completely free and ad free.
It also depends on the country. Spain is collectively moving onto the next free OTT provider now that WhatsApp is charging on Android (see comments), but I guess Germans would choose Joyn and be happy to pay more to their network operator over privacy issues. I'm not entirely sure how Joyn could be marketed in the UK and whether it would be a success.
Joyn never was a good idea
It always was a feature only wanted by operators so they could still have a strong grip on the user. After all if you changed your mobile phone number you also would change your Joyn "handle".
They hope that it'll be just like SMS. First its free, then they can charge you through the nose.
Re: Joyn never was a good idea
It is rare to ever find a idea which 100% good or 100% bad. Almost all of them have some sort of trade off. With Joyn it's potential ownership of the id and cost. With Skype or GTalk it's privacy. I don't tend to use these types of utilities, so I don't have a dog in the fight.
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