I see your point about security. I had not considered that. I would think the obtaining IP address security thing could be dealt with, but I’d have to give that a lot more thought.
I do do file transfer over iMessage, the need does come up occasionally.
In my situation, if I want to do something like Apple Facetime over my LAN, instead of getting 300 Mbps (perhaps halve that because of contention in a WLAN), I getting the video quality limited by the upstream ADSL2 bandwidth, which is about 0.7 Mbps after all overheads including TCP are subtracted. And before I forget, both parties are fighting over the upstream bandwidth. I do need to check that FaceTime is indeed guilty before I libel it further, mind.
A while ago, I was in bed as usual and my wife was in the office plugging in and unplugging network cables, and I used FaceTime so I could see what she was seeing and guide her.
> use a different tool rather than wait for that one to be changed. Is that feasible?
If I could give Apple some product feedback, there is a way to do it, but I forget now, then who knows they might simply fix it, it isn’t that hard. As for feasibility, I don’t know the spec of the various chat programs out there. I can’t use WhatsApp because the moronic thing only runs on phones, and I only have an iPad. They advertise a product for iPad, but incredibly this requires you to have a mobile phone as well as the iPad. I don’t know whether or not any of eg WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Signal et al have sane routing. Of course the killer thing about iMessage and Facetime is that they are installed on every Apple device so if the other person is an Apple user, a big if, then you won’t have to somehow talk them through the business of installing a new app. Of course having said that, the multi-platform apps have a greater advantage still in that you’re not limited to only being able to communicate with the 20% that is the Apple slice of the cake. I don’t have a Facebook account, but my wife uses Facebook Messenger chat a lot, and that might be worth a look. End-to-end serious encryption is of course a must and that might rule out some applications.
You were talking about alternatives. For file transfer over the LAN, Apple has a program called AirDrop which does what I need but has no chat capability, nor video conferencing. For some reason, it kicks off the protocol using BlueTooth. I don’t know why that’s necessary, but it could be that they just found it makes things a lot easier. I would think something like the algorithm that I sketched out very badly earlier should be capable of handling things. I’m quite a fan of multicast too. It could be that Apple’s fake IP address and fake MAC address generation algorithms for privacy protection might be making life difficult for such a use case. I wonder if that presents a killer problem. I didn’t think about that before since I always have such features turned off. I can see why Apple did this privacy addressing thing, what with tracking going on in the London Underground (by MAC address ?).