I give you this feedback with respect and to help you become a better writer, because I believe you are capable of substantially more:
This was not a high quality piece of writing. It doesn’t appear as if you spent any time at all learning about the topic, and you did not express yourself well, even when trying to articulate your ignorant points.
If English is not your first language, I totally understand and applaud the effort to learn a second language, but if English is your first language, this is the work product of a child.
You need to put more effort into two main areas to improve your writing: research and structure. I cannot overstate how poorly constructed this post is, and how thoroughly it undermines your effort to make an argument.
You can learn to improve! It’s a skill, like anything else, and your natural curiosity is what drove you this far, but you will need to work at writing if you want to get better at it.
I give you this feedback with respect and to help you become a better internet commenter, because I believe you are capable of substantially more:
This is an incredibly rude and insulting way to give feedback. There is no reading of this that's kind or charitable, don't tell people their work is the "product of a child" and how you "can't overstate how poorly constructed [their] post is".
But, thankfully, you can learn to improve! Try to avoid insulting the author and their work. Instead, just try to offer actionable suggestions on how to improve.
Hi! Yeah I agree that it could’ve been better. Thank you for your feedback, I’m going to try to improve on my writing. And yes, I’m a teenager, so I’m not insulted by that. Thank you for the feedback, I’m going to work on getting better at writing. Thanks for reading and your feedback helps a lot!
Am currently a teen in high school so here's my hot take. No one actually gives a shit about the color of the bubble, like beyond it being annoying that you can't add more people to a gc if one person has an android it's not an actual problem. I would love to meet a person who actually cares about the color of a message that this article is talking about because I have yet to find them lol. And plus most of the time we aren't using iMessages, (using Discord/Snap/Insta instead) so no one even knows if you have an iPhone or not, we just want to talk to our friends, no matter the phone.
As an Android user, yes, people absolutely care. I care, even. If I get added to a group chat (any group chat, since my entire family and social circle uses iPhones), that chat is immediately degraded to potato videos, every like is now a whole string of useless text, etc. I'll never forgive Apple for the crap they put me though _as a customer_. My family has iPads, MacBooks, two iPhones, AirPods, you name it. I'm typing this on a year-old MacBook. But because I run one Linux desktop and don't feel like replacing my old Pixel, I have to deal with their ire. Apple demands absolute loyalty.
EDIT: Reading down the page, it seems that other Android users have a different experience, where only they are degraded? That's odd. In my experience, my presence degrades the entire chat and everyone gets swapped to MMS.
> But because I run one Linux desktop and don't feel like replacing my old Pixel, I have to deal with their ire.
SMS/MMS has technical limitations you're running into. It's the lowest common denominator that's going to work between Apple and non-Apple devices. Google and carriers have shit the bed multiple times over the past decade trying to come up with an equivalent to iMessage.
There's no good reason why Apple and Google couldn't collaborate to design an upgraded and open SMS protocol that everyone can plug into. These two effectively control the entire mobile market.
They only reason they don't is spelled out exactly in this thread. Apple cares more about pressuring people into their walled garden than actually serving customers well and encouraging a vibrant market of products using cross compatible messaging protocols.
Which AFAIK Apple does not use. I have RCS enabled on my Android phone but it only works to other Android users who have a compatible phone that also has RCS. Still does not resolve the OP's issue that Apple refuses to send/receive messages to/from other vendors' devices unless it is via SMS/MMS. It's a sad state of affairs indeed.
I’ve seen it posted multiple times on this very forum that carriers have not done a good job rolling this out. How is this actually going over in Android-land?
In Australia it's been on Telstra for a bit. I got it working on Optus last year. I don't know what happens to other companies running over the Telstra or Optus networks though.
> Apple cares more about pressuring people into their walled garden than actually serving customers well and encouraging a vibrant market of products using cross compatible messaging protocols.
Apple has already been serving their customers with Messages. A free E2EE messaging system usable across all their devices. Your "Apple walled garden" complaint rings a bit hollow considering there's tons of messaging apps on iOS. Why are you not complaining WhatsApp or Signal doesn't make their infrastructure cross compatible for Apple to use? You know, vibrancy and all.
Messaging platforms (Apple included) don't want to be interoperable. It slows down feature development and partners in development may be at cross purposes. It also means opening expensive infrastructure to use by third parties. The rollout of RCS has been an object example of those issues.
But no, it must be Apple bad. Walled garden! WHARGARBL!
There's a difference between interoperability and being cross-platform. Nobody is saying iMessage should be inter-operable with Signal or whatever, but that it should in some way be compatible with non-Apple platforms. All the other messaging services work on both Apple and Android devices, as well as often having web/desktop versions.
It's the definition of a walled garden. Google's messaging services aren't limited to Pixel devices or even Android in general, whereas Apple has made theirs available only on devices they manufacture.
> but that it should in some way be compatible with non-Apple platforms
It is fucking compatible. Messages falls back to the most compatible option between platforms and carriers: SMS/MMS. RCS has been a shit show, even Google has had to run their own parallel infrastructure for it just to avoid the implementation problems of carriers. Google also has proprietary extensions for RCS for E2EE which only works on Google's infrastructure and only between clients running Google Messages.
An app falling back to something else entirely does not make the first system "compatible". All Apple did was bundle SMS into their iMessage app. That has nothing to with iMessage, which is not allowed on non-Apple hardware.
Google Messages and every other default messaging app on phones falls back to SMS when RCS isn't available for the recipient. Google hasn't made their E2EE extensions available outside their app. Where's your "there's no excuse" outrage?
You're trying to excoriate Apple for not supporting an extremely poorly implemented "standard" (RCS) or investing tons of money fighting with carriers and partners trying to create some new "standard". It's absurd.
If Apple tried to support the RCS clusterfuck that would be a third protocol supported in their Messages app. Even if it was some new standard hammered out with Google and carriers there would still be an SMS/MMS fallback for the literal billions of handsets that won't support whatever new standard.
Yeah, I agree 100%. The issue is that Apple has used it's market share to force users onto something that isn't better, because iMessage isn't open to everyone. So you have Apple users bouncing back and forth between two shitty systems (in the same app, so folks don't really even know what's going on), and I'm forced to interact with them on Apple's terms.
RCS' rollout has been a complete shit show. Carriers have deployed it inconsistently between markets, messaging apps have had inconsistent support for it, different apps have added their own extensions, and interoperability between carriers has been inconsistent. Shit, Google Messages only started supporting it in 2018 with most users needing to use Google's servers to actually get it working across carriers. Google only added E2EE last summer and only in 1:1 conversations between Google Messages users.
So I'll repeat, SMS/MMS is the least common denominator that will reliably work on non-Apple devices and across carriers. Adding RCS support to Messages would mean building their own infrastructure like Google has done in order to have the feature work reliably.
RCS has been around a long time, but it has been deployed by major carriers in just the last year and certainly is not universal. Google also just did a bypass the carriers thing mid last year. It is not a this feature has been missing for years question.
Adding a full feature set is something to approach with caution since Apple does not go the Google approach of burn it down and start over every few messaging apps. Most of the zero days seem iMessage related.
> If I get added to a group chat (any group chat, since my entire family and social circle uses iPhones), that chat is immediately degraded to potato videos, every like is now a whole string of useless text, etc.
I think this should at the very least be classified as a new dark pattern - and it sounds as if it could potentially even have antitrust implications:
Apple's strategy is effectively that users of competing products aren't just put at a disadvantage themselves, Apple will disadvantage their whole social circle and rely on social pressure to drive them back from the competitor.
This seems honestly extremely anticompetitive. (Not to mention, has icky similarities to china-style social credit systems)
And signal, and wechat (if Chinese frens), and Kakao (if Korean frens), and Line (if Taiwanese), and Viber (Thai, Vietnamese), and FB messenger. Those I know on iphone also rarely using iMessage.
> Those I know on iphone also rarely using iMessage.
I think there is a significant US vs. ex-US difference in how people use messaging. I am in the US and very few older adults I know use over-the-top messaging apps, with perhaps the exception of Facebook Messenger. The only people who use WhatsApp are folks who have traveled internationally, have international friends, or international business contacts. Signal is for crypto-nerds. Telegram is for... I'm not sure. Certainly nobody I know.
Interestingly, people I know who are in their 30s are more likely to use FB Messenger, because they're more likely to have been on Facebook since it was introduced.
But people in their 20s seem to have eschewed Facebook. Some of them seem to use Snapchat or Instagram Chat, but without the expectation that everyone is going to be on it.
So, basically, there is no universal chat tool that you can use in the US and basically expect people to be on, except SMS/MMS (and iMessage, which basically takes the place of MMS on iPhones from a users perspective).
My 12-year-old uses iMessage exclusively with all his peers. Guess he's a few months too young, but I'm not gonna blow off the whole premise of the article quite yet.
The people denying this seem to be ignoring the data the article quotes suggesting a sizable majority of American youth are on iPhones and likely social pressure has a lot to do with it. Sorry I’m not buying these anecdotes of “no one cares”. If no one cared they’d be on cheaper androids. Most likely they’ll say they don’t care and yet secretly do. If I as a 40 year old feel pressure from colleagues there’s no way a teen isn’t.
I’m 35 and grew up on the Internet chatting on AIM and chat rooms as a teenager, and Discord feels very much like that. I like it a lot and vastly prefer it to text messaging or Facebook messenger.
Funny you should say that - I’m 38, and feel the same way. So much so, in fact, that I set up a Discord instance for my 13-year-old daughter to converse with her friend group.
It’s super nice because they can set up channels for only some subset of the everyone on the instance, and because I admin it, I can see everything that goes on there if there’s an issue. I don’t expect issues, but the fact that I’m the admin means that a lot of her friends’ parents who are otherwise relatively strict allow their kids to use it.
I have no kids so have 0 context, but discord servers are very easy to create. If your child wants to avoid your surveillance couldn't they just make a new server that you don't admin? If there are parental controls can't they just make a new account? Has this been a problem for you?
Different person, but I have a kid. If your parental technique is 'surveillance', they're just going to go over to friend's house instead. It's like a micro-managing manager, it's going to be really ineffective and compliance is an illusion.
Setting the boundary of 'you can use Discord and only this channel I've setup for you and your friends' works if you've spent their whole life setting reasonable boundaries that you discuss with them. Just like an adult, reasonable boundaries are more likely to be complied with.
To the specifics, they could create a new account/server, but it's really obvious on the server list (set a unique server icon). Discord doesn't have parental controls (e.g., you can't set a settings PIN so the settings can't be changed), but there are a lot of server controls you can setup to restrict access (like really short invite times, for example).
Sure, they could create a new instance if they wanted - but it's just easier for them not to. Plus, if they did, then some of their friends would either not be able to join or would get in trouble when their parents saw that they were members of a second server.
It's honestly not something I'm worried about. I'm just saying that using the server I set up is the path of least resistance for them.
Yeah, my "with friends" chat moved from MSN -> Facebook -> Skype -> Discord. My "with family/professional relations" moved Email -> Facebook -> Whatsapp in the same time. My "random internet groups" moved MSN -> IRC -> Discord -> Matrix.
I think you are being nostalgic. The current generation of communication software (iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Signal, Messenger, Hangout, Matrix, etc) trumps what was popular in the 90s/00s.
And every one of them needs a separate client, with a separate list of friends and handles, a separate program to check and monitor, ensuring that they are well-behaving. The current generation of software has no equivalent of Trillian or Pidgin, which could interact across any protocol. Heck, the current generation has no concept of "protocols" at all, instead treating the network communication as something entirely internal and subservient to the program running it.
I know a lot of people hate it, but Signal piggybacking on your phone number and native contact list is a reasonable workaround to that “seperate contact list” issue. And mobile push notifications make that “a seperate program to check and monitor” a non problem, at least for me.
Did you check Franz/Ferdi? Though its Electron, it does support a lot of protocols.
People here (NL) barely use iMessage. They use WhatsApp mainly. I prefer (and do use mainly) Signal. For group chat, Matrix. Though Discord is (unfortunately) very popular. I dig it only for gaming.
Doesn't Ferdi just put everything into an embedded browser and call it a day? I may be wrong here as I used it for a brief stint, but that is basically what I picked up from it.
* single chat client (not a plethora on many platforms these days)
* ability to set online, offline, away, invisible (basically if you're available or not, whereas Facebook/Instagram/Slack don't really have that same separation and even the ones that do tend to not be as popular)
* Single-purpose platform, no other social media needed to carry it. i.e. Instagram's DM's are tucked away. Discord is technically single-purpose, but it's also at its core a social media platform, you need to join servers/Discords for all the separate things you're into, etc. so it's also not a single-purpose platform).
Nah not really. For normal users maybe, but if you were into programming you own utilities bots, scripts etc, today most platforms are very limited.
Out of all of them I like discord the most, but it's not hard to find problems even there. (weird scrolling, nearly useless search). I miss custom clients.
Plus, while I like the integration gifs images and some emojis, I generally find it overused in almost all servers I am on.
Its kind if funny that Apple Facetime and Facebook are the way my child speeks with his grandmother. He loves his grandma, but the tech will forever be old and lame as a result.
The same will happen to Discord, too. Personally, I still think ICQ and IRC are the epitome of chat applications.
DeadAIM by JimADI was the epitome of chat for me... There was AIM+ as well...
It seems like yesterday we NEEDED to hack a chat client to remove ads to make it usable... Kind of how we use adblocking on web browsers to make the web usable...
I'm actually really glad to hear that Discord is the popular platform among young adults. I run an educational/professional Discord server so this has me thinking I'm in the right place to help teach people about my industry.
My biggest worry isn't that Discord (or whatever is next in that space) kills off other IM, but that it kills off email - i.e. the last truly widespread open and federated protocol for person-to-person communication.
It appeals to gaming communities rather than business ones through it's design and features. You don't have to sign up to instances separately - there's a single account you use to sign into any, and you can adjust your picture/nickname per instance. It's got great streaming and voice channel features. Because of all this, it's the #1 platform for gaming communities, and many other tech communities opt for it as well.
Was going to comment, anecdotal but I'm 24 and I absolutely prefer texting people with iMessage.
It's also a slight verification in some situations — if I were to get someone's number from a dating app, or chat with someone from Facebook Marketplace and the message was green, I'd be much more hesitant to message them.
It's a negative signal to me if it's green, as they may be using a Google Voice number or any other fake number system. This isn't to say someone couldn't have a burner iPhone, but it's way more effort than simply having a Google Voice number, and I haven't encountered that.
The statement isn't "most Android users are scammers," but "most scammers use Android."
I personally would be less likely to respond from a dating app or marketplace app in particular. Google Voice numbers are less traceable and more easily replaceable, which makes them more viable for scammers.
I don't fully understand this line of thinking. The vast, vast majority of Android users do not use Google Voice. They just have a different phone operating system than your phone.
I mean, your preferences are your own, and if you prefer to only date iPhone users, that's weird, but you're entitled. I am just struggling to understand the Google Voice connection here.
I was addressing the specific commenter who uses Google Voice, but to use the comment prior to that:
> It's a negative signal to me if it's green, as they may be using a Google Voice number or any other fake number system.
I'm not implying the vast majority of "green-bubble numbers" are Google Voice rather than Android phones, but that there is no verification they are not Google Voice numbers.
I'm not trying to be elitist at all; there's just a verification that happens with an iPhone texting another iPhone of (1) this is a real phone number, and (2) this isn't a cheap burner flip-phone someone just bought. When interacting with strangers from the internet, that verification is important!
I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a spam iMessage, but I get at least one green message from a spammer daily. And I doubt they’re using Android, it’s probably Twilio or other sketchier telecom providers.
This is ultimately a problem because regular SMS has zero authentication, whereas I iMessage is essentially walled off to legit users by the telephone carriers and Apple.
I've never got a phishing message at all. And the last spam message I got was 6+ months ago. I guess at some point Google figured out spam SMS blocking, or some other event has drastically decreased the rate of spam messages.
I just recently moved from Android to an iPhone, and pretty much every teenager I've texted since has immediately texted back something along the lines of, "Wow, you got an iPhone. Cool. Welcome." My son had to explain to me how they knew I'd switched, as I had no prior clue about the green/blue message colors. A couple of crusty old middle aged folks like myself have commented as well, but not nearly universally like the teens.
So clearly the teens in my social circle at least are paying attention enough to notice and comment.
The color is there because a regular SMS may either take a significant amount of money per message or empty your free SMS plan. That depends on a carrier, but e.g. my SMS costs me 0.7¢ or so, iirc. And more if a message spans a very short character limit (160, or ~80 for unicode). That's what some people would like to pay attention to, because when there was no/bad internet (a regular issue back in the day) iMessage switched to SMS seamlessly.
Is this still a commonplace practice? I remember (in the US) this being the case when I was a young teen, with a call time quota too (accidentally made a $400 USD phone bill once...), but now in my mid 20s, all the phone plans I'm aware of have unlimited local + "long distance" calling and unlimited SMS/MMS.
International calls still cost per minute, and IP bandwidth is metered, but I honestly thought metered calls/texts were mostly a thing of the past. Is this a regional thing?
Anecdotal data point from Germany. SMS is still 9ct per message if you don't pay for a package with included text messages, MMS is around 39ct/300kb, and as far as I know there are no (and have never been at any price point) packages with included MMS messages.
It's not surprising >90% of people in Germany use WhatsApp (+ other messengers)
Here in Haiti, it was between texting 5 messages or call for one minutes (if you have not activated any special plans). So, when WhatsApp came, everyone switched and SMS is now mostly ads from the provider. Most people only do quick calls and would wait when the internet get better to do longer exchanges. Internet infrastructure is still not good.
The article misses the point. Green is not what makes it bad. Green just becomes associated with all of the bad features. The reason it’s bad is because it lacks all of the Rich capabilities that iMessage offers relative to sms.
Also the notion that if I text a friend a blurb of text that it somehow shows up as a line item on my cell phone bill and is logged by the phone company is simply absurd.
I too detest green texts. But the color has nothing to do with it.
Absolutely. Green bubbles are associated with a subpar, lower grade, poorer quality, which creates doubt and caution in the user's mind when they see it. It's like an asterisk next to the bubble with fine print attached to it.
Quite a brilliant bit of UX design on Apple's part to put SMS/MMS and iMessages in the same exact app and colour them differently to form an instinctual association in the user's mind that 'green bubble bad, blue bubble good'.
It’s worth noting that all messaging used to be green back in the old iOS days. When iMessage was added they made them blue so you knew you were using the new snazzy feature. So to those saying apple picked an intentionally derogatory color are simply misinformed.
It's not the color, but the fact that the person with green bubbles will not see what you see if you use comment reactions or replies -- for example if you put a heart reaction on a comment, the android user will not see a heart on the message, and instead will get a separate text that says "Jimmy loved a message" and they can't tell which message you're talking about. So when you interact with green bubble people in iMessage, you have to modify your behavior and find alternate ways to express those reactions, which is annoying.
> the android user will not see a heart on the message, and instead will get a separate text that says "Jimmy loved a message" and they can't tell which message you're talking about
The substitute message for the reaction (known as a "Tapback" in iMessage) does let the recipient tell which message is being reacted to, though it's not very user-friendly. The format is something like:
The Google Messages app,[1] which is preloaded on many Android phones, now automatically interprets substitute messages for iMessage Tapbacks and displays them as reactions, the same way iMessage users would see them.[2] Hopefully, this feature makes its way to open source texting apps soon.
Thanks, I could have sworn that before I switched back to iOS, I was getting a bunch of "<X> loved a message" from iOS users. Maybe it improved in newer iterations.
What I find annoying is that Apple is doing exclusive proprietary stuff in their default chat app. At that point you might as well just use Instagram or whatever else. Actually I find emojis annoying to begin with, on any platform, so there's that.
You can disable iMessage in the settings. Heck, since you seem to yearn for the days of text only, you can also turn off MMS and disable messages over 120 characters.
Stealth Advertising. 10 years ago it only cost £30k to get a couple of full page right side articles written up to stealth advertise in the Sunday Times & Sunday Observer. Don't know what the current rates are, as journalism is a lot of what you know and what they need to keep below the radar.
Proof it and sell it to the NYT, they’d love to see their competitor go down in flames. Or to Google, because Apple’s reputation would also suffer.
That opportunity also exists for any insider with actual knowledge. None of them coming forward is a pretty good indication it’s bullshit.
And who, exactly, is the seller here? Is it the publishing company? In that case they would seem to be underreporting their income, which is a crime. Trump could have ended the NYT if he had managed to substantiate the charge.
Or is it individual reporters? In that case, the publisher is the largest single victim of this dynamic, since they aren’t getting any cash but carry all the risk. They would have an interest to stop it and obviously a rather good position to do so.
1) Apple pays PR company to write a really compelling pitch for an article (maybe even writing basically the whole thing, or at least providing all the quotes and whatnot)
2) Journalist writes the article because hey, it’s a great story (which will get lots of clicks) being handed to them on a silver platter
This is the best I can do to try and fix this issue: try to get Apple people onto Signal.
My experience as an Android user when dealing with an iMessage initiated chat is terrible. Apple's obfuscation of the distinction between its proprietary messaging platform and sms/mms does a disservice to everybody.
Never trust the encryption in proprietary software there's a reason criminals and those relying on privacy for life doesn't use iPhones. Further Apple has proved countless times they don't care about their customers privacy. If you don't care, fine you do you.
> So don't post state secrets on SMS. I hardly think that encryption is a major issue, unless you actually have something to hide.
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden
> I just don't see that happening anytime soon.
You can install Signal right now for free. You don't require anyone's permission to do this.
There is a setting in Signal to alert you when one of your contacts joins Signal. Only other people who have Signal receive this notification and they can turn it off.
They also don't receive the alert because they were in your contacts. They receive the alert because you were in their contacts.
It preserves the privacy of your contacts (no one learns that you have them as a contact) and people have a choice about whether to receive the notifications (it isn't spam). That's not worse.
> Is there a setting when you join that doesn't blast it to everyone who has you as a contact?
It isn't blasting it whatsoever. Their client is querying whether any of their contacts has Signal. If one does now that didn't before, and their client is configured to notify them when that happens, their client notifies them when that happens.
The client has to be able to determine whether it can use the network to contact a given peer. Removing the ability to provide a notification when that happens is just security through obscurity.
It's not clear to me what you're actually asking for.
Signal, like it or not (I feel both ways) is keyed on phone numbers. When you look for someone, that's what you look for, and unless someone messages you first, you have to look for them.
So anyone who has your phone number and thinks "hmm, is so and so on Signal?" will find out, yes.
What's the downside to them opting in to getting alerts that the answer is now yes? I find them annoying and turn it off, but I can't avoid anyone who has my number messaging me one time on Signal, that's just how the platform works.
> So anyone who has your phone number and thinks "hmm, is so and so on Signal?" will find out, yes.
It would be more privacy preserving to prevent that user from ever knowing the answer until I send them a message.
The usual areas this is a problem are for example: bad exes, poor former business relations, anyone who is harassing/stalking someone, and so on. I enjoy Signal as an app but it's a bit disingenuous to pretend that there aren't other ways of architecting a messenger system that could preserve anonymity better.
> It would be more privacy preserving to prevent that user from ever knowing the answer until I send them a message.
Someone has to send the first message. To have end to end encryption, that someone needs to be able to retrieve the other person's public key in order to be able to send it. This means they can determine whether you have a public key, i.e. whether you have the app.
> The usual areas this is a problem are for example: bad exes, poor former business relations, anyone who is harassing/stalking someone, and so on.
If your bad exes don't have your phone number, they don't learn that you installed Signal. If they do have your phone number, they learn that you installed Signal, but if them learning this one bit of information is an actual problem for you, maybe you should change your phone number.
Can you read my SMS messages? Eh, if you want to go to the trouble to intercept them, I don't really care. They're pretty boring, and I know they're not secure so I don't send anything sensitive over SMS.
It seems to me like you're being downvoted because it looks like you're making the "nothing to hide" argument. But a more charitable interpretation might indicate that you feel SMS still has utility despite being unencrypted, which I agree with.
If you have someone's phone number, you can just about guarantee that you can message them. It might not be encrypted, or have richer features like other messaging services, or it might even be expensive, but it's fairly reliable and doesn't require any third-party apps. Just like how you might shout to someone at a distance to get their attention and convey important information, but you wouldn't shout their credit card number to them.
Same here, 40 years old (single, no kids) but I do keep clued on what kids are doing these days (via my niece and nephew) - never heard them issue come up either, I hazard to guess the whole status of owning an iPhone and iMessage has more to do with the socio-economic circles one moves in. With that being said, in New Zealand 53.94% use Android and 44.52% use iOS with most kids either using FB Messenger or WhatsApp which is probably why so few care about bubble colours.
To me, the color means I am not sending/receiving images/video at full quality.
In my extended family, we even have both iMessage groups and WhatsApp groups, the iMessage ones specifically when we want to share original quality pics/videos of the kids and family for whoever wants to save them.
It's not an Apple thing, it's a carrier thing. MMS (green) data sizes are controlled by the carrier. WhatsApp doesn't use MMS and is a closed protocol.
iMessage (blue) sent messages are similarly a closed protocol and unencumbered by the carrier.
The destination carrier determines the maximum allowable size an MMS attachment can be:
Tier 1 Carriers -- Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T -- all MMS content up to about 1 MB.
Tier 2 Carriers allow MMS content of 600 KB.
Tier 3 Carriers allow MMS content of 300 KB.
MMS (“green messages”) are mangled by most US carriers. The carrier will often recompress the media. And phones tend to send it at a lower quality to begin with.
I had never thought of doing that. I just tried, and clicking the + symbol in WhatsApp gives me option to send photos/video, documents, contact, and location.
If I choose documents, I do not see where I can go to select photos/videos in the iPhone camera roll. I presume it may not be accessible that way.
Also, I presume WhatsApp does not want to allow people to send photo/video at full size in their network to reduce bandwidth costs.
Exactly. When I see a green message bubble on my iPhone, it means that I'm in a gimped environment, especially if it's a group chat. I can't leave an SMS group chat unilaterally. I can't direct-reply to specific messages. Emoji-reactions to messages will render as "John liked 'Check out this website!'" Links won't get rich previews.
Personally I'd take that as a cue to switch to a more inclusive messaging platform but that's just me.
Easy for me to say I guess. There's never been enough iOS ubiquity in my circle for the network effect to take over. There's age, nationality and class factors at play. UK had slightly less iOS dominance than the US and I'm older.
as a counterpoint, iMessage messes up links sometimes, I had to turn it off because it breaks some types of links that I sometimes have to exchange with my coworkers. SMS is plain text, so the link is preserved as-is
Edit: those are links generated using Firebase Dynamic Links service. When sent over Twilio (vanilla SMS) they work but when forwarded from iPhone to iPhone they will break unless you turn off iMessage.
I think it matters a lot for a certain social class; below the WSJ tweet of this article, this is what one concerned parent tweeted in reply (I shan't link to the tweet, don't want to hassle the fellow for sharing his opinion)
> Yep. My son had a galaxy s20+ at the beginning of his 9th grade year this year. Within 2 weeks he asked if he could get the iPhone since kids were calling him the “green bubble” kid. Once he got his new iPhone 13 Pro Max, they shut up.
And quite a few other parents/relatives sharing similar anecdotes.
in high-schools where parents of students casually buy them $1000+ phones... it matters a lot, it seems. Peer Pressure is a bitch, even when you have no 'real' problems, kids can make up problems for themselves.
You're interpreting the headline too literally if you what you took from it was that people care about the actual color of the messages. The point is that they care about preserving the advantages of everyone in a group chat being on iMessage. As soon as even one participant in the conversion is on a non-Apple device, the chat switches to SMS, and you lose some of the fancy iMessage features. There also may be a status component where some kids think iPhones are cooler.
Of course this doesn't apply to every group of people. As you say, in some circles other non-Apple chat platforms are more popular so this isn't an issue. But don't make the mistake of thinking that just because iMessage isn't popular in your friend circle that it's not popular in general.
It’s not the color itself that matters. It’s the consequences of seeing said bubble. It could be purple. The point is that these nice features such as liking a message or FaceTiming the group easily are now gone. I don’t avoid Android users, but I personally try to lump them into separate groups and/or use something like FB Messenger to get back some of those missing features.
I care about color customization only because I assign everyone their own color scheme so I won't message the wrong person. One time telling my father to "Have a good day at work sugar pie" was enough.
Not a teen by many decaf, I recently got an iPhone, I received a surprising amount of congratulations after my bubble color changed. From a wide range of people.
this, i don't understand why journalists want to create problems when there are clearly none, do they feel like they became out of touch with the new generation? do they feel like they need to do something to regain the influence they long lost?
A few years ago, when I was a teen in high school, I was part of a decently large group that used iMessage to make plans and hang out. We never had any Android users who consistently showed up, so iMessage was an easy default.
I recognized that we could potentially be excluding people who didn't have iPhones, so I brought up the topic in the group. Switching to a regular MMS group was a non-starter -- MMS is slow and unreliable, administering large groups is a complete disaster, and many teens can't receive MMS messages at all because they don't have a data plan (whereas iMessage works over a Wi-Fi connection). So I researched alternatives and suggested we switch over to Slack (this was before Discord got big, so Slack seemed like the best option at the time).
I got flamed hard for this suggestion. People very much did not want to download a new app, make an account, and learn to use it just for one group chat. iMessage was working great for us, so we decided to stick with it and reconsider if an Android user actually wanted to join the group. (One Android users eventually showed up, but the group went with the path of least resistance and just relayed information to him separately rather than switching chat platforms. Of course, this meant he missed out on all the socialization aspects of this group).
Eventually, we hit iMessage's 30-person limit on the number of participants in a group chat, and so we were forced to switch to Slack. This was a complete disaster: Slack was cumbersome, intuitive, and a painful transition, and it completely killed the group chat. It wasn't worth opening up a new, clunky app just to send a meme or joke to some friends, and Slack's extremely unintuitive notification settings [0] meant that nobody saw anyone's messages anyway. It didn't help that this happened in the fall right after some people had moved off to college and a bunch of new freshmen joined the group; and within about two weeks the group ceased to exist.
My takeway from this was that the iMessage lockin was definitely real, not because of any social stigma but because iMessage was, at that time and place, far superior to any other well-known product for our use case. Everybody made a Slack account and switched over to the new group, but nobody used it because it was unintuitive and cumbersome. Nowadays it seems Discord is finally succeeding in this space; I'm in college now and among my peers Discord is by far the preferred means of communication in small and large groups alike. Even many of my professors are on Discord and use it as their primary communication channel outside the classroom (I've had several classes where office hours are held in a Discord voice channel). Its interface is cleaner, easier to use, and more performant/responsive than Slack's, its notification settings have sensible defaults but are easy to customize, and its voice channels are an absolutely incredible feature that puts products like Zoom to shame.
I know Discord certainly has it's fair share of issues when it comes to freedom, privacy, and interoperability -- but ultimately teenagers don't care about any of that -- as you said, we just want to talk to our friends. It's all about who offers the best features for the least friction -- and I'm not talking gimmicks that nobody uses like cryptocurrency integration or talking animated avatars, but rather functional aspects including the product's reliability, usability, practicality, performance, and of course the network effect. A few years ago the winner was iMessage on nearly all fronts, today it's Discord.
I can deal with the green text, what's annoying is when my S.O.'s father, who absolutely insists on using Android when the rest of us all have iPhones, insists on taking a video of my son and texting it to us, and it comes through as (I shit you not) some crazy potato resolution like 192x105 and is 300k despite being a minute long; this absolutely NEVER happens from another iPhone, the downsampling of both photos and video
Yeah I also wouldn't like to be pressured into buying a >1000$ phone when a 200$ one works just as well... Unless some people insist on using weird, non-crossplatform messengers.
My iPhone is my primary camera, good screen, durable, and in-hand for a bunch of key life events where a bigger camera wouldn't have worked. Well worth it. Purchasing choices are not universal.
That's true. I stopped taking pictures of everything once I realized I never look at them later, and nobody else gives a crap about my pictures (remember the old jokes about watching the neighbors slide show of their vacation? It's still the same). I use my phone camera maybe once a month, and it's to take a picture of a receipt or something I need to remember but I don't have a pen and paper handy.
Agree - it's a key way I record memories of my children and family. It's how I photograph, read, research, communicate and occasionally work, so worth spending on for me. I've shot paid content for Tourism Australia on my phone as well.
Well, seems we agree, it’s a good thing you don’t have to spend a grand to get an iPhone (or a high-end Galaxy…). If you want to try an iPhone, try a refurb, to get you closer to the $200-300 price point.
My wife uses iPhone, and whenever she sends stuff, it comes over as crap.
So it goes both ways. Maybe you should get an android instead? Or you can continue being snobby about Apple and Google being companies that want closed gardens.
The real villain here is the carriers who did not provide the infrastructure for large MMS attachments. If there was a widely supported standard Apple would probably implement it, instead the standard limit is 1MB or something so videos will just generally suck.
RCS is pretty meh technically and not widely supported, why would Apple take on the extra complexity? They can barely make their own apps work as it is.
iMessage has existed in more or less its current form for over 10 years now. RCS took too long and basically gave this space to Apple. And Apple keeps adding features, such as bundling photos sent at once, showing where photos you have came from, and other things, not to mention things that STILL aren't on Android (nor whatsapp) like livephotos.
Potato-quality happens the other way too, for what it's worth. I tend to believe it's the fault of iPhones, because sending media Android->Android over MMS works fine.
There is no reason to be so entitled thinking other people have to buy a > $1000 phone just because Apple gimps on their messaging app. If you want him to text you a better quality video, buy him a phone, or better yet don't because that's their choice.
OK, but I got my totally workable Android phone (Samsung Galaxy A20) for just over $200. Some people may not have that extra money, or may prefer to spend it on something besides an expensive phone.
I created a WhatsApp group chat for my family years ago and there's never been any functional problems. Obviously there's that whole Facebook privacy issue but I don't see my family switching to something like Signal anytime soon.
The only reason I have a reddit account is so I can disable all the junk in preferances and not have to worry about the subdomain. My reddit basically looks like HN. Old is good, but not as good as what you can get with customization for now.
Their App Store privacy report, as well as the app developer's explicit privacy policy, directly contradicts you. Could you kindly back that up with some evidence, or is this more FUD from you?
It uploads your usage data and identifiers (presumably username) without consent, and does so via IP, leaking your city-level location to the developers.
My information is coming directly from its app store privacy label.
Your reddit username is not your identity, and it's data which reddit already has. In fact, you can use it to browse reddit without being signed in, and reddit will glean much less data from you by the use of Apollo in either case.
The developer specifically states that they perform no user-linked tracking with their app. Their monetization model also supports this conclusion.
I'm a iOS tweak developer and the way the App Store is ran is fantastic as it prevents people like me from posting our tweaks to the main store as in my opinion a regular person shouldn't be installing tweaks or jailbreaking their device as if they install a bad tweak or fuck up their device they should know how to navigate the command line to fix it. Jailbreaking is cool but if you don't know what you are doing you shouldn't do it.
There are plenty of 3rd party app stores for the iPhone/iPad that anyone can access with out jailbreaking, Ignition (https://ignition.fun), TuTuApp (https://tutuapp-app.org), TweakBox (https://www.tweakboxapp.com), I'm probably missing more but they do exist. But they're sketchy and ad filled. They do how ever allow anyone to install semi-untethered jailbreaking software like Unc0ver and Electra.
That being said Apple taking 30% cut in revenue is way too much in my view and the way it's set up could be better.
Some of my favorite posts I’ve made: https://juliette.page/b/scratch - My attempt at writing an interpreted language in Scratch https://juliette.page/b/fediverse - My take on how to explain the Fediverse