Dear iPhone users: Please don’t forget that a green bubble is a person | Hacker News Reader

Dear iPhone users: Please don’t forget that a green bubble is a person

androidauthority.com

12 pointsfreedomben21 comments

> Apple intentionally made the green bubble color as ugly as possible

A lot of the arguments in this article forget a single thing, which is that when the iPhone came out, everything was green as there was no iMessage. The blue bubble is the new kid on the block here.

I was also struck by this hyperbolic and flat out wrong talking point in the article.

I kind of resent the notion that green = Android. The distinction is actually quite important. Green means it’s an SMS message. Green May very well cost me money (I don’t have unlimited SMS on my plan). Green means it’s going through the phone company. Green means it shows up in your phone bill. Green means it’s logged by the NSA.

These are the reasons I despise green messages. Has nothing to do with possibly being an “Android” phone. I could be a misconfigured iPhone for all I know, but the above are still true.

I hardly think the behavior is as malicious as the author seems to suggest.

As an anecdote, I am an iPhone user with read receipts on. My phone tells those who send me messages both when I have received the message (Delivered), and the exact time that I opened the message. Even with read receipts turned off, other people KNOW that I at least got the message because of the Delivered flag.

For this reason, there is a dynamic that compels me to -- in my limited texting time -- respond to iPhone messages first, those people after all know that I at least received, if not opened, their message. I feel less guilty about putting the green messages at the back of my respond queue because at least there's not a "READ THREE HOURS AGO" message mocking the sender.

I'm curious to know why you decided to enable read receipts.

Actually, that’s not what the “delivered” flag means. It actually means that the message has been delivered to your carrier, that’s it.

In other words, it’s just like the sound you hear when you’ve “sent” an e-mail message — the message in question has successfully left your system and is now somewhere in the aether. Oh, and it hopefully won’t get lost.

"Delivered" means that at least one recipient's device has received the message. It won't show up as delivered if the devices are offline.

"This attitude might seem childish but harmless at first glance, but is actually a real problem with real consequences. Young Android users, in particular, increasingly feel left out within their group of iPhone-using friends because of this green bubble phenomenon."

Who seriously want to be friend with such iPhone-using person? In this sense, I would be proud to be left out.

>Who seriously want to be friend with such iPhone-using person?

It's not just one person sometimes, it may be everyone they know.

You might be forgetting what it is like to be a child

I am very sure to have excellent memories about my childhood and I believe that my comment reflects these memories well.

Or to put it into different words: if you are somewhat smart, you should see very fast that the only winning move is not to play.

Sometimes the choice is to play losing games or have no friends.

It seems childish, but if you ever witnessed a bully use a small thing like chat color as a form of discrimination, you would realize even little decisions like this have huge implications on social development. We might not know what the original intent for chat color is but the reality is, believe it or not, wether you want to admit it or not, something as simple as the color of a chat bubble reaches way farther than anyone probably is willing to admit and likely will make a noticeable difference in the future grades and income and social standing of a child.

In particular, because chats with green are functionally different from imessage chats, it gives bullies an easy out for social exclusion.

The wise decision is to leave people like this and not befriend them, but children don't know that, and few parents do either. And lastly, there is evidence that show bullies succeed more at life at the expense of those they bully [1]. It gives ammunition to the people who are willing to use something as simple as color to discriminate in communication channels. The small weasly design decision, which might have been to bring more revenue to apple, empowers the kind of people who have no sense of empathy or live life selfishly disregardingly destroying the people and the world they live in.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3037427/why-the-office-bully-is-...

> The iPhone is more than just a phone. It's a status symbol not unlike a designer handbag or a luxury car.

I got a good chuckle out of this. The number of people I used to see using iPhone with cracked screens was hilarious, they literally looked dirt poor and unable to afford to repair or replace their phone.

My G1 Pixel may not have a cool Apple logo to show off on the back, but you wouldn't see it anyway, since its safely ensconced in an after market leather case to protect it in case it gets dropped, since it's just a tool and not a status symbol. Several years old an no damage so far. Only reason I'll replace it soon is that the battery life is now very degraded.

My family had to switch to Slack because of this. Some of the family are "Apple everything" people, while the rest are not and typically go with lower end Android phones (like the Moto G). It bothered some of the iPhone users so much to see "green bubbles" that they would routinely leave the green bubbles out of conversations. Well a a big family party came and nobody remembered to tell the Android users about it because they were so used to excluding them. There were some seriously hurt feelings. We basically had to move to Slack to save the family. Now that we do all the communication through Slack, all is well again.

This is why I tell my Android friends to install Signal. It’s close to the iMessage experience but multi-platform.

I don’t like sending SMS because of reduced image quality among other features. However iMessage isn’t the only way to remedy that.

With respect, many times a green bubble is not actually a person.

Many times, it’s an automated SMS notice. And maybe from a system I don’t want to be notifying me.

Sometimes, it’s even actual SMS spam — instead of being sent to me by e-mail, they use SMS now.

Sometimes a green bubble is actually a real person, and I do try to pay special attention to those.

But I would observe that I have never once gotten a spam message or unwanted automated notification through iMessage.this is a fact not at all lost on me.

It's crazy to me that nearly every country globally has a preferred messaging app of choice, but America stays in the Apple ecosystem. Why aren't apps like Wechat Whatsapp and Line popular in the states?

IIRC the US got cheap/free SMS before the rest of the world.

FWIW FB messenger is pretty popular here.

In Australia, the closest we have is Messenger. Behind Messenger, you have iMessage. After that, you're dealing with SMS or Signal.

I got a BlackBerry in school for the exact same reason, I know how it feels. I think it's convenience above everything else.

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