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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

How does the pressure manifest?

I've had a few friends passive aggressively mention I am the reason our group chat is MMS vs iMessage.

Or even worse: I just simply got excluded from group chats. That was the saddest one because when hanging out in person, a friend will mention a conversation from the group chat and I wouldn't know what's going on and they would just awkwardly pretend it didn't happen. Or say they'd add me to the group and never actually do it.

iMessage FOMO is a real thing and the social pressure (in the US at least) is insane.

Blue bubbles good. Green bubbles bad.

> the social pressure (in the US at least) is insane.

This isn't a US-wide thing. This is about the priorities of a certain subculture, nothing more. Your friends just happen to be embedded in that subculture. My condolences.

The subculture of people who have iPhones? As much as Apple would want this to be, I don't believe there is a cohesive subculture that describes all iPhone users.

In my experience, in most countries (and outside the US especially) WhatsApp has already won the network effects battle, and it's the default messaging app in any smartphone. Even people with iPhone will all have WhatsApp installed.

In western Europe maybe, not in Asia for example

What part of Asia? I'm guessing you mean China/Korea/Japan. Whatsapp is by far the dominant messaging platform on the Indian subcontinent, extending as far the Middle East.

Here's a map that shows WhatsApp leading in most regions. And for Europe, even in countries where FB Messenger is the dominant app, most people will still have WhatsApp installed to ensure good "friend coverage". It is common to have (and regularly use) at least 2 if not more messaging apps.

https://rocketbots.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/AppMap_5a9b...

Where in Asia? The #1 (by a VERY LARGE margin) messaging apps in India, China, and S. Korea (at least) are all not iMessage.

(Whatsapp, WeChat, and KakaoTalk respectively.)

Interesting; in whatever cultural bubble I'm embedded in, every group chat (even among five friends without any shared purpose) is its own Discord server.

I doubt that includes family, co-workers or neighbors, right? Here in germany WhatsApp is so ubiquitous that beside various friends circles you'll likely have groups for family, work, (sports) clubs, or your fellow kindergarten parents, etc.

It's the default form of mobile communication here.

No, the subculture isn't "all people who have iPhones". It's a specific subset of people who have iPhones.

If you've got friends who have time to complain about it, but not the time to move conversation to WhatsApp/FB/line/telegram/WeChat/...anything and prefer to exclude you, are they really friends? This honestly makes me angry when people say they're pressured into buying a high cost device.

I agree! Trust me, I was resentful for buying an iPhone too. They are my friend because we can't really move the conversation to any other platform. Some of my friends took #DeleteFacebook very seriously and deleted Insta/WhatsApp/FB while others refuse to download Line/WeChat/Telegram or any others because I'd be the only one they'd use that with. The network effect is bad and the only "standardized" communication platform that we all have is SMS. But because they are all iPhone users, it defaults to iMessage and they hate me for causing them to default to SMS/MMS because they see it as "slower and not as instant"... So other than emailing one another, there wasn't really any other options...

> because I'd be the only one they'd use that with

I started using hangouts, WhatsApp, signal, FB, and just yesterday line for a single person. This is really not a good excuse. People should be more important than tech.

Agreed. Unfortunately, many millennials don't see it that way. There's so many stories about the Green Bubble effect and how lazy people are to switch to anything else. It's sad.

>not the time to move conversation to WhatsApp/FB/line/telegram/WeChat/

None of these are an alternative to iMessage. They all either are missing key features or require you to deal with unencrypted communications or relayed encryption.

WhatsApp, signal, matrix has e2e. It's not an exhaustive list either - there are tons of solutions to choose from. What are the other key features?

WhatsApp, though, is still owned by Facebook and, therefore, has all kinds of privacy concerns. Last I heard, the encryption wasn't e2e and used a key that was generated by the app. If that's the case, then Facebook has a copy of that key.

The key has to be generated either in the app or on some server. There are no other choices really, unless you use only ephemeral keys - and that gives you secrecy but doesn't validate the other side. (And you can still copy that key) WhatsApp is e2e on all devices since 2016 and uses open whisper, which is the same encryption as signal.

Regarding the key - you have to trust the app it doesn't share it with the app authors. That's regardless of who/how implements the encryption. And it's true for iMessage as well.

>it's true for iMessage as well

Are you sure about that? I was under the impression that, according to the security white paper released by Apple, that the key is generated on-device in the Secure Enclave and that Apple never has access to it. The Enclave itself also doesn't have network access so there's no way for that to be transmitted anywhere by any other means except for physical access, which is also limited in the hardware.

You still have to trust the app to use the secure enclave and not generate the key in standard code.

iMessage does that, though. This has been verified by the jailbreak community and the netsec community.

To be fair, if I was in such a group I would probably be the one passive aggressive about them using a messaging suite locked into a single platform too expensive for most people to afford (instead of Signal, Whatsapp, etc), so maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on your friends.

This is my friends too. I gave in to the pressure for a different reason, so it’s nice to not be excluded again. GroupMe seems to be the lowest common denominator for proper group chats (50+ people).

as dumb as it sounds, nobody likes to be a green bubble

It's not just green bubbles. Tapbacks are awkward and pictures and videos don't send as reliably.

With my "green bubble" friends, we usually use Telegram or Signal or Keybase instead.

I'd love to see a standardized IM/Text protocol instead of 1000 fragmented platforms. I've got on the order of 10 chat apps on my phone right now, all used in different contexts.

> I'd love to see a standardized IM/Text protocol instead of 1000 fragmented platforms. I've got on the order of 10 chat apps on my phone right now, all used in different contexts.

Apple could easily open the protocol, but they won't. They also won't use any of the other ones so as long as you'll be using iOS, you'll be in the iMessage garden and everyone else will be in another garden.

Try Matrix[1]. It's a protocol specification with multiple open-source implementations. It has federation so that you can choose which server to use (or run your own) and still communicate with everyone else. It has end-to-end encryption (although at the moment it only works in one client, but it's coming along).

[1] https://matrix.org/

Agreed, it's like signal on steroids.

> I'd love to see a standardized IM/Text protocol instead of 1000 fragmented platforms.

I'm hoping that's what RCS[1] will be (ids? And that's why I referenced it above). It's supposed to by the successor to SMS, but it's been around for quite a while and not adopted, so I'm not sure what's going on with it.

Edit: It looks like as of a couple months ago it's live in the UK and France, and just those two countries.[2]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

2: https://9to5google.com/2019/07/01/rcs-hands-on-not-quite-ime...

The problem is that, as near as I can tell, RCS will eliminate much of what makes SMS an attractive thing.

If you have kids that you communicate with, stickers and iMessage apps like bitmoji are a big deal, and Whatsapp doesn’t have them.

Whatsapp really seems to be missing the boat with tweens and teens - that’s cant be good for their future.

I spend lots of time with my teenage nephew—it’s all iMessage, Snapchat, Discord, GroupMe (surprisingly, because I’m old enough to use that!), and sometimes even Instagram DMs. Granted, he lives in the US, so that might change things.

Must be an American problem. Never heard anyone outside of the US talk about the colour of the bubbles. Everyone uses Whatsapp here.

> nobody likes to be a green bubble

Lots of people don't care at all. The only time I hear about this whole "green bubble bad" thing is online. In real life, I have never once encountered this sentiment. (I'm not saying this sentiment doesn't exist IRL, I'm saying that it's not universal.)

Eh, don't want to make any assumptions on your age, but I'm young enough that iPhones were introduced around when I was in middle/high school. Here in the US, living in an upper-middle class area, lots of kids got them right off the bat.

I've never had anyone SERIOUSLY be mad about me being the green bubble, but when you're doing large group text coordination and someone drops me in, then starts doing tapbacks and sending rich media, I get some shit. And it gets thrown out as a joke in general conversation all the time. "Oh, he's a GREEN bubble..."

> Here in the US, living in an upper-middle class area, lots of kids got them right off the bat.

I'm sure that correct, but how common iPhones are, even amongst your age group, greatly depends on where in the US you are. In my area, iPhones are not nearly as common as they are in other areas, and there is generally little peer pressure in the grade/high schools to have them. Having a smartphone generally is expected, but few people care about whether or not it's an iPhone.

I've never heard of this until today, but green is my favorite color. I am confused how two functioning adults can care about this. It sounds like an unreasonably childish thing to care about. If someone has different phone then you and they want you to change to appease them then tell them to deal with it.

The color is simply an indicator of an inferior system. It's not the color itself that people care about. They care about the encryption, quality of media, timestamps, delivery receipts, etc.

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