Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfifs | Hacker News Reader

Not expanding iMessage and Facetime to other OSes when they had the chance was the single most foolish strategic decision Apple ever took. It's what allowed Whatsapp and WeChat and Line and Snapchat and Slack and Teams and Zoom even Instagram to a certain extent to happen. Not surprising given Jobs's famously monopolistic tendencies that he's passed on to the current leadership he's groomed but it did do the shareholders a major dis-service

View on HN

I think it’s the best decision they made and has taken courage to stick to it.

There’s actually been a network effect especially with groups of people with being a “blue bubble” vs “green bubble”.

Doesn’t look like this has cost them financially at all.

I even feel like whenever I have to SMS someone, it feels like going backwards. It’s not encrypted, there’s no delivery receipt, no richness, etc.

I’m just amazed that Google has utterly failed to build a viable alternative on Android in 10 years (which is why all the other services have thrived there), and boy have they tried.

It has cost them hugely.

Outside of the US and a few other countries iMessage is basically non-existent.

How does it cost them? Do you mean in that a free service isn't being used by non-Apple product owners/users? Or that it's costing them sales of their Apple products?

It's costing in usefulness. iMessage loses value if no one uses it, and outside of the US pretty much no one uses it, so it's useless.

There are an estimated 900 million iPhone users. If about 1/9th of the world is using those phones. Twitter has fewer users and remains pretty relevant.

Being installed by default doesn't make them a user

Just because the app is installed doesn't mean people actually use it as their main chat app.

All my EU contacts that have an iPhone use iMessage. Companies(100k+ employees) in the EU, that have an iPhone as a company phone, use iMessage.

Well that is certainly new to me. When I lived in the EU I knew precisely no one for which iMessage was the main mode of communication.

Usefulness to whom? The hundreds of millions of iOS users worldwide seem perfectly happy with it. I count myself in it.

Far from all the iOS users actually use iMessage as their main chat app.

Is apple affordable in those counties?

Easy to forget just how cheap and crappy phones can get.

Those countries would include the UK for example, i.e. many that aren't poor.

My anecdata is that Apple products are quite in the hands of people I know, to the point that I would only guess they own an iPhone if they are on double or triple (or more) the disposable income to actually afford one - i.e. even then their kids might still have an Android.

But the only real question is, when presenter with taking the "step backwards" of talking to someone who doesn't have an iPhone via SMS, how often does the other person plunk down a giant pile of cash for a new phone--and in the process leave the close ecosystem of apps and services they have already invested in--vs. everyone download WhatsApp, which not only bridges across mobile platforms but frankly has a better desktop experience than iMessage (which also wasn't a fully native app, but handled its web rendering worse) in addition to letting you talk to anyone, anywhere, even in markets where iPhones are rare? The issue here is that no matter how many features iMessage adds, it can't replace my usage of Facebook's messaging products, which means Facebook is always going to be in my life... if Apple had instead built the cross-platform version of these products (which Steve Jobs literally promised everyone would be the case for Facetime), Facebook wouldn't have anywhere near the power it currently does.

Quite often, actually. Well, in the US at least. "Green bubble" ickyness is a real thing among the US youth.

School children get bullied until they ask their parents for an iPhone for that blue bubble. Dates will ghost you if you text them with a green bubble. Friend groups will just refuse to invite you solely because you have the dreaded green bubble.

There's serious social pressure in the US to switch to iOS just for imessage.

I'd like to see real numbers on the frequency of this kind of behavior. I don't doubt that it happens, but it's very implausible that it's widespread behavior.

There's no way to have accurate, completely relevant numbers - not even Apple can track that. But, with my anecdotal experience graduating from HS in the US having just caught the iPhone craze, here are some numbers that support that.

It's well known that Apple has about a 50% marketshare overall in the US. But what about among the youth? If my hypothesis is correct, then the green bubble bullying should mean that more teenagers own iPhones than the general population.

And indeed they do! Youth ownershop of iPhones in the US is a whopping 86%[0] - with 89% reporting that they are planning on buying a iPhone as their next phone.

This also gives iMessage the marketshare in this specific niche to be the dominant messaging app.

[0]https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/06/us-teen-iphone-ow...

> It's well known that Apple has about a 50% marketshare overall in the US. But what about among the youth? If my hypothesis is correct, then the green bubble bullying should mean that more teenagers own iPhones than the general population.

> And indeed they do!

Your reasoning is flawless...

That is interesting, and in my mind, insane. Here in Europe it seem to be about 50% as well, but we use either Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp, exactly because what is the point of using iMessage if you only have at most half your friends on it?

Because way more than 50% of your friends have it in the US; if you're a teenager, 80%+ of your friends have an iPhone. It's the default messaging app, and it works well, and it's become somewhat of a status symbol.

It isn't. The only major countries in the world iPhone approaches 50% are US, UK, JP and the Gulf oil states.

I. Don't know any person who actually thinks this way. If friends won't invite you or dates will ghost you based on messaging app you've dodged a bullet with not associating with those people.

This was kind of a thing back when there was some what of a differentiation between the platforms when it came to features many many years ago and the concept of a premium Android was not really a thing, but in my friend groups that span between the ages of early twenties to late thirties, everyone has atleast a few messaging apps and really the only people that insist on group chats over imessage are my family group chats with people over the age of fifty.

As a lifelong Android user it's never been an actual impediment to communication, especially with people I actually consider friends, but also with just random meets from apps like Tinder or meetup where you usually start with a phone number but then move to some other platform the first time you want to share any kind of multimedia.

iMessage offers nothing that LINE, messenger, WhatsApp, snapchat etc don't already have besides being preinstalled if you own an iphone as far as I can tell.

If Apple makes important strategic decisions on observations like that they are on a path to failure in international markets due to lack of cultural understanding.

Jobs actually stood up at WWDC when he launched FaceTime and said “we’re going to the standards boards tomorrow and making this a fully open protocol”, then when they got hit with a patent suit, rearchitected it to be less peer-to-peer and didn’t open it up. Then, when iMessage came along, they probably figured what’s the point.

I wish they were that innocent.

> iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com