Hacker News Reader

Comment by reidjs | Hacker News Reader

What makes it really challenging to leave Apple is all the integrations it has with its own products. If a friend of mine has an iPhone, I can share my wifi password with them from my iPad. If I want to send them a photo from my MacBook, I don’t have to ask for their email. If they’re nearby, I just airdrop it directly onto their phone.

You can’t escape from their ecosystem without seriously limiting your ability to interact with friends. The only way out I can see is If someone makes a phone that can interop seamlessly with all these features. That seems like a really hard technical challenge with a very small market.

View on HN

> You can’t escape from their ecosystem without seriously limiting your ability to interact with friends

I've lived 34 years with this _never_ being an issue. Ever.

Teenagers will socially reject you if you do not use iMessage. I suspect even as they get older they will continue this practise as it as been ingrained in them from a young age.

People still use iMessage? At least in my relatively multicultural social circle, everyone is either communicating via Instagram DMs or Telegram.

In the USA, iMessage is _extremely_ popular.

In the other words, iMessage is not that extremely popular in other countries. The strong presence of Apple is strictly domestic to the US and a few more countries, so your statement (and the GP's original statement) can only make sense in those countries. Given other countries don't seem to have the stated problems, there is no technical problem per se, there is only a social problem where people are just not willing to accept a small amount of annoyance for others.

So are opioids.

Telegram? Where are you? Telegram is pretty specific for diverse groups of people to all be using. I didn’t know telegram is that popular anywhere just generally pretty popular. And then very popular within some niches like crypto.

Guess my kids will have to be social rejects when they are teenagers.

Good riddance! Just like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Viber, Signal, Telegram or whatever else "chat" app we use these days. The only real benefit they provide is chatting with relatives or old friends halfway across the world. For everything else, face-to-face or voice interaction is much better and more meaningful (heck, even for long-distance I still prefer video).

This seems a bit…reductive. Billions of people use chat, some significant fraction for decades. It’s nice to hear one person’s opinion, but the “truth on the ground” doesn’t bear you out.

That's just my opinion, of course - I'm not generalizing here. But the fact that folks use them doesn't mean they are "useful", just that they're addictive.

You have to use apps to do video too. And chat to communicate when to do audio or video.

> Teenagers will socially reject you

You say it like it's bad thing?

As a teenager it can be a bad thing. That would have been tough on me as a kid. Obviously in hindsight I can see my fears were silly. At the time though?

I guess this might be USA or even just SV thing.

Because where I live most teenagers don't have iphones, but androids.

And by most I mean 80%-90% , you see ocasiona iPhone, but not that often

I have an Android phone. All my friends have iPhones. I have never had issues dealing with them. Wifi passwords can be shared through QR codes. Messaging can be done through apps like Signal if you can't use iMessage.

Yeah I don’t think it’s a big deal. There are some ways exclusions happen but that would be happening no matter what for group stuff except for group texting. Otherwise you’re always on some platform.

> What makes it really challenging to leave Apple is all the integrations it has with its own products. If a friend of mine has an iPhone, I can share my wifi password with them from my iPad. If I want to send them a photo from my MacBook, I don’t have to ask for their email. If they’re nearby, I just airdrop it directly onto their phone.

It's interesting that you feel this way; I don't feel like either of those things are hard for me to do with friends without using any Apple devices or services, but obviously these sorts of things are very subjective. On my Android phone, I can either manually show them the password or read it out to them or even show them a QR code to scan to add the network from my phone's wifi settings. It's a bit more work than automatically adding it, but I feel like it comes up so rarely that having it take ten seconds instead of one really doesn't matter. For photos, I don't really ever email my friends; I generally have their info on any number of potential messaging apps which deliver faster than email and don't have nearly as small a limit on the attachment size. It's kind of surprising to me that there's nothing more significant than that stopping you from migrating to a new ecosystem.

I have used MacBook Air and macOS (OS X back then) for more than a decade and I never had this issue; I haven't used iPhone at all. True, the Apple-only ecosystem might be slightly easier to use, but not too much compared to the mixed Apple-Android-whatever ecosystem.

Latest versions of Android OS have all the features you've mentioned.

I had to force-quit Apple because I couldn't afford them any longer. I have the shittiest Android you can get. My gf has iPhone 12. There is no problem with us communicating. She never texts anyone. She uses Snapchat and Insta with her friends as far as I can tell. We talk over Skype, Insta and TikTok. I have texted her exactly once. Just so she had my actual phone number.

Macs are where the pricing becomes much worse! iPhones have high resale value and there’s usually deals in the US. so phone cost is negligible. Or maybe it’s the combo of it all. I have a cheaper iPad too.

Cool to know how both of you chat. Are you in your earlier 20s? I’m respectfully asking :). I ask because Snap’s demographics skew pretty young? I run a virtual free coworking camaraderie community. The only people there who have brought up Snap have been 2-3 people under 25. This is a small sample size though.

The market would be ALL android phones. Apple would never allow seamless interop. It's not in their interest, let alone opening themselves up for more exploit possibilities.

that’s a good point maybe there would be a large market for it. Even just the ability to use iMessage from android would be huge. There is definitely some in group/out group dynamics going on, some iphone users call android people “Green bubbles”

Why can't iPhone people just use Whatsapp / Signal / etc.?

They can, and do. I do lots of messaging in WhatsApp on iOS.

There does seem to be an in group / our group thing for teenagers and people in their 20s though.

The biggest feature benefit of group imessaging is sharing images/video at original quality. But I feel like that is also a benefit for WhatsApp, in that its compression results in quick messages.

Android has similar social features when you're interacting with other Android users (e.g. RCS and Nearby Share). RCS in particular is an open source iMessage competitor and Apple seems to be stubbornly refusing to support it, leading to this "green bubble" phenomenon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com