Why Apple’s iMessage is winning: teens dread the green text bubble | Hacker News Reader

Why Apple’s iMessage is winning: teens dread the green text bubble

wsj.com

256 pointscwwc569 comments

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.

The people this article is talking about are actually in their mid-to-late twenties.

Which, with tongue like very slightly in cheek, checks out with a Wall Street Journal article about the Youths.

Youts?

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.

What? All 30% of smartphone users with Android in the US are scammers?

I use a Google Voice number as my primary number and have for over ten years.

Yeah but if you see blue you have way more confidence that you are talking to a real person…

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!

" ... but that there is no verification they are not Google Voice numbers ..."

This isn't unknowable ... why don't you just check ?

  curl -s -X GET "https://lookups.twilio.com/v1/PhoneNumbers/$number?Type=carrier&Type=caller-name" -u $accountsid:$authtoken | /usr/local/bin/jq '.'

... or, if you're non-technical, just use mycarrierlookup.tv or checkcarrier.estonia or whatever ... there are 20 or more such sites extant.

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 gotten a spam or phish from a blue bubble. 100% are green.

Green could be any type of source. Android, Twilio, google voice, who knows.

But if a random number comes in and it’s green, more often than not it’s spam. If it’s blue, more often then not there’s a real person behind it.

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 don't think the complaint is about the color itself, but rather, what the color means.

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.

On Android you can send images as files in Whatsapp and most other messengers. Does Apple not allow such access to your own photo files?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> Links won't get rich previews.

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.

There is a reason to not like the green bubbles. They imply that it's SMS, which is unencrypted. That is actually bad.

Of course, people can avoid this by not using iMessage in favor of e.g. Signal, which runs on both Android and iOS.

So don't post state secrets on SMS. I hardly think that encryption is a major issue, unless you actually have something to hide.

But if Signal or a secure, universal SMS protocol could be agreed upon and used by Android and IPhone, that would be okay.

I just don't see that happening anytime soon.

> 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.

Would be nice if signal did not blast out a message to contacts that I've joined signal

It doesn't do that.

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.

That sounds even worse. Is there a setting when you join that doesn't blast it to everyone who has you as a contact?

> That sounds even worse.

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.

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007061452-Do...

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 put a webcam in your bedroom? And send me all your emails and credit card statements?

Whenever people say they don’t care about privacy I ask them those questions, and curiously they never reply.

Can you put a webcam in my bedroom? No.

Can you have my credit card statements? No.

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.

How about you post them somewhere? Also your address please.

No, if you want them, it's up to you to make the effort to get them.

So much to "nothing to hide".

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.

He's one of those conflicted people that have nothing to hide, and yet are hiding everything.

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.

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.

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

ask them to email it to you?

> who absolutely insists on using Android

I’m in an all iPhone household, but come on. It’s his phone. No need to get tetchy about it.

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.

Or a $400 one like the iPhone SE?

Still 2x what I have ever spent on a phone. And grand for a phone... that's just stupid.

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.

And I run a $80 Android with a user replaceable battery. At least in my social circle the majority are Android owners.

The $399 iPhone SE is currently on it's sixth year of OS and security updates.

Even the brand new >1000$ Android phones will only get half as many years of support.

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.

Yep. It's because android supports rich messages, a kind of SMS 2.0, where as iPhones do not support it because it competes with iMessage.

No, even without RCS the quality seems to be decent. Even on my old BlackBerry receiving a video from a Windows Phone over MMS had decent quality.

Blame Apple for this, not Google. Android supports RCS, iMessage does not. Apple is the last holdout.

There's no good reason to have it this way other than lock-in.

100%, maybe Apple should be compelled to support standards when they choose not to for anticompetitive reasons.

> Android supports RCS, iMessage does not.

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.

No one is saying apple needs to get rid of iMessage, just update the fallback from sms to rcs

There is a standard that is significantly better than SMS and Apple has so far chosen to stay with SMS as the only fallback.

Blame Apple that talking to anyone not on iMessage sucks.

Also, the features you mention are all extremely new to iOS, I'm not sure what you mean by "still".

- Sent from my iPhone

Livephotos are NOT new... 2015.

But sure, Apple could (maybe should) use RCS as a fallback instead of SMS.

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 the infrastructure to allow larger attachments. Apple is the only one at fault here for not implementing it.

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.

Ah, widely supported standards like the various USB charging standards that Apple so famously adopted

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.

A totally workable iPhone can cost $400 new. Refurbs from Apple cost less. Carrier deals are available.

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 think these people should go for the refurb options I mentioned, if they’d like an iPhone.

They don't want an iPhone, though - they're pressured into getting one.

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.

Just use Whatsapp. That's what my family has done to work around the issues with weird iPhone users.

No Livephotos.

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.

My understanding is that it works like this:

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

Reevaluate your questions and start again.

Communicating with likes, exclamations and loves is most annoying with an Android in the bunch —

iMessage cleverly quotes the whole message you liked, which contextually is required, and doubly grinds the conversation to content mulch

I'm going to make the slightly conspiracistic speculation that Apple may be well aware of this effect.

Probably, at the very least they're confirmed to be aware of the network effects of the ecosystem (imessage is also specifically called out) https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1463558823109660677

iOS users see those too in SMS mode? In that case the Android users might actually have the cleaner experience after the latest update: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/google-messages-upda...

I get the impression that even without RCS, Apple could have done more to keep the experience usable for the iOS users in SMS fallback mode.

My daughter and all her friends in middle school would have to disagree with you here.

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.

Edit: or MMS, if that's enabled

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?

In the US unlimited is common, less so internationally. That’s why WhatsApp caught on.

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.

I live in Japan, and my carrier charges me the equivalent of 3 US cents per domestic SMS, or 40 cents for an international SMS.

On the other hand, I have unlimited data with no throttling.

Everyone here uses the LINE messenger app, or email. Literally all I have in my iOS Messages app is 2FA codes and Pingdom notifications.

This is very similar to what happens in many Latin American Countries, but they use WhatsApp instead of Line.

The phone companies got greedy and priced the individual SMS so high ($0.06 local) that nobody uses them except for 2FA codes and notifications.

If sms where still $0.02 each as they were in the early 2000s I would still use them occasionally.

iPhone users here (10%) are not really aware of iMessage because they use WhatsApp.

Where i live an SMS costs me $0.15. the cheapest internet flat (unmetered) costs me $4 per month.

There are plans with unlimited SMS and domestic calls included, but they are like $50 per month.

Why would i pay that when everyone is on WA/Signal anyways and i can just buy a cheap data sim with unmetered bandwidth?

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)

I'm an android user.

I had no idea what this thread was about until your comment. Thanks

I care that it makes it super easy and free to send an image as opposed to MMS and the confusing technology that exists there.

I'm not a teen, but a parent with almost teen kids!

And I can confirm, they don't really care :-)

Discord is their go-to chat platform on their gaming PCs, iPads and iPhones.

TBF One of my kids did ask about the bubble colour thing, but they dont actually care.

They love Discord, where as I find it impossible LOL! Which makes perfect sense!

Their Discord chats are irreverent and full of memes, their avatars and nicknames are totally random to me!

Which is as it should be!

iMessage is great and all - but it's very stuffy and old and corporate compared to how I see my kids using Discord!

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...

While removing the ad was the first feature I think tabbed messages and message logging were the most popular DeadAIM features

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.

I miss AIM, honestly. Nothing quite matches it, these days.

Same. I actually downloaded it in a VM and logged in one last time before the AIM servers went offline a couple years ago.

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.

The nostalgia is partly for centralized reasons. It's undeniably convenient when everyone uses one thing (or ICQ).

I too remember having all my friends on AIM, and my signature being about throwing real rocks at my sham-friends.

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.

...well every one of them except Matrix, which can plug into Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, and Google Chat - which I'm using all of!

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.

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.

I don't see any difference in those compared to ICQ of 1996. I have a 6-digit ICQ number btw.

Nope, here's why.

* 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.

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.

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.

Does Discord have scrollers and punters?

Asking for a friend, who is into 133t vv@rez.

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.

Thanks for the insights.

Discord is really where all the kids are.

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.

God you sound like a fun parent

Can someone explain the appeal of Discord? It seems to be the same as Slack. In what way is it differentiated from existing messaging services?

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.

There are some really vibrant programming language communities on Discord. The Python Discord always has very active servers, for instance: https://discord.com/channels/267624335836053506/267631170882...

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:

  Liked "[original message text]"

Examples: https://www.pcworld.com/article/395045/hey-iphone-users-stop...

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.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

[2] https://9to5google.com/2021/11/19/google-messages-imessage-r...

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.

I got a bunch of those

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.

Not true any more, a modern Android phone will show the likes etc.

Just what we need, a worse snr in group chat.

I also can confirm Discord thing. I don't think they use messages (sms) to communicate to anyone else but us (their parents).

Do any of your friends use Signal? Most older adults don't care at all about privacy, so I'm guessing high schoolers don't care either?

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.

Snapchat is pretty popular amongst kids and early 20s in NZ too.

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.

That's not an excuse.

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.

Yeah. In the time it took them to not solve that problem, WhatsApp et al. took over the world of texting from under them.

>an upgraded and open SMS protocol that everyone can plug into

that exists, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

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?

My (european) take: nobody cares. Usage of Whatsapp/Signal is higher.

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.

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.

> 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.

RCS has been a thing for a while. Apple has no excuse.

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.

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.

Apple should let RCS die, involving carriers was a shit idea.

RCS has been a "thing" for years but nobody has bothered using it, because it's terrible.

Last time I checked it didn't even have E2EE.

Neither does SMS, but that doesn't preclude Apple from falling back to that.

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.

The article is about teens, and no they do not care.

They're on Discord.

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.

> 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)

Thank fucking god my whole circle uses either Telegram or WhatsApp

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).

Line is also the standard with Japanese friends

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'.

That's a Saturated Pattern instead of a Dark Pattern.

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.

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?

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.

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.

[0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6ROe0mU0AEmpzz?format=jpg&name=...

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.

As a teen in high school: People don't use iMessages, or for that matter SMS. We use Discord, Instagram DMs, etc. for communication. I don't know any of my friends' phone numbers and have never cared to ask, because we use Discord voice channels instead.

This article seems to be of the "kids these days" type, and is, in my experience, highly reflective of the millenial generation, who are by and large not teens anymore.

I'm a millennial and we don't use texts in most of the world either. Sticking to SMS and SMS-adjacent stuff like iMessage seems to be a fairly uniquely American thing. The last time I had an SMS conversation was... May 2020. And before that it was October 2019. Everything else is verification/notification SMSes.

In Europe you'll find people using WhatsApp or Telegram; in Japan and Taiwan, LINE is king, and of course in China there's WeChat. There's also Twitter DMs. Discord has been becoming increasingly popular lately, especially among the tech/game and adjacent crowds. Nobody has used SMSes by default for years.

US millennials I am in contact with run their lives through SMS, or “whatever happens when I tell my phone to send a text message to someone in my contacts”.

Source: Am US millennial in a dozen text groups.

I think GP is saying “us millenials”, not “US millenials”. (I was confused for a moment myself)

Indeed. Edited for clarity.

It's probably whatever was popular when you started using technology to stay in touch with your friend group.

For millenials in the USA, that's SMS/text messages. I'm a older than millenial, but too young to be a boomer. I prefer email. Boomers I know tend to prefer phone calls. "Why can't you just pick up the phone" is a common complaint.

> I’m a older than millennial, but too young to be a boomer

There is a generation in-between millennials and boomers, it’s called Generation X. It refers to people born in the 70s and early 80s.

> It's probably whatever was popular when you started using technology to stay in touch with your friend group.

Not really. My family and other Spanish circles largely use WhatsApp. That absolutely did not exist when things got started; heck, I remember when my dad got his first cellphone, which definitely couldn't do anything but SMS. Discord is also much more recent and a big subset of my generation has had no trouble embracing it; it is probably the messaging app I use most these days, by message volume. Way back we'd have been using stuff like MSN Messenger. And since moving to Japan I've seen things shift from Skype to LINE and now slowly to Discord.

Voice calls are still popular in my family, but they have no trouble embracing different apps and ecosystems for it; I recently got my immediate family to switch to Telegram from Hangouts for talking among us, since Google botched their messaging ecosystem again (I refuse to use WhatsApp because it's by Meta but that's a me thing; either way Telegram is also an increasingly popular alternative overall).

Americans being stuck with SMS when superior alternatives have existed for ages is something unique. Then again, so much of communications infrastructure/culture in America is bizarre (Paying for incoming phone calls on cellphones? What? That one shocked me when I spent 3 years studying in the US.)

I think the reason that SMS/iMessage has hung on in the US is that they got "unlimited texting" plans early on, whereas in Europe carriers kept charging per-message much longer, driving people to messaging apps simply to save money. Europeans are also more likely to have international friends to send messages to, which costs even more (you see the same thing in diaspora in the US). Before WhatsApp, I remember Skype was very popular as a messenger since people already used it for free international calls.

Japan is interesting because their feature phones used internet e-mail instead of SMS, but I don't ever recall seeing a client that threaded e-mail conversations like SMS clients ended up doing.

Deltachat can do that.

iMessage is the best SMS application. Nothing compares. If you haven an iPhone, the native integrations with everything is incomparable to anything like Messenger, etc.

Do Americans even really "stick" to SMS? I know millennials who might use iMessage as their primary channel, but the only people I know who ONLY text are my mom and grandma. Everyone I know around my age (millennial) has a small collection of apps that they used a lot for a bit, and now maybe have one or two people they still talk to on.

Personal anecdata of one:

I only text/msg with family.

Am Gen X, now we're doing eldercare.

Texting and voice calls (and voice mails) are the only skills our parents know. I've tried teaching them FaceTime, WhatsApp, some cooperative social games. Nope, too late.

Once our parents pass, I probably won't even have a normal phone plan. The only other calls I get are telemarketers. Maybe switch to prepaid. For emergency services, and all these services using texts for 2FA.

> In Europe you'll find people using WhatsApp or Telegram

For whatever reason, in my country, everybody use FB Messenger for the absolute majority of their texting. And by "everybody" I mean teenagers, young adults, parents and the elerderly.

It's only if you've had prolonged stays in other countries (or is exposed to international communication in other ways) that people will be familiar with WhatsApp and I'd guess that very few have ever heard of Telegram here.

The quality of your written communication makes this high school teacher’s heart swell with pride.

That plural possessive apostrophe is damn impressive. Haven't seen one of those in an internet comment in years.

I still use it myself (as a young person at that!), but feel increasingly pretentious for doing so. This is my burden for getting raised in a family of editors, I guess.

This is just selection bias (the type of teens in high school that post on HN). I know for a veritable fact that teens in high school in the US use iMessage.

It has been decreasing, a lot, and not from selection bias. A few years ago a lot of people on my side were using iMessage, now almost everyone went over to discord and Insta. Some Telegram but not many.

Just a quibble: not only are millenials "by and large" not teens any more, the very youngest of them are 25.

Signed, a Gen X-er who won't use SMS except with his Boomer parents, and prefers gChat or Discord.

Does gChat even exist anymore?

Signed, a zoomer.

Elder millenial here; who the heck is using SMS or iMessage for communication? SMS is for messages from the bank. Insta/FB/WhatsApp/LINE and some weirdos using Telegram or Signal...

By age, I'm Generation X, but by philosophy, attitude, etc., according to my nieces and nephews, I'm a millennial (one of my nieces actually thinks I'm a zoomer... lol), but I think you're spot on with this.

I actually use whatever communications method the people in my life want to use.

My Mom is 71 and wants to talk on the phone. My brother is 42 and does a mix of SMS / MMS texting, phone calls, and the occasional Facebook Messenger. My cousin likes to video call with Facebook Messenger. My nieces and nephews like to use Discord / Instagram / Snapchat, so I use those.

It's weird - and more than a little stupid - how people get so hung up on a singular monolithic communication method.

Teenagers and young people in their 20s are not millenials anymore.

FWIW, as a working Gen Z, I absolutely disagree with anyone trying to say that iMessage isn't popular. Sure it isn't the majority of conversations, but it does seem to be the preferred group chat app still.

Since I have seen Discord mentioned multiple times in this thread I asked my high school aged daughter and she has no idea what Discord is. She has never heard one of her friends mention it. According to her the by far dominate communications platform for her friends and others at her school is Snapchat. I think the great mistake here is believing there is some consensus preferred platform among teens. The platform of choice likely differs greatly regionally and just among different friend groups.

I asked my kids about this. Both of them have cheap Android phones on a cheap plan, as do I. My phone is a $25 refurb. They know that they can get jobs and buy whatever they want, but it's apparently not that important to them.

I asked: "Have you heard of the green bubble?" Both of them said it was basically a non issue, kids figure out how to get in touch with the people they want to get in touch with.

The only exception was, my daughter said her violin teacher was puzzled why her texts were a different color than everybody else's.

From talking to people, I had formed the impression that people buy iPhones because they are the default, like IBM. Parents get the same thing for their kids, that they're using themselves.

I think it's less "parents buy the same things for their children" and more "parents give their old devices to their children"

> From talking to people, I had formed the impression that people buy iPhones because they are the default, like IBM. Parents get the same thing for their kids, that they're using themselves.

But how rich are those people, that they just spend 1000$ on a phone for their kids without any research at all?

iPhone is pretty accessible - the SE is a bargain at $399 given the features and how long Apple supports their devices. You only spend $1000 if you are adamant about the “Pro” line.

Ouch. That's a lot more than a refurb Android. And given we have 4 people in the household, it would add up to quite a bit. My son's cell phone went missing, and showed up on the sidewalk outside the school, crushed.

Buying cheap stuff is my insurance plan. ;-)

You’re still paying for it somehow. Be it in security or privacy.

But that’s a trade-off everyone makes, and for a lot of people it’s worth it.

Indeed I'm also paying a price in aesthetics and marketing. I'm familiar with the appeal -- I used Apple products in the mid 90s. And I ride a second-hand bike.

That’s not a genuine comparison though, because you can get refurb/s&d iPhones for even cheaper. On Swappa you can get iPhones for ~$200 and still run the latest iOS version on them. I doubt an Android for $200 is something I’ll feel comfortable with on the long run.

And this is coming from someone who has been on the Android train since Donut times. I reluctantly switched once the 12 mini came out.

> the SE is a bargain at $399

It’s still twice the price of a good Xiaomi

Kids can simply use hand-me-downs.

Cheap iPhones are readily available these days. You can get an SE for pretty cheap

Not $25 cheap

That $25 Android is probably 3+ major Android versions behind and not getting updates. It was probably 2 major version behind when it launched.

A $200 used iPhone SE is running the latest iOS 15 and will continue to get updates until at least 2027.

None of which is relevant to the point

How is that not relevant? If you’re looking to spend a minimal amount of money for a phone that will last a while, Android is arguably poor value since you’ll be replacing it sooner.

See the Boots Theory of Socioeconomics: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...

I don’t believe the Boots Theory of Socioeconomics applies here. It rarely applies to luxury goods.

1. A phone can easily be lost, stolen, or damaged beyond repair. A $25 phone isn’t 8x more likely to break than a $200 phone, so the damage/lost/theft risk is much higher with the $200 phone.

2. People that buy $25 phones are presumably okay not having access to the latest versions of apps and the latest security updates.

3. $25 is 8x cheaper than $200. Even if we assume a rapid rate of replacing the $25 every 6 months it would take 4 years before the $200 phone pays off. That’s a poor ROI for $175, and the $25 phones will probably last longer than 6 months.

So far my phones tend to last until the screens break or the batteries give out. On one occasion I upgraded because a particular OS version level supports a la carte app permissions. I'd be really surprised if an Apple phone would have been cheaper than a small handful of cheap phones over the span of 20 years. To be fair I could have bought used / refurb iPhones. And it looks like my plan offers a new iPhone SE for around $300 when all is said and done.

Now had I been really smart, I should have invested the savings in Apple stock ;-)

The Boots theory sounds clever, but of course would need to be supported by evidence.

This would only apply if the quality of boots increased by about 4x every 5-7 years, which I'm pretty sure they do not.

> From talking to people, I had formed the impression that people buy iPhones because they are the default, like IBM.

I use iPhones for the consistent UX and single point source for the OS. There is one version of iOS that is updated by Apple. This is not the case for Android.

FWIW, I use a basic iPhone 8 issued by my employer almost 4 years ago. Before that I used an iPhone SE. I’m not sure why everyone assumes you need to spend $1,000 on a iPhone.

I know people like to pick on this. And I know that it is a factor.

But this seems so incredibly reductive.

“80% of teens have iPhones? Must be the blue bubbles. RESEARCH DONE.”

There isn’t a single other reason kids might like it? This is literally the ONLY reason? Did you even talk to a couple of kids?

I’m not denying iMessage is powerful. It sees incredible usage. I don’t know what the numbers are but it wouldn’t surprise me if they would put Facebook to shame (on a message/post/attention basis).

But couldn’t anyone do a deeper dive than the first thing that comes to mind?

Research: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807

That research definitely doesn't seem to support the thesis that it's the green bubbles that are the reason.

It's network effect, visually manifested as green bubble plebs.

I'm not disagreeing that it's happening (it makes sense, and I have no data to say otherwise), but unless I'm seriously missing something, nothing in the article linked by mgh2 mentions network effect, iMessage, green/blue bubbles, or anything related.

That’s a shallow “article” quoting a single stat from a survey.

Nowhere does it say WHY teens are choosing iPhones. And the discussion just seems to assume it’s iMessage with only supporting anecdotes about its popularity and practically nothing about other possibilities.

The green bubble implies that iPhones are a symbol of wealth (of the middle class variety, not significant wealth) and therefore status. That's basically everything to most teens.

I don’t doubt this is what people think. But it does seem a little odd when older, still supported iPhones can be bought for almost nothing.

You could say the same thing about a Mercedes. Doesn't seem to matter.

You can buy scuffed up Jordans for next to nothing too but kids will laugh at you for wearing them. Same if some teen sees you whip out an iPhone 3. Might as well have an Android at that point.

Why do you think Apple being out new devices that are 99% identical so regularly and yet people still fawn over them? It's a new chance to show off your disposable wealth to other people who filled the hole where their personality should be with a wallet.

no one’s pulling out an iphone 3

but a 7 is £100 and still a solid phone that gets updates

I wasn't a teen that long ago and I don't remember anything like this. in fact, I remember quite the opposite: kids who brought nice things into school were made fun of for it. having your parents buy you a brand new car was the worst, but excessively nice phone, laptop, shoes were also bad. there were only two exceptions. if you had a job after school and bought the thing yourself, that was very cool. high-end sports equipment was also acceptable, but only if you were really good at that sport.

I should've put YMMV: general trends don't predict specific examples reliably. Of course over-flexing is often seen as being a tryhard, but owning an iPhone isn't that.

it's entirely possible I'm already out of touch. but I'd guess it's more of a "why can't you just be like the rest of us?" than "haha this kid's parents can't afford an iphone".

Could well be that too

not at all

when i was in high school kids had iphones because they liked them and kids had androids because they liked them

everyone thinks kids do shit for status or clout and not just because we want to and make a choice of our own

lots of kids bought airpods because they work well not because they look cool or whatever

the kids who bragged about having the latest iphone were laughed at and the same went for android kids

> everyone thinks kids do shit for status or clout and not just because we want to and make a choice of our own

Signaling and making “free choices” are not mutually exclusive.

iPhones are definitely about clout & wealth signaling. Moving from where I did in the south to affluent areas of Boston, it was iPhones and Canada goose jackets as far as the eye could see.

Only other thing that comes to mind is supposedly the camera on Snapchat is better (native) on ios whereas on android its their own.

Talking to my teen cousins we guessed that it's because most of the iPhones are hand me downs from Parents.

Delivery confirmation has got to be #1, right? There's no feedback from SMS. Messages get lost or sent multiple times as dups. All without having to install an app or use a Meta or Google property.

Edit: Creepy read receipts can be turned off too (I think they're even disabled by default?) Delivery confirmation is one thing but almost nobody likes forced read receipts—they makes text messaging icky like a phone call, because once you pick up you either respond immediately or the other party knows you "left them on read."

I assume everyone has read a message if it has been a few hours after it has been sent, or definitely within 24 hours, whether they deny having read it or not. Whether or not it was delivered is the key information.

The percent of people not constantly checking their phone has got to be so vanishingly small.

Teens may be in class, out somewhere, or (increasingly) have it locked down by parents during certain times. And they may only get short chances to sneak a look. Knowing your message got sent (or didn't) lets you mentally set it aside regardless of the other party's status. And if you do sneak a look it doesn't snitch to the other party, like FB Messenger.

> The percent of people not constantly checking their phone has got to be so vanishingly small.

Sample size of 1, but the amount of time I go without checking my phone has only grown over time.

sms has delivery confirmation built-in

on android it's an option in the settings

works on vodafone, EE and three in the UK (not O2)

That's got to be pretty recent and only in certain markets though. I've yet to see a read receipt from SMS (U.S.).

No, it existed before the iPhone. It was actually weird to not have it on the iPhone, and I remember they were jailbreak tweaks to bring back the feature on the iPhone 3G.

TIL, guess I never had a phone that supported them. Do you know which platforms did?

I don't know exactly, sorry. My Windows Phone had it. BlackBerry also had the feature, but people used BBM at the time anyway.

the first mobile phone I ever owned (nokia 3310) supported it!

from the manual:

> Delivery reports

> You can request the network to send delivery reports on your text messages (network service).

I remember explicitly disabling acknowledging read reciepts on a sony ericsson in the mid-2000s because a friend of mine had discovered how to ask for them on their similar dumbphone and made dumb assumptions about how long until someone should reply.

> That's got to be pretty recent

Yes: only 20 years or so ;-)

SMS (the protocol) doesn't have read receipts. Read receipts are a device specific implementation that sends a message back to the number ( and has existed since before smart phones )

>This is literally the ONLY reason?

For some reason it's incredibly controversial to even imply that the iPhone is just a better product. You will rile up fanboys who are quick to let you know about reparability, battery life, screen resolution and RAM. If more teens are buying iPhones, it's not because it's better, it's because they are being bullied into it.

> But this seems so incredibly reductive.

> “80% of teens have iPhones? Must be the blue bubbles. RESEARCH DONE.”

Who's being reductive?

I find the 85% figure in the article rather shocking.

Is this because US people have a lot of disposable income?

Just iPhones are pricy even secondhand. Of course Android doesn't update for as long but plenty of people worldwide run unpatched devices.

> disposable income?

Yes. The median household income in the US is $68k. Even at the poverty line for a family of 4 at 26k[0], $1600 in phones for your two children that last 2 years+ is worth it given the immense value it provides, both in time savings (spending hours a day texting / via entertainment) and utility.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold#:~:text=The%....

Almost every kid I know gets their parent’s old phones. Apple made a major effort to extend the supported usable life of their phones several years ago and it’s paid big dividends in terms of getting the kids started on iOS. A brand new $400 SE can easily be expected to give 5-7 years of service, which brings the starting price down to $60-80/a to say nothing of the used market. It’s hard to even argue that Android is the cheaper option unless you don’t mind running insecure OS versions for several years.

Apple could easily end this by adopting RCS support into iMessage. Android's RCS implementation is very good and the default these days, at least for Google and Samsung phones. It's an open standard. As the article points out, Apple executives know it's not in their business interest to allow this kind of interoperability so they won't do it.

All of this reminds me, exhausted, of the long sad story of AOL Instant Messenger and Microsoft's attempts to integrate with it. AIM was at one point even compelled to support interop as part of the anti-trust review for the Time Warner merger. But it never actually happened.

What problem would Apple be solving and why would they want to solve it?

They'd be providing a higher-quality and more reliable messaging conduit to non-iPhone users.

They might not want to solve it, but I don't think we should accept unethical business rationales.

I am somewhat resentful of Apple because as a currently-Android but formerly-iPhone user I am now unable to text some iPhone users in some situations because of iMessage. I guess fucking me with their bugs is a positive business outcome for Apple, especially because they create a environment where their bugs appear to be Android bugs. But that's an unethical stance on the part of Apple.

I had iphones from the 3G on up to about 2 years ago, when I thought I'd try android. I was surprised when group txt messages stopped working for me, even after I did whatever apple told me to do to disable iMessage after the fact. The whole time I thought we were using txt messages as a kind of least common denominator, but really it wasn't sms. I doubt if more than 50% of ppl using it realize they're locking themselves in when they start. To me, now that I'm used to Android, it's a reason not to go back to iOS.

Now I just need to convince my spouse to switch

Agreed. When others continue using old threads you’re left off entirely. Everyone has to stop using the old thread (usually be deleting it) for messages from them to reach you. That’s nuts. I’m honestly surprised Apple isn’t been sued for it.

In any decent world: not being curb stomped by antitrust law.

I'm genuinely curious how this is an antitrust thing?

Apple phones can send texts and communicate with any other phone on any other network and vice versa. They just don't use iMessage to do so. I can't DM my discord friends from my work Slack, for example.

The SMS fallback experience in iMessage is pretty bad. Some of it may be because SMS is bad itself (the unreliability), but the way iMessage features get downgraded to SMS creates a terrible experience for everyone. Add MMS in the mix and it gets even worse. To be fair this can be ascribed to technical limitations; in Apple's view iMessage works great and it's too bad you're using something crappy like SMS/MMS. But then Apple hasn't put any effort into making the non-iMessage experience better.

As for why it's anti-trust, it's right there in the WSJ article. Apple executives are explicit in the lock-in being useful for their market power.

Also it may have been years ago but I'll never forget the way Apple originally captured phone numbers into iMessage. Once a phone number was registered in to iMessage no Apple system would ever send SMS to it again. That created a major problem if the owner of the number had stopped using Apple phones. They were sued over this lock-in and finally implemented a way to release your number from iMessage jail. It's still kind of awkward though.

Giving their users a better experience when messaging their friends and family who are not using iPhones. As the WSJ article points out in Apple's monopolistic thinking, this is an anti-goal.

> Giving their users a better experience when messaging their friends and family who are not using iPhones.

That's literally the opposite of what Apple wants.

There’s no question that Apple has not extended iMessage support to Android because it’s in their business interest. However, it is a bit rich for Hiroshi Lockheimer, who is obviously massively biased, to claim the Apple could “just adopt RCS” as a replacement for iMessage (and also for the author to let that comment stand without challenging it at all).

It has taken _years_ to get carriers on board with RCS (and RCS requires their involvement) and it doesn’t support all of iMessage’s features (e.g. only supports end-to-end encryption in one-to-one chats, and that after a near Herculean effort from Google). Moreover, the fact that it’s an open standard means that it will likely take quite some time for the protocol to support new features that OS vendors like Apple might like to add, and that that process will be fraught with compromises. It seems completely reasonable to me for Apple to not want to tie themselves to the whims of carriers (who, let’s recall, were charging _absurd_ amounts for text messages before proprietary systems forced their hand) or Google (look at what’s happened to web standards under their stewardship) when it comes to managing their messaging service.

That said, as an iPhone user, I _would_ love to see RCS support _alongside_ iMessage to improve the experience of communicating with Android users, and that actually might happen someday.

I'm not sure I see the problem really. iMessage already has a fallback to SMS. They can implement a fallback to RCS the same way and support more than basic features. It doesn't have to be a 1:1 feature complete equivalent. And in terms of devs - they have the money to implement it and support it.

Agreed. Purple bubbles.

No one is asking Apple to replace iMessage with RCS.

I've texted Pixel something to Pixel something over Google Fi and it's been shit compared to iPhone. I've been almost universally an Android user for ages.

Switching to an iPhone when the 13 came out has been a top notch decision.

Androids RCS adoption is good with major caveats:

- it's good only in certain locations, without global ubiquity

- it still very much depends on what phone you have

- it's only recently become good enough to be usable

- it's still tricky to deal with the SMS fallback problem, and you'll still see Android phones struggle with SMS fallback

So in the case of iMessage, for them to adopt RCS they'd need three tiers of messaging:

- iMessage (because it's not just for cellular devices)

- RCS (for those devices that handle it)

- SMS for everyone else

People act like RCS is a solved problem. It's not and while I'd love to see it integrated into iOS, it's not as trivial to do it as just saying: okay add it in.

> People act like RCS is a solved problem. It's not and while I'd love to see it integrated into iOS, it's not as trivial to do it as just saying: okay add it in.

Why?

I don't mean that flippantly. Let's not pretend that there are major technical hurdles to something like this for a company with as many engineering resources to throw around as Apple.

The reasons are pure business.

RCS is a carrier standard. It will stagnate and die a slow death over the next 5-10 years just like SMS and MMS. The carriers have absolutely no place establishing or maintaining a standard.

Google epically failed to establish a messaging ecosystem similar to Apple, and so they went to RCS. But they’ll regret it when the standard fades into uselessness.

I was working with RCS related stuff for a carrier R&D group in 2008-2009. I was sure it was a dead horse already then, so it blew my mind when the term reappeared a year or two ago. I actually had to check if it was just coincidentally the same name. But no, somehow the thing was still alive and now after over a decade actually adopted too.

It's anyway useless outside of US now as that ship has sailed, proprietary chat apps ate the market.

I'm torn between being angry that U.S. law enforcement turns a blind eye to such obviously abusive business practices, and being angry that individuals are so terrified their child might not fit in that they literally buy into the scam.

open standards 4 lyfe, green bubble bruthas

What's abusive, painting chat bubbles in another colour?

More manipulation or a dark pattern than abuse.

iMessage deliberately makes the text unpleasant to read. They could just use a green/blue badge to differentiate the underlying protocols, but instead they render the non-iMessage texts on a background that makes them slightly annoying to read. How is annoying users and inducing a negative emotional response to messages from a group of people not abusive?

wow

I guess dang and ycombinator are abusing me for making me read your comment with light gray text color.

It would be like Apple paying off forum sites to do something like that, graying out Android users in any public discourse. Android phones are more popular in African American communities, so Apple is already doing segregation-like stuff with these hard to read text bubbles.

That's the most convoluted reason to call someone racist I've heard of in a long time.

A better analogy would be HN greying comments that were posted from any device that wasn't manufactured by Apple.

SMS messages were green for years before they introduced iMessage, so I doubt they chose that colour to be intentionally annoying or abusive.

The look was entirely different. Black on green IIRC. It's white on somewhat neon green now.

If you turn on Increase Contrast in the accessibility features the green is darker and much nicer.

> Black on green IIRC

Yep, inherited from iChat way back in the Jagwire days: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/revie...

With later iOS they changed the colour to much brighter green which violates even their own accessibility contrast rules.

They were black on green which is fine, white on green is hard to read, only white on yellow would be worse for the way our cone cells are distributed.

It's ends up breaking group messaging and Android people are left out due to the Hassel of having an Android in the group chat.

I wonder if this article/research exists to drum up anti-apple sentiment.

In an ideal world we would be all using open standards protocols/file formats/etc which would avoid this mess however in reality what ends up happening is a replay of the XKCD comic about standards - every vendor insisting that after embracing an open standard that they have some unique corner case that requires them to diverge from the standard rather than work within the system which starts off as divergence then leads to a completely new standard. The committee process is pretty horrendous as well as demonstrated by how long it took took to standardise HTML5 and the various organisations who were members either throwing around their patents or threatening to block any movement forward.

Using SMS or iMesssage seems to be a very US centric thing to do. At this point i only get these kind of messages from companies.

In Europe i'm gussing people quickly migrated away built in messaging system, to basically whatsapp because its availible on all platforms

In any case it feels like a very low level thing to use the phones built-in messaging system. If someone sends me a message using imessage i would reply to them on whatsapp and ask if they are Ok ;)

Yeah same. In Asia, almost every single person uses WhatsApp (or Instagram) for chatting/messaging. I don't know a single person who still uses iMessage or any such thing. It's definitely a very US-centric thing.

Totally US centric. Android has a bigger market share everywhere else, so these supposed iPhone lock-in tactics cannot work. But I believe it's something about sms costs and data plans. Here, Italy, telcos started to offer affordable data plans way before unlimited sms. MMS never took off because the huge costs. I used gtalk on symbian phones. Then Hangouts, a bit of Skype. At some point Whatsapp prevailed but sms were long dead.

The thing is that US is still the "trend setter" - if using iPhones is fashionable and using other phone is not and puts teenager out of the group then they'll want it at all cost, not to mention young adults and Tinder related stuff some people mentioned in their comments where green bubble apparently means "worse, poor, sketchy". And as adults they will be submerged in ecosystem.

If I were google this ~85% US ownership would make me incredibly, insanely scared about my phone related business. And not only phone related as device is gateway for everything. This is basically writing on the wall of what comes in not so distant future - it seems that Apple era is coming - which is sad for multiple reasons: their desire to totally control and lock down software AND hardware, their stance towards web browsers and API's: I'm expecting even more resistance when it comes to implementing browsers capabilities and even more eagerness for gimping existing ones or implementing something "apple way"

Color my surprise when I came to the US to study undergraduate, and somebody asks me for my number so they can make a group chat. I was like "US people still use SMS/MMS?". Turns out everybody uses the included Messages app, and on iPhone it upgrades to iMessage if the recipient uses an iPhone also.

Every time I sees someone using iMessage, it pains me a lot because I feel like I'm being left out of the conversation, just because I refuse to bow down to Apple's monopolistic practices.

As opposed to the non-monopolistic practices of Facebook and their messengers?

As much as I dislike Meta, at least they don't tie you to one specific brand of phone.

On the other hand, Meta spies on you a hell of a lot more and then leases those results to others. And SMS is cross phone - even to feature phones

They all spy on all of us all the time, Apple is no different. Apple probably has more data on their users than any other company out there. So far there are no known instances of Apple selling this information, most likely because they believe they get better value by keeping the information for themselves. But they still spy on users and it is only one step from keeping all that data for themselves to selling it to boost profits or charging fees to keep it private.

This… isn’t true, unless you think everything in here is a lie:

https://www.apple.com/privacy/

If it were all lies there would be lawsuits from the FTC and EU regulators, and there simply isn’t. Because advertising is not a significant part of Apple’s business model, profiling users is a liability that they prefer to avoid. This does slow down the introduction of features. For instance Google images had usable face recognition for years before Apple because Google does it in the cloud. It happens on device for Apple, and it takes longer to scan photos for faces. A slightly worse experience, but worth it in many consumers eyes.

But, I mean apple even does wacky stuff like creating unique ids for each trip you route on maps that isn’t tied to your user id, and fuzzes the precise location using differential privacy for product improvement. You can read all about it in the white papers at the link I provided above.

I agree that Apple makes it very difficult for other entities to track you but Apple themselves can track you and nowhere in their privacy info does it say they they can't or don't. The devil is in the detail. For instance: "Apple does not maintain a comprehensive user data profile of your activity across all our products and services to serve you targeted advertising." A naive reading of that sentence would be that Apple does not keep data on users. But that is not what that sentence says - they just don't use that data for targeted advertising. And as we all know these policies are subject to change at any time so even targeted advertising might become the part of the agreement without users noticing or having any say in it.

Again, read the white papers. The details go beyond either a naive or cynical reading of things that they highlight on the webpage that consumers are most interested in.

So $3T company that advertises privacy focus cannot unambiguously say on their web page about their privacy policy that they do not store data about users? Either they are incompetent in which case I don't really trust their attempt to protect my privacy or they are intentionally obtuse in which case I actually do trust that they know what they are doing and they store data on their users just like they say they do on they web page about privacy policy. Look, you can go ahead and trust them and that is fine. Just ask yourself what is the chance that Apple is the ONLY big tech company in the world that does not spy on its users.

Apple does have a checkbox for "please learn things about me and serve me personalized ads" as well as another checkbox for "please send my analytics data back to you, I wanna share". Therefore they cannot categorically say they don't do it. But they certainly seem not to do it when those check boxes are off.

And Apple doesn’t?

I’d like to assume (because I literally have no way of finding otherwise) Apple spies on us more than other platforms.

It’s so tightly locked down and locked in that most of the ways you control tracking on other platforms are either impossible or frustratingly hard and cumbersome on Apple devices, let alone services.

Top that with most of those services being much inferior to competition without a doubt other than the polished looks (and even that’s doubtful).

Strange assumption. Apple certainly make claims that they don't (which can result in nasty legal consequences if they are lung), provides access to the data they collect on you on phone, allow people to opt out data collection.

And that's all public. It's possible they're lying. Maybe you know they are lying. But unless you do it seems like a weird assumption.

Re: spying, ostensibly both WhatsApp and iMessage messages are E2E encrypted, so I don’t really see a huge difference here (it still leaves either company with valuable metadata, but at least it’s better than nothing).

Re: SMS, isn’t this entire thread about how SMS isn’t seen as a viable (on par with iMessage) alternative?

AFAIK, WhatsApp's client does a lot of tracking itself, it just observing the messages. I've also thought (esp. in the past) that WhatsApp claims if e2e didn't hold up irl.

Meanwhile, yes this article is about how sms isn't a replacement. It's silly, because here and elsewhere people are saying the only place what the greentext nonsense exists is in articles like this.

as opposed to something like a Signal group chat

The only thing that stops you from having Signal group chat is you and people you talk to. When I deleted WhatsApp few years ago, I dropped a message to all my contacts informing them I'm moving to Signal and I included a link if they wanted to download it. Alternatively, I'm happy to still use iMessage/SMS or e-mail. 80% of my friends installed Signal.

My "graceful" fallback is similar to yours but Telegram --> Delta Chat (it's just email to them) --> Element (Matrix) --> Snikket (XMPP). Basically by the time they've gotten to the second step I already have a way of talking to them. I have maybe 1 or 2 people on Element and Snikket 0.

Signal’s leadership is well known for being hostile towards forks and alternative clients. It seeks to be a monopoly too. I think that’s the right call, as it maximizes user-friendliness, but if your overriding concern is monopolies then Signal is not the messaging system you should be advocating.

> it maximizes user-friendliness

Unless the user wants to get their packages from F-Droid[0], or wants a chat client that doesn't come bundled with a crypto coin.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/fdroid/comments/q1jnbb/why_isnt_sig...

Yes, as opposed to. At least in the sense that it’s available on almost every platform out there!

There's a lot of things to criticize about Apple, but how on earth are they monopolistic?

Monopoly on new ideas if anything

Lots of ways - there are hundreds of articles about this, but here's a recent high profile dispute: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2021/06/02/the-epic-...

People tend to dislike companies that are popular/successful in many sectors at the same time and they mistake popularity with monopoly. Do a lot of people are "Apple-mad"? Yes, they are. They would buy anything with Apple logo on it no matter the price even if there are better alternatives available burt that doesnt mean Apple is monopolistic, as long as there is a choice. You can buy Android mobile phone, listen to your music on Spotify with Cambridge Audio headphones on, buy Yamaha speaker for your house, watch Netflix on Lenovo laptop with Ubuntu on it if you want.

I think people tend to use "monopoly" as a catch-all for anticompetitive practices. Apple is not a monopoly except in contrived ways, but they can still be behaving in an anticompetitive way and some of those behaviors may violate regulations.

U.S. antitrust has a lot of discretion and is pretty political but the core metric they lean on, for good or ill, is consumer prices. Can it be argued that the green bubble is increasing consumer prices?

Hm, I think I'd argue that the problem with this is that it results in muddy thinking.

Practices that improve your ability to make money are what the market is fundamentally about. Ideally, those are practices that develop the best products/services at the best value, but there are a whole number of ways to make money as a small participant without doing that. Loyalty cards / buy-nine-get-one-free punch cards are a great example of this: the punch card from my local deli serves only to make me decide not to try out other, perhaps comparable delis. Then the other delis all introduce punch cards, and then they maintain their same set of customers, and a marginal improvement in product at one place will result in attracting far fewer customers than it otherwise would. The whole system is, unquestionably, anti-competitive. But what do you do about it? Certainly there's no monopoly. Do we want to make this illegal, and on what grounds?

To be clear, maybe we should make it illegal - but what does that world look like, exactly? Do we also make it illegal to drip-market customers with discounts? To offer them subscriptions (a la Amazon's "subscribe and save", or a la Lyft Plus)? To sell products that are larger sizes so people make fewer decisions about who to purchase from? etc.

Even before we get to the problem of appropriate use of government power, there's the question of what we want society to ideally look like. Is it inappropriate, even if it's legal, to do any of the things above?

Or put another way, the grounds for anti-monopology legislation is that it is one of the rare known failures of the free-market thesis, that competition will incentivize people to offer the best products/services. But if every tiny deli finds themselves incentivized to be anti-competitive, what should we do about it?

I think people use “anticompetitive” as a catch-all for both anticompetitive and competitive practices.

Making your product better than that of the competition, as Apple did with iMessage (moving between-iPhone data traffic out of the, certainly at the time, expensive and limited amount of SMSes included in many phone plans) isn’t anti-competitive. You could even say they built competition for the SMS network, just as WhatsApp did later.

I also don’t see how signaling, in the UI, which messages are subject to different rules would be a anti-competitive.

And yes, that is useful even today. My smartphone subscription has a limit of 200 SMS per month (any following costs about a quarter of a dollar)

> I also don’t see how signaling, in the UI, which messages are subject to different rules would be a anti-competitive

I think the anti-competitive part is refusing to make iMessage available anywhere other than on apple products, even though there are clearly users who would like to use it on other platforms

Deciding not to serve a market isn’t anti-competitive. I also don’t think keeping the protocol closed so that competitors cannot implement it is anti-competitive, but that’s getting borderline for me.

I also think Apple, if they decided to provide android support, should be allowed make that a paid service. After all, it runs on their back-end. I guess even a reasonable pricing scheme would be met with resistance.

There's an "easy" solution for Apple to stop being perceived as uncompetitive: create an Android app, with feature-parity.

If Apple was a small company, no issue; but they are a $3T company, and conscious decisions taken by such behemoths to increase lock-in should be treated differently. They also have >50% of the market, not a minuscule of it.

Of course they won't do it on a virtue, because they know it will lower the friction of switching. Every big company loves walled gardens that maximize the friction of changing; that's why maybe they should get some scrutiny from a regulator.

What Apple did might have just been a well-intentioned engineering hack but it became insidious: giving the minimum compatibility, meaning you can have non-Apple people in the chats (our hands are clean! plus, disincentivizes groups to look for alternative tools), but everyone gets inferior experience (non-Apple folks get less features, Apple folks get the white-text-on-green-bg which is unpleasant to read), and "blaming the victim" starts.

What about the reports of users that were iMessage users, and then decided to switch to Android? And then Apple just does buggy, shitty things to them like sometimes not send SMS messages from iPhones to them. Which causes users to blame Android, for an apple bug? How is that no anti competitive?

If Apple wants imessage to compete with SMS, they could have made one app for SMS, and one app for imessage. But Apple doesn't want to compete with SMS. Apple wants to kill SMS, and be the only game left in town. It's similar to the old tactics that Microsoft used to use. Only difference is Apple has a much better marketing department.

There was a post here recently about how 87% of US teens are using iPhones. As somebody who was a "green bubble" in the past I can see how peer pressure inflated that number.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807

I do agree that defining a market as "cell phones for teenagers" is a bit disingenuous but I definitely feel like there's something really unfair about not having iMessage for Android. The green bubbles are basically a marker of not being part of the in-group even if you have something more expensive than an iPhone.

The lack of feature parity on the sms side (poor quality videos, stupid text responses when ppl like something) is annoying .. but if you're ostracized because of the green bubble, that may turn out better for you anyway. My kids don't have phones yet, but I'm pretty sure I would be very unsympathetic to pleas for an iphone so they can fit in. It's hard being a kid/teenager, but I'd rather them learn early how stupid/shallow this is, even if (or because) it's painful.

When FaceTime was announced Steve Jobs promised Apple would create an open standard so it could be used by anyone. They got wrapped up in patent hell and chose to limit the service to their own devices rather than pay for licensing. The alternative would have made Apple less money.

How did Skype and other video services deal with the patent challenges?

I thought perhaps looking at the patents might help answer your question, but I changed my mind about doing the research upon retrieving them. Quite large.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7921211B2/en

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7418504B2/en

You can do it now! https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619

I mean, you can't start a FaceTime call, but at least they finally let you join one.

While iPhone users are free to use any messenger they wish, iMessage still has monopolistic properties.

The key one is that it’s very difficult to convince an iMessage group to use a different app. iMessage isn’t even objectively better — in many cases, other messaging platforms have faster, less buggy, more secure iOS apps with more features than iMessage. (Speaking from extensive experience with iMessage and other apps.)

As a result, iMessage has a stranglehold on Apple users because of Apple’s design goals and business decisions. It’s designed to feel like you need to use it for texting someone. It overrides standard protocols (SMS), doesn’t implement new messaging protocols (RCS), and doesn’t allow any other apps to process text messages. So iMessage has a monopoly on the default carrier-based messaging solution on iOS.

And its group lock-in makes it very hard to choose to use an android, since you’ll have to spend a large amount of social capital to get everyone into a different messaging app.

I would not consider iMessage to have monopolistic properties if it did the following:

- Implemented modern carrier messaging protocols, like RCS.

- Had good apps for other platforms, including android and the web.

- Allowed 3rd party apps to handle SMS/RCS.

But iMessage is a huge benefit to Apple because it keeps people locked into the ecosystem. Not because it’s an excellent messenger. That’s why it’s monopolistic.

I agree that iMessage is a huge benefit to Apple because it keeps people locked into the ecosystem more than because of technical merit. I disagree that it is monopolistic, because they don't have a monopoly!

Think about airline mileage programs and status. They keep people locked into the airline's ecosystem. But no single airline has a majority market share, and labeling a dozen active competitors in a market "monopolistic" would make no sense.

The switching costs are different, though.

You can switch between airlines without having to convince everyone else on your flight to do the same. Also, buying two flights on two different airlines to fly to two separate destinations on two separate days makes much more sense than buying two phones to talk to two different people.

> The key one is that it’s very difficult to convince an iMessage group to use a different app.

As someone who managed to convince half the WhatsApp group to migrate to signal where we held out for a couple of months, ended up cross posting so the ones who were left behind didn't miss out and eventually abandoned signal and went back to WhatsApp I can tell you this has very little to do with Apple.

> iMessage isn’t even objectively better — in many cases, other messaging platforms have faster, less buggy, more secure iOS apps with more features than iMessage. (Speaking from extensive experience with iMessage and other apps.)

Which other app lets me exchange full quality video/pictures?

Signal? Telegram? WhatsApp?

I know WhatsApp does not, it heavily compressed images and video.

This is why we had to break up AT&T. We know these type of network effect businesses are a drain once they reach the extraction phase.

If you surveyed iphone users, I doubt any of them would care about any features you listed. There was article today about ink toner chips, people care that they can't use other toner cartridges in their printers. That is true monopolistic properties and detriment to consumers.

There is literally 2 billion month active whatsapp users which is a direct competitor to imessage and is my default group messaging. There aren't even two billion iphone users.

MKBHD made a video about Apple and the paradox of choice. Pretty interesting

WhatsApp and I'd assume lots of other messengers use the number as your identifier, too.

Anyone and his dog can use WhatsApp. You don't have to buy a specific phone to use it.

Really? Because I can go buy a feature phone right now that begs to differ.

Funny you should say that.

WhatsApp became popular worldwide in part due to supporting such a vast amount of devices; including what would be known these days as 'feature phones'. It even works on some of Nokia's 'retro' phones such as the 8110.

Unfortunately it seems post-Facebook acquisition they ended support for (at least some of) those platforms.

https://blog.whatsapp.com/whats-app-support-for-mobile-devic...

I'm just thrown by your statement. No feature phone I've purchased has had the ability to use WhatsApp, so what are you talking about? Feature phones tend to come with a few preloaded apps, if that, full stop. Many come without the ability to run any apps at all. Maybe some feature phones have access to a app repository and some WhatsApp client could exist there?

Or are you thinking you could have a web interface was if the feature phone includes a basic webbrowser?

I mentioned a feature phone in my post that currently supports WhatsApp.

Back in the early years, it used to support Nokia feature phones (not anymore of course) running their S40 operating system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40).

Accessing WhatsApp from the web is also of course always a possibility.

My entire household uses Apple products. A few years ago I got fed up and went all in on Linux and Android. I liked a lot of things about it but ultimately came back to Apple. When I switched back to an iPhone my wife told me "I'm so glad you're back on iMessage..." like she'd been holding this dark secret inside her the entire time I was out of the fold.

It's baffling honestly as messaging was the least of my problems. Sucky apps, weird driver issues, and just general friction with simple things like printing were what finally got me.

Windows and Android play very nicely together. I'm a Windows and iOS user, but interfacing iOS and Windows definitely requires research. It's hard to not go whole hog on Apple once you have the iPhone trojan horse. A very high built quality device that receives years of security and feature updates.

That said, if they don't go USB-C by the next time I upgrade, I'm going Pixel or Samsung. Or if they go portless, I'm out. The build quality does suffer, but I'm done with USB 2.0 transfer speeds and goofy Lightning ports. Apple is the only company that could get away with such things in 2022.

There’s nothing wrong with lightning, I think it’s an excellently designed connector. I like that they seem to be sticking with it.

However, the fact that it doesn’t support USB three speeds is… baffling. I hope they fix that.

I was listening to a podcast last week (The Talk Show?) And they were talking about the fact that you can take this glorious 4K footage on the newest iPhones and everything looks amazing and it takes FOREVER to transfer it off the phone because you have to do it at USB 2.0 speeds or Wi-Fi speeds.

They can fix that without a new connector.

Sidenote: I find this kind of hilarious. So many people were up in arms when they introduced lightning because they were changing things and making things obsolescent and people had to buy all new stuff.

Here we are a few years later and all sorts of people are mad that Apple is not introducing a new connector and forcing everyone to buy all new stuff.

I understand the desire. It’s just sort of an ironic situation.

Most don't need to buy new stuff for a USB C charger. I can take the same cable and charge my MacBook, Windows laptop, iPad, Xbox controllers, Switch controllers, Switch, Android phone, drone, and portable battery. I can plug that cable into many of the different chargers around the house or plug a combination of devices together with it. When I do I can share charge or exchange data. When I leave I can unplug my 4k portable fold up monitor from my desktop's GPU and put it in the laptop bag to use on my MacBook with the same cable as anything else. Generally I carry 2 USB C cables and 1 dual port charging brick in that bag and I'm covered for charging, data, power, or display of any device I bring along.

When lightning was introduced no non-Apple things used or would use lightning, you were forced to buy all new stuff. Now it's rarely the case someone buying a brand new iPhone doesn't also already have any USB C chargers or cables. As such this is not ironic for the majority, just sad and frustrating... as what doesn't fit into this mold? My god damned Air Pods Pro which insists I have a dedicated c-to-lightning cable just for it wherever they go with me. Not the cable on the couch for the console controllers, not the cables around the PC, not the 2 cables that do everything else in my travel bag, not the phone charging cable next to my bed, the lightning cable the charge the charging pod to charge my headphones. Fantastic headphones as they are while on the go in noisy environments... why they needed to be lightning I'll never come to terms with.

Regardless it's unlikely they'll be sticking with it. The EU is now requiring mobile phones with a wired charging port to support USB C (and additional interfaces if they desire but at least USB C directly). So like the GP alluded to either the next iPhone will be portless or have USB C. Well, or Apple doesn't sell the iPhone in Europe but given the iPad and current MacBooks are USB C that seems exceedingly unlikely. Portless however... wouldn't surprise me.

> Most don't need to buy new stuff for a USB C charger. […]

You’re right. That’s different this time and I’m sympathetic to it. As I’ve started to gain more and more USB-C stuff the possible convenience it would provide has certainly increased. When people were beating this drum 2-3 years ago I basically didn’t have any USB-C stuff so it wouldn’t have given me any convenience. But overtime that’s changing.

Regarding the EU: I like Apple but they are stubborn as hell. For that reason alone I have a hard time seeing them doing it. They could start making two options, one USB-C and one lightning, but that doesn’t sound like Apple either.

Portless would certainly be a solution, but I have a hard time seeing that either. Wireless charging is just too slow.

I really don’t know what’s gonna happen on that one.

USB-C and then portless when the technology is good enough. It'll be hard to stick with iPhones knowing this. I never want zero ports, they'll never match charging efficiency of a cable having no port.

I agree. Unless someone figures out some sort of epic hack around physics, I can’t see getting rid of the charging cable ever.

Most of this thread is about how people dont use iMessage, and summarily most of this thread misses the point.

It’s not that people need a blue bubble to indicate that the other party has an iPhone. That would be silly. It’s about the features afforded to you if you use iMessage, which were revolutionary for a phone when it was introduced. remember that this was introduced a couple years after the iPhone - it wasn’t a first gen feature.

Knowing if my recipient received the message, that my recipient will receive the message at all, and seeing if they are replying — these are the reasons I’m an iMessage fan. And perhaps most importantly, on my Mac I can respond to and send such messages as well. All of this works works with wifi connection only, no cell signal needed. Making it usable on airplanes etc.

None of this works with the dreaded green bubble. None of this.

With green bubble, I can’t guarantee my messages were sent in order. If I send a message with a photo it just as likely won’t be received at all of their phone can’t receive it in the proper time or if they are in a bad signal area. Suffering through this is not worth the effort to talk to most people (and call me whatever you want but it’s true and you know it).

It’s not about what device my other person has. It’s about being able to communicate with a technology that doesn’t resemble a dial up modem.

Well the point is not to advocate for SMS but rather to criticize iMessage for being restricted to the Apple Eco System.

Where I live, iMessage is just significantly less relevant. Instead you can safely assume that most people have WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal :)

I use Android and can send texts or make calls using wifi. I also can see if the recipient received my message and if they are replying.

I’m pretty sure this is only working if your other party has an Android - and effectively is doing the same thing, perhaps with RCS, that iMessage is doing.

But that’s definitely not the case if your counterpart is using an iPhone, right?

>Apple’s iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy. Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this.

This is very very strange coming from Google. I am surprise because Google has stopped acting like they do no evil. And somehow Apple picked that up from Google since 2016. And now they are in reverse situation.

My thinking has evolved somewhat in this. There's a big difference between a standard and an integrated platform where the client is under control of the server operator, and can guarantee timely updates for changes in the messaging protocols.

Jabber is nowhere to be found today, yet we have a plethora of messaging services, perhaps most notably WhatsApp, which seems to have word domination.

There are big consumer advantages here, in addition to the known disadvantages.

What is this quote from? Someone at Google said this? I don't see it in the archived link.

Looks like it's a tweet from Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP at Google for Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, Play, Comms and Photos

https://twitter.com/lockheimer/status/1479865157753147395

Blackberry commanded the same level of loyalty via BBM ages ago. Apple has definitely refined that strategy with iMessage. The network effects of it are very strong (in the markets where it is dominant, anyway).

Meanwhile, Google is content to just rename their chat app every two years with zero coherent strategy. Would it be so hard to make an Android messaging service that doesn’t suck?

It's called whatsapp. Doesn't suck, is multi platform, has a bunch of features, and the end to end encryption means that all the privacy fears people have are FUD. Only valid complaint I have is that they are too restrictive with their bot api, can't really experiment with chat bots unless you are are an established company already, and established companies are not great in experimenting.

They would have done that ages ago I think. They could have made the „default“ Android messaging app similar to iMessage.

But couldn‘t because they needed to keep the OEMs (mostly Samsung) and regulators at bay. Android needed to be open in the beginning so Google could catch up and overtake iOS. But obviously there are drawbacks (from their perspective) if you don‘t control the whole ecosystem including hardware.

Reminder: if you see an article reappearing every few months ("suits are in again"), it's very likely pushed by some company's PR department.

Wonder which company might be interested in pushing this story!

Edit: see http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

This is a great link, thanks for sharing

Here is a clue:

https://mobile.twitter.com/android/status/147987545766744883...

Not sure why Android would want "iMessage is winning" as headline...

It is 2022. Feelings rule the Earth. You don’t win by being better. You win by crying more (in this case, to regulators).

As a Russian: lol sms. I can't remember the last time I actually sent an sms-type message to an actual human. We mostly use Telegram and VKontakte for messaging. Some weirdos also use WhatsApp. Every carrier has an unlimited sms option you can add to your plan though.

Before smartphones, SMS was a big selling point for US carriers. Plans were very cheap compared to the rest of the world. So we were already accustomed to texting when smartphones arrived. When WhatsApp / Telegram got here, no one in the US really cared because all our contacts already had SMS and MMS.

SMS should have been retired a while ago. But now we've foolishly managed to tie MFA to it...so I doubt its going anywhere anytime soon.

We also used SMS before smartphones, but only for a bit, because most people paid per message. Some, like me, did figure out mobile data and did use ICQ (via JIMM and, in my case, NatICQ) and VKontakte (via Opera Mini) from their phones. Either way, messaging services tied to a single device have never caught on very much in the first place around me, and so stuff like WhatsApp is a tough sell. iMessage is an absolute non-starter because the only world in which everyone uses an iPhone is the fantasy one dreamed up by Apple.

Today, 99% of my SMS messages are various notifications and login codes.

I can’t imagine actually using SMS, iMessage or not. It’s just an inferior experience to basically any other chat solution.

The only thing I actually use SMS for are things that make me do MFA with it, and even that is a worse experience than the alternatives(I’m not saying you shouldn’t have MFA, just that SMS is inferior to most other approaches).

A chat "solution" that your correspondent doesn't use is the worst experience of all.

Well I guess I’m not saying it doesn’t ever have a place, it’s nice to have a universal means of communication, but for regular ongoing communication within a given subset of people it is certainly not a great experience.

> I can’t imagine actually using SMS, iMessage or not.

iMessage does not use SMS, so this statement does not make any sense.

I mean, it's the standard in the US. It doesn't really matter whether you can imagine it or not.

I don’t know about teens, but something that annoys me as an adult about non-iPhone users is that I can’t be sure that they’re seeing what I’m seeing when I send them a photo.

If I take a photo of a sunset in my iPhone and send it to another iPhone user, I can be assured that:

- The colours will be correct

- The high dynamic range will be preserved

- Live photos will work.

Etc…

With Android users, all bets are off. The colours will be shifted or wrong. HDR will generally not work.

(The same thing applies to Microsoft Windows users. If I email them something, chances are that it’ll be mangled in some way.)

Google, like Microsoft, just doesn’t care about quality or interoperability, and consumers like me notice.

Does this happen with Signal or Element? If not, you could ask your Android contacts to use a cross-platform messenger such as those, like the rest of the world does with WhatsApp.

This is the number one method for how I got my friends to contact me on Signal. No more potato videos and images. Can still do group video calls, reactions, everything that iMessage offers except it's cross platform.

> Google, like Microsoft, just doesn’t care about quality or interoperability, and consumers like me notice.

Just to be clear, Google and Microsoft care very much about interop. That's why quality and ecosystem coherence are generally lower than Apple.

I mean, I agree with problem while vehemently disagreeing with proposed cause. It somehow puts blame on "others" for interoperability, whereas my personal perception is that Apple said "&@#& screw interoperability - we will make sure things work right in our own ecosystem only, through closed proprietary systems, and who cares about anybody not using our hardware".

Live photos not working on other phones is not THEIR fault for goodness sake. It's a proprietary iPhone gimmick Apple have spent zero effort in trying to work anywhere else. Same for portrait photo etc.

Apple is intentionally building a walled garden of proprietary stuff that purposefully doesn't work outside. From charger to text to photos to everything else, they see their future in blazing their own path as opposed to compatibility.

I too am frustrated in my iPhone photos being a pain anywhere outside, but seeing as my android Nikon canon windows Linux google adobe Microsoft etc systems all seem to talk happily with each other, I know exactly where to scream in rage at.

- Sent from my iPhone, fwiw

Edit: not that you're alone mind you. Apple's marketing machine and prestige identity works brilliantly - Most iPhone users I know feel that's everybody else's fault, which only makes the brand loyalty firmer - it's a perpetually self enforcing perception.

There was a great article on here yesterday that hits the nail on the head: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208

Distributed standards inherently become ossified and are unable to innovate. The path of least resistance is to centralise and gain control, which allows fast iteration and innovation.

Fundamentally, as a user I don't care about Google's or Microsoft's excuses. They're some of the biggest companies in the world. They've largely centralised their systems (G Suite, Office 365, Teams, etc...), yet have failed to capitalise on this centralisation, unlike Apple.

I mean, we're talking about a trivial thing here: sending pictures! Yet only Apple gets this even remotely "right". Every other company is perfectly content with sending potato quality images, randomly mangling colours, etc...

I just installed Windows 11 on a brand-new, high-end laptop with an OLED HDR screen. It's a shit-show.

- HDR is off by default. I paid thousands for this feature, but let's just keep that disabled... for reasons?

- HEVC is unavailable by default, so apps like NetFlix silently downgrade to 1080p & SDR.

- HEIF support is available, but also off by default.

- The Dolby Vision Extension is available, but cannot be found via the App Store search(!). You have to find an external link to it, and use that to navigate to the hidden storage page to download it.

- Windows 10 used to have 10-bit SDR with wide gamut support. That has been removed. You can only have a colour-managed desktop by default in HDR mode.

- HDR mode is forcibly disabled if you're running on battery. So you unplug your laptop and the colours shift.

I could go on and on. And on. And on.

You can't blame "standards" for this. Microsoft and Google are just too lazy to do things right, to have things "just work".

With Apple, I can send another person a Dolby Vision 4K 60fps HDR video in a text message and it will work. With a much more powerful Windows 10 computer I can't. It won't play, and even if it does, it'll probably stutter like mad because an 8-core 5 GHz laptop struggles with something my phone can handle smoothly.

> Distributed standards inherently become ossified and are unable to innovate.

I don't think it's as simple as that. When websites were proudly stating that they were "best viewed in Internet Explorer", there was very little innovation in the web platform, but then when Mozilla/Firefox and Chrome became popular, distributed innovation improved.

Things are a little more complicated now that Chrome has a dominant market share, but I'd argue that it is actually Safari (and Apple's monopoly control over it on the iPhone) that is most holding back the web now.

Fair enough; in retrospective, I've focused on "Interoperability" part of your last sentence, where I find Apple to be more-or-less awful.

I cannot much contribute to the quality aspect in the context you speak of, so I'll take your word - of the many kinds of geeks I've been in the past, I've purposefully never been an Audio/Video geek, because I feel that way madness lies (for me) - for the type of reasons you outline and many many more :)

> Google, like Microsoft, just doesn’t care about quality or interoperability, and consumers like me notice.

It's absurd to blame Google or Microsoft for this. If anything Google is the one pushing for an interoperable alternative to iMessage.

When you send a photo using iMessage to an Android user, it's delivered over MMS. The technological restrictions of MMS are what's at fault here.

This is the reason I've converted a lot of my friends to Signal. We can share high quality images, reactions, everything that iMessage has. I only wish Signal would have an air drop like feature to transfer raw files in an anonymous manner without the need for internet.

Yes, but Apple could make their iMessage features available to non IOS products if their goal was to create a non-discriminatory messaging platform.

They've had many many years to do this. Its simply not part of their plan. Their plan amongst other things involves this little cheap tactic of utilizing social engineering to draw users into their platform, when it doesn't have to.

It seems like you (and a whole lot of people in this thread) don't understand how iMessage and texting works. Let me take a stab at this:

To text with non-Apple phones, iMessage uses SMS over the cellular network. This is pre-smartphone technology. A few years ago, SMS was upgraded to RCS (still over the cell network though). Lots of features were added. But Apple refuses to update their old SMS implementation in iMessage.

Now on the other hand, to text with other iMessage users, iMessage uses Apple's own proprietary iMessage protocols over the IP network (the internet); Just like Telegram and WhatsApp does. Apple refuses to bring iMessage to other devices and doesn't let other messengers implement it's proprietary iMessage protocols.

I hope you realize, the reason you have a substandard experience communicating with Android users is because Apple wants you to.

> still over the cell network though

That's the rub. Why would Apple allow text messages to be once again controlled by both telcos and governments, including interception?

> doesn't let other messengers implement it's proprietary iMessage protocols.

I can't find an open standards document anywhere on the Internet for RCS. Can you?

From what I'm reading, it's a mish-mash of random proprietary "standards" that were each an extension written by one or more telcos or corporations. The current "standard" probably isn't one in any meaningful way, and I would be money that it's full of security flaws due to the heterogeneous design.

> That's the rub. Why would Apple allow text messages to be once again controlled by both telcos and governments, including interception?

SMS text messaging ONLY works over the carrier's cell network, never IP. Its a hold-over from another time. It should've had died when phones became internet connected. But it didn't, and now we've tied MFA to it... so its here to stay.

> I can't find an open standards document anywhere on the Internet for RCS. Can you?

I haven't looked into RCS in a long time. But I do remember it wasn't great. The reason its such a mish-mash of carrier "standards" is because that is exactly what SMS is. When text messaging first came out, you could not message someone on a different carrier. Eventually carriers bridged their messaging networks, but it was always a hot mess (especially when it came to MMS).

I've seen some terrible colors from iphones with iphone users stating the colors are correct. Apple has trained you to see through their colored glasses.

Probably needs a big ‘American’ caveat because iMessage (and SMS) seems to be much less popular outside the US. WhatsApp (or other fb messengers) tend to be the most popular choice where I live. I’d never heard of a ‘greentexter’ until I went to the US but on the other hand Android phones allow 10-finger multitouch which is pretty useful for Chwazi.

Blame mobile carriers in the US for this. Data rates were very high for a long time and eventually texts went from $.10/each (receiving and sending) to “free” w a phone plan before most people had a phone that could install an app.

We still don’t have data only phone plans in the US on major carriers, AND phone plans are insanely expensive compared to what you get in almost any other country, AND most of the country is more spread out so wifi isn’t guaranteed.

The US is very expensive when it comes to telecom, and just about any other industry where there’s a duopoly/cartel that doesn’t bother competing anymore. Come to think of it, there’s very few aspects of the US that doesn’t work like this.

I get a very good rate from T-Mobile for pretty much unlimited everything, including not worrying about roaming. Google Fi is also a good deal.

If anything I hear about horror stories in Canada and I'm very glad I don't have to deal with their rates.

By good rate like $60/mo? Canada is also bad. Data rates are 6x more expensive in US/Canada than Italy. 2x that if the UK or Germany.

In Taiwan, unlimited 4g data plan is around 700 twd/mo (25~30 usd/mo depends on exchange rate). Double if 5g instead of 4g. Some people that don't play games even drop wired network because 300ms isn't a issue if you only watch YouTube. And from what I see. No body is using sms now. Everyone use message apps(line, fbmessanger, telegram, discord) and they also expect everyone have it even in elders.

It's okay. I've never heard "greentexter" in any situation other than "news department trots out this biannual nonstory".

I thought that the green bubbles were WhatsApp messages when I started reading the post. Outside the USA iMessage is something that only people with an iPhone use when messaging other people they know having an iPhone. All the group chats are on systems that run both on Android and iOS because you don't know what the other people are using and frankly it doesn't matter. And only banks and credit cards are sending SMSes. They are slowly moving to push messages on their own apps.

The US is weird. They took a long time to start using SMS, ad then once they started using it, its hard to get them to switch. A very stubborn attitude.

Teens? This happens well into your 20s lol. I've always had iPhones but heard experiences like these from Android-using friends.

There are two important lessons to take from iMessage:

1. Simplicity in product design and UX is key here. You sign in with your AppleID when you setup the phone and then it's basically seamless: it'll use AppleID through Apple's messaging systems and infrastructure when it can, otherwise it uses SMS.

2. Steve Jobs completely turned the mobile phone industry on its head by creating a product users wanted and then extracting conditions from telcos. This was the reason for years of AT&T exclusivity. It allowed devs to install apps on the device (rather than the telco gatekeeeping that). Telcos couldn't install their crapware on the phones (eg Japanese telcos resisted the iPhone for years because of this). The iMessage system broke the SMS monopoly.

Google's model of creating an OS and then putting a suite of apps on top of that allowing phone manufacturers and telcos to "customize" the experience (ie putting their crapware on; Bixby anyone?). One can argue they had to do this to win market share. Or that it's "right". Either way, for many users this is a worse experience.

Compare this to the 217 different chat apps that are in the Google graveyard. Maybe because of the Android model it wasn't possible but quite literally Google did everything they could not to copy iMessage.

Hangouts, Chat or whatever it's called now has been around for 15+ years and seems like such a missed opportunity. Google didn't budge on your email being identity (which Eric Schmidt later stated was a mistake) and it's weird how primitive Google's chat apps are (eg AFAICS there's no easy way to send GIFs in Chat, like WTF?).

I don't think the green/blue thing was planned by Apple in terms of status. It is easy marketing though. People like iPhones so the blue bubble is a kind of flex though. I suspect that was more incidental than planned.

> The iMessage system broke the SMS monopoly.

Wait isn't SMS federated and iMessage the walled-garden monopoly? (At least for their value added features)

SMS used to often cost money, even for plans with gigabytes of internet data. iMessage helped break that.

This is a US-centric point of view. For most of the world, WhatsApp was the key communication app that broke the SMS monopoly. Furthermore, it's not part of a walled garden, being available on all platforms - unlike iMessage which Apple intentionally makes available only on Mac platforms. By comparison, WhatsApp is available on Android and various feature phones, as well as the iPhone, and provides a web client (web.whatsapp.com) and native clients for Windows and Mac (whatsapp.com/download) (and Linux too, though that software is business-oriented).

That’s why I said “helped break that” rather than “single-handedly broke that”.

WhatsApp isn’t as heroic as that: for a long time it was phone-only.

iMessage didn't break the SMS monopoly alone; I'd argue that WhatsApp played a more important role.

WhatsApp launched in Jan 2009, almost 2 years before iMessage launched in Oct 2011. Instead of being locked to one smartphone ecosystem, WhatsApp supported all platforms, including Android and feature phones (and the iPhone). This facilitated its worldwide adoption, in countries where feature phones were more common at the time (or still are). From some rough research/estimates, WhatsApp's adoption is probably roughly 2-3x that of iMessage on a monthly-active-user basis. (This is based on an estimate that roughly 1 billion people have iPhones; and that most but probably not all of them use iMessage.) In March of 2020, WhatsApp had over 2 billion MAU.

iMessage may have broken the monopoly in the USA (where WhatsApp usage is less popular), but WhatsApp arguably played the more important role in most other countries.

I won't dispute that the iPhone may have broken the "telcos install crapware" standard though. (Even today, from what I understand, telcos can install and update software on the phone, or some part of its hardware, but I believe it's limited to the telecommunication software/hardware, not apps on the phone OS.)

> Instead of being locked to one smartphone ecosystem, WhatsApp supported all platforms, including Android and feature phones (and the iPhone). This facilitated its worldwide adoption, in countries where feature phones were more common at the time (or still are).

I recall there being other cross platform apps out there, like Skype, Viber, Tango, and others. But what blew me away, and what I assume blew others away about WhatsApp, is that it simply used your phone number and SMS 1 factor authentication as your verification/login.

This solved the problem of spammers, plus no login name/password combo made it dead simple for non tech literate people. My grandparents in a developing country figured it out without even knowing English.

And the app itself was just extremely polished. I remember being so frustrated at sharing contacts, and then WhatsApp came out, and sharing contacts became extremely easy.

> AFAICS there's no easy way to send GIFs in Chat, like WTF?

GIFs work fine. https://owo.whats-th.is/ABjVcCQ.mp4

You're looking at desktop. This doesn't exist on iOS Google Chat, for example.

These articles always play up the sillier aspects, but I don’t think non-iPhone users realize how much more annoying a group chat becomes when you add even one non-iPhone user. All of the social network features (thumbs up, etc) becomes an explicit and long text, etc. None of it is a big deal individually, but it adds up. If I were younger and meaner, I’d definitely make passive aggressive comments about “green bubbles” and occasionally leave people off threads.

(I realize this is a US-centric perspective, etc… but I’m definitely not a teen. :))

You can use any cross-platform messenger instead of iMessage. Which is what most people on earth do.

No shit. But when my friends and family message me, they tend to text.

I gotta say that one of the biggest reasons I'll never buy an iphone is because iMessages are awful. Anytime there is a group chat with an android user there's like a 5% chance your message will be lagged by hours, or sometimes not even be sent at all.

I'm seeing in these comments that no one uses texts much, which must explain why this isn't an issue with most people, because I can't imagine why people would think iMessage is good when it doesn't even reliably work.

I have an iPhone but all of my messages are green: I have disabled the iMessage features because they tend to mess up certain types of links which I have to sometimes exchange with my coworkers[1].

Unlike what the heading suggests, the colour of the bubble doesn't tell you what phone one owns.

[1] 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 use Google Voice with my iPhone. My cousin has an Android. The rest of the family is on iPhones. My family all have my GV #, but not my iPhone phone #. My iCloud address is my email address.

I think almost everyone is on Verizon.

Group Chat works great in Messages for me until someone adds my cousin, who being on Android, obviously doesn't have Messages installed. At that point all the iPhones (or the Apple Messages backend?) switch to MMS. Then the fun starts for me.

For every message sent to the group chat, I get an email (to my iCloud email address) from phone#@vzwpix.com. The to list is all the phone #'s in the group @vzwpix.com, oh except one person who is on AT&T goes to phone#@icmms1.sun5.lightsurf.net. The email has no subject, and the body of the message is a single text attachment.

I don't really understand why Messages Group Chat has to be all or nothing Apple Messages or MMS. I also don't really understand what this weird email thing is or where it happens. But it's annoying as heck.

I've offered to buy my cousin an iPhone, but she's just really attached to Android. (Normally, I chat with her via WhatsApp, but I also can't convince my entire family to switch to WhatsApp just so we can have a common communication protocol.)

I'm glad your cousin stood her ground. Forcing her to uproot her entire digital ecosystem because someone else can't be bothered to install a messenger app (while rewarding Apple for anti-competitive behavior) is terrible and kinda selfish.

The only real solution is for everyone to switch to Telegram or WhatsApp or some other platform that works on ALL devices. Vendor lock-in is bad for everyone. In the long run, its in everyone's best interest to move away from iMessage to a more open platform.

She’d be happier on an iPhone. She uses a Mac for everything else. She has no digital ecosystem tied to Google/Android. She’s just used to the Android UI. No one is forcing her to do anything.

But in any case, she should be able to use whatever mobile OS she wants and asking everyone to use WhatsApp or Signal isn’t the answer either. Both of those apps have shitty integration with Android/iOS compared to the native messaging apps.

Rather, all of the messaging apps should interoperate with something better than freaking SMS/MMS and whatever this stupid email hack is the carriers have come up with.

> Rather, all of the messaging apps should interoperate with something better than freaking SMS/MMS and whatever this stupid email hack is the carriers have come up with.

In another comment I explained why SMS is so bad on Apple devices. I'll copy paste that here:

I hope you realize, the reason you have a substandard experience communicating with Android users is because Apple wants you to.

RCS is tied to the telcos. Boo. (And yes, boo on Apple for not opening iMessage up to non-Apple users, but RCS is no panacea.)

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/after-ruining-androi...

via https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/01/14/amadeo-google-m...

I get grief about the green bubble weekly. It not just teens

It's the people who are mentally teenagers still.

It wasn't until reading this article that I have ever heard that the color of the bubble meant anything (I'm an 8-generation iPhone user). Maybe it's my cohort, or the fact that I have a lot of international people on chats, but 100% of my group messaging takes place on Whatsapp, 30% of the time through their web interface on my laptop.

I don’t mind the green bubble except that it seriously harms readability for me. The green is so bright. I wouldn’t think anything of the “green bubble strategy” if it weren’t for how garish and unreadable the text appears. It’s a questionable decision from a UI/accessibility perspective.

I wonder if the illegibility is intentional?

Given the iPhone shipped for 3 or 4 years with only green bubbles (for SMS, pre iMessage) it’s definitely not intentional.

Another user pointed out that it used to be black text on a green background. Now it is white on green. I think I agree that it is harder to read.

There really needs to be some catch-all law that prevents dark patterns like this. (Please excuse the irony that in this case the dark pattern is light text).

If an engineer or designer is told to deliberately spend time making an experience less good for someone, they should be able to report that to a government ombudsman, and if their whistleblowing is proven correct, the company should be forced to reverse the decision and continue to pay the developer their salary for the next 10 years even if they choose to quit.

I suppose there are cases when the dark pattern is actually intended to add friction to a path that leads to user errors, like accidentally making private files world-readable, but something like a jury of users should be able to unanimously reach a verdict on whether a given "feature" is really a benefit.

Possibly. Did that change with the iMessage launch? Either way I feel the choice is for aesthetic purposes rather than anything sinister.

I don't think it's an accident.

No, me either. They get enough UI right (I know, many of you will disagree) that this particular mistake in a prominent part of one of their most important applications is almost certainly intentional.

To me, this is just another example of Apple's hypocrisy, where they claim to be all about inclusivity, but then build in exclusivity (read: being non-inclusive to a certain group of the population) in their products to induce FOMO and "status" among peers.

Apple has always had a subtle (sometimes not-so-subtle) exclusivity or "you're inferior if you don't use our stuff" angle in all their marketing.

This is nonsense. If you have a group or N text message participants you really don’t want that 1 person to be non-iOS, because it ruins the benefits of being on iMessage for everyone else. You don’t even get delivery confirmation with regular texts.

This is exactly it - as a teen I am excluded from class group chats regularly as I don't have iMessage. For group chats, it really does annoy everyone because it's hard to get everyone to switch. I've relied on the fact that I help others with work to get people to switch, and I've only been able to do that for my grade's IB class (15 people) onto Instagram and WhatsApp. It sort of helps that the school is not a rich school, that way there's still others with Androids and I'm not the only one.

RCS has existed for a while but Apple refuses to implement it. Instead of rewarding them for anti-competitive behavior, you should switch to an open platform that everyone can play in.

Reading comments in this thread is so weird because in my own millennial bubble (west coast US), which includes many people of all socioeconomic classes, including some affluent tech people, 90% of people use Android (usually Pixels) and everyone uses Signal. Having a Signal account is the default expectation among most people I know.

The kids use Discord though I've been trying to sell Signal to them too. The end to end encryption is a pretty good selling point—I pulled up the FBI chart the other day showing that iMessage is effectively plaintext for most people.

the much more insidious thing that I've repeatedly noticed and is not touched on in this article is that SMSes to and from iphone users, from my Android device, are completely dropped about 5% of the time. I don't know if it's a problem with the carriers or what, and I've always just assumed it's an edge case Apple doesn't care about or they'd fix it. The problem with randomly (and rarely) dropping text messages is that it can drastically alter a conversation or even make it seem to both parties like they're being ghosted.

Haha, in Germany I do not know a single person using iMessage. In my social bubble it is like WhatsApp > Signal > Telegram > Threema > Facebook Messanger

With a bunch of local/social group variation which order these are in.

Right, changed it to "in my social bubble". Still with iMessage I have never seen anybody using it here.

While I have the same experience, I believe this is called social bubble. I do not know many teenagers, and I don't visit high schools to see what trends are popular among them to assess whether they prefer to use Threema over iMessage.

You are right. Changed the wording to "my social bubble". Still these services I would consider popular in Germany in no particular order.

As you get older you'll likely fallback to the default iMessages app. Those others are just fads to me the kids like to use.

WhatsApp is 13 years old, like it or not, it is not a fad. I've seen it used on Nokia's with Symbian and series 40 candy bar phones 10 years ago. Outside the USA it dwarfs iMessage and will continue to do so for a very long time. Everyone in my extended family uses it, from 15 to 85 years old.

WhatsApp are on the phones that people want, including iPhones.

iMessage is on the phone that iPhone users want.

Neither of those is lock in.

Folk with iPhones will still get those IMs though. shrug

In the UK everyone uses WhatsApp. Certainly everyone I meet my age or older. Maybe the kids are doing something differently, but I doubt it. iPhone usage just hasn't quite got high enough for iMessage to be seamless.

Maybe it's similar in Germany?

In the UK too, and yeah, at both my sons primary school and secondary school it was just expected that you had WhatsApp to be added to the year group and class WhatsApp groups. It's to the point where getting an SMS that isn't a notification from a business is really weird. A lot of people even asks what your WhatsApp is rather than what your phone number is, even though they're the same thing.

In which country? I also don't know a single person using iMessage, and the last non-auth SMS I received was years and years ago. It's as good as dead basically.

It’s not because you’re older or because of fads, it’s because you don’t message anyone outside of the US.

I don't see what age has to do with it. My parents and grandparents message their friends using WhatsApp (in Europe).

Italy here, same.

The US had an early incumbent SMS culture that never gripped most other countries, so iMessage is here to stay.

Outside the US I have friends in their 30s who have never even sent text message.

I love how we’re making a class war out of MMS and a variant of MMS that doesn’t require mobile networks to operate.

Just send your fucking messages on your mobile devices and be done with it.

Yeah, it's... pretty dumb, IMO.

If we want to talk about technical issues, though, it's pretty stark. MMS delivery and message ordering is significantly less reliable than pretty much any OTT service out there. Message size limitations mean videos get recompressed to garbage when you send them. There are basically no add-on features, like reacting with emoji to messages, for example.

The disappointing thing is that there's a solution to all of this: RCS[0]. Android supports it, but Apple of course loves their iMessage walled garden and refuses to, even though RCS has end-to-end encryption now. iMessage may be technically superior in some ways, and RCS certainly has its issues, but personally I feel interop is much more important here.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

This isn't true. SMS was wildly popular in other countries years before it took off here.

In Sweden 50% above age 12 have blue bubbles. Out of 50 of my friends and family one keeps using Android.

Sweden has a roughly 50/50 split of Android/iOS marketshare. If you have a group of 50 people where 49 are using iOS, it stands to reason that there is probably another group of 50 friends and family where 49 are using Android.

Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning in US. The world is made up of nearly 7.8 Billion people. ~4.5B Smartphone users, ~1.1B iOS users. The rest are 95%+ Android ( Both Google and China ) and KaiOS.

That's because SMS have always been awfully expensive in the EU. People moved to whatsapp as soon as it came out.

When was that? We've had free unlimited SMS/MMS for years in France, even on the cheapest plans at 10 euros/month. Now it's free to/from any EU country too.

That is interesting. Before whatsapp showed up, they costed like 25 cents each for a very long time here.

Here in the UK I think WhatsApp took off here based on the strength of the group chat. Now people use it (and Facebook Messenger) for everything.

That was in 2009-2010 when WhatsApp came out.

By that time SMS were free and unlimited under most plans in the US but not in other places. WhatsApp, Viber, LINE etc. caught the non-US markets rapidly as a free alternative to an expensive service. These messaging apps didn't do as well in the US, as they had an equally free built-in alternative (SMS).

Later, most operators made SMS free everywhere, but it was already too late.

10 years later, we still see the same results.

France here, around me it's Messenger / Instagram > Telegram ~ WhatsApp > ...

A grand total of three of my contacts are on Signal lol

I once got texted by a guy coming over to my apartment to install some stuff. Apparently he had an iPhone because I got a blue bubble. Took me a second to figure out why the message looked so weird.

Do you have an iPhone, but everyone else in your contacts has some other type?

There's a mix, but everyone would have sent me messages via WhatsApp at that time.

Now I'm one of those people that uninstalled WhatsApp and told all of my contacts that I'm moving to Signal. I'm still not getting any iMessage messages and >90% of my incoming SMS are from bots.

Tired of Whatsapp scammers, who can register any temporary phone number without identification confirmation.

Find these on crypto, youtube, dating apps, you name it

Italy: WhatsApp > Telegram > Messenger. Maybe Apple users use iMessage between them but given that they are using WA with everybody else and in group chats I'm not sure it's popular even there.

> There is no dot-dot-dot icon to demonstrate that a non-iPhone user is typing,

That sounds more a privacy feature. Why should the other guy know that I'm typing or online?

I (early 20's) have had people complain about the green bubbles from my messages, but now 95% of my communication is over Signal so it's a non-issue.

why americans don't just use telegram or whatsapp like in the rest of the world?

Many Americans with international contacts do use WhatsApp, or even Americans who travel internationally.

However, because many Americans never leave the US, and neither does anyone in their social circles, many Americans never had to deal with international messaging and call costs. Hence they went from unlimited SMS to unlimited iMessage, once Apple rolled it out.

However, if you traveled internationally during 2008 to 2012 or so period, then WhatsApp was a godsend, and almost everyone I knew (since pretty much everyone in my social circles vacations or travels for business internationally) has WhatsApp.

But everyone pretty much has iPhones, so the preferred chat is iMessage due to the high image quality, but if someone does not have iMessage then we switch to WhatsApp.

Probably many reasons. One reason is that SMS was already ubiquitous, and it doesn't require an additional data plan the way 3rd-party apps do.

Why did the rest of the world adopt WhatsApp and alternatives? I don't think they were any later to text messaging than the US..

text messaging was prohibitively expensive. wifi was ubiquitous.

america bid down the cost of SMS first so there was never any urgency to move off of sms. developing nations did not have the same luxury.

There’s no way in hell I’d voluntarily lock myself into a Facebook service. WhatsApp’s a non-starter.

Because proprietary messaging apps are sad and unnecessary.

But what if they offer a (level of) service that SMS/MMS does not? Surely they can’t be dismissed so easily by a rational person?

So there is this new thing called Jami that I had never heard of, that seems to be trying to do mostly the same things as Matrix / Element, but without the bridging? But it doesn't need a "home server", so might actually be usable.

It didn't work when I tried it ("NAT-PMP: Setup failed"), but it's very new.

I'm a thirtysomething, so not a teenager. But at least amongst my peers in my social circle, I've seen more and more iPhones replacing Androids not because of iMessage, but because of the Apple Watch. Seems like the Apple Watch is the must-have gadget + fashion accessory these days.

Just 2 days ago this was posted with a source from 2015:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835437

And now it’s reposted on WSJ in 2020? Why is this suddenly appearing everywhere?

Looks like someone trying to submarine a narrative about something.

What about readability? It's harder to read green bubbles and you can show it with accessibility metrics. If you think about luminance contrast, blue is much darker than green. So the blue bubble text is easier to read, because the text is white.

I don’t really think the green bubble is despised as much as the blue bubble is loved.

I mean every company and their mothers company is trying to get into blue messaging. I mean just see how well sendblue.co is doing...

> Android users trigger a just-a-little-less-cool green bubble: ‘Ew, that’s gross.’

Seriously? What are people doing to their children that make them this fucking shallow?

Edit: NM, apparently it's all BS anyway.

I don't see why this article paints this as specific to teenagers. You can find social networks that use iMessage in various countries among tons of age groups. /nit

It's interesting to consider that people are still using SMS at all as most people in my conversation bubbles utilize Facebook Messenger, Slack, Whatsapp or Discord

this comment section is one of many reminders that i (a 29-year old millennial who uses all messaging apps but primarily iMessage) am now an old person

Don't use an iPhone. "Problem" solved. Billions of people worldwide pull it off without this faux dread even entering the picture.

This is effective only in the U.S., in Europe whatsapp is winning and iMessage is quite ignored (unfortunately).

Same almost everywhere not-us. WA, Line, Telegram, etc. are easily accessible to everyone. I wish the whole green bubble idea was seen more widely as just elitist BS.

At least for me I think WhatsApp is more popular with older people (at least in Germany) while teens use it too they also use combination of different messengers in addition to it (Instagram, iMessage, Signal, Discord, Snapchat, etc.)

I've installed (on a secondary phone) WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Discord, Instagram, Telegram just to be reachable for every friend. Germany is really scattered in regards of messengers.

10 years ago you could at least only have one client (trillian for me) for your different messenger services and google and facebook used xmpp so you didn't even need a facebook account to talk to your friends but alas here we are I guess.

It's a novel and technical not great idea but I always liked https://delta.chat/en/ in their approach to use a decentralized but common service like email for chat but there are just too many difficulties for a normal person to set it up.

This is because the US is the only country that kept using SMS.

Apple has a large share of the us market, not elsewhere

Not true. Apple might actually have a larger marketshare in Japan than it does in the US, but absolutely no one in Japan is using iMessage.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-...

Everyone else decided to use a proprietary app owned by Facebook. That seems far worse to me, I’ll take sms/mms any day of the week.

With end to end encryption, this is important to remember too. And it wasn't owned by Facebook when it started gaining traction. Don't make the US decision seem smarter.

You make a good point about the mass adoption mostly happening before FB took ownership. Back then, Whatsapp was definitely a better choice for a lot of non-US places vs paying for SMS, and perhaps it is even now. iMessage has E2E encryption, but regular SMS doesn’t so WhatsApp seems better in that case as well.

It more than quadrupled since the acquisition, hardly "mostly before FB".

It wasn't owned by Facebook when people decided to use it. Facebook bought it after it became popular.

> I’ll take sms/mms any day of the week

That's because in the US there were unlimited SMS plans. In other countries they used to charge per message.

Also in Italy we use a lot the sms. Since they’re free for almost everyone with all the mobile phone plans.

In Eastern Europe I feel like Viber/Telegram have won, with Instagram/Facebook messenger second, and Whatsapp a distant also-ran.

In Romania at least, WhatsApp is the de facto standard. Just to give some idea of how ubiquitous it is, when I had to buy flowers for a funeral, the lady told me to send the message I wanted printed on WhatsApp, didn't even think to ask if I used it.

By contrast, the only two people I ever saw using Telegram or Viber were a security researcher and a colleague from further East.

I think that you are generalizing too much. There are huge differences between euro countries. From what I see iMessage is bigger in Scandinavia and WhatsApp seems to be winning most of the southern European countries.

I wish some other app besides WhatsApp was the default. Facebook ownership aside, it’s the only messaging app where I can’t access it across all of my devices (no iPad app), and they are very, very slow to adopt new OS features (on iOS at least, not sure about Android). It took them forever to support dark mode and took them forever to support the one-click share sheet APIs.

In some countries. In Denmark everyone uses Facebook Messenger it seems.

Lets at least realize that Apple could easily have a department that develops a broader iMessage app, or release an imessage api, that can be used outside of its apple products to reduce the purported discrimination against SMS messages.

There are certainly other ways to solve the UX as well that doesn't involve discrimination.

But ... they dont.

I'm postulating with this last one: they know exactly what they're doing.

> or release an imessage api

This is an important point. Proposed legislation in the US and EU could this year mandate the sort of interoperability you are alluding to, and it would make much of this controversy moot.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/future-interoperabilit...

Yup, It makes apple billions every year

Btw: check out sendblue.co

A messaging service that cannot interoperate across platforms is strictly non-inclusive by design.

So messaging services must be "inclusive" now ? What is that supposed to mean

100% sure messaging services should be inclusive. Imagine a world with 100 people. 20 are not able to use messaging service A because they cannot afford the computing platform needed to run A. Let’s assume 50 of the remaining 80 choose to buy the said platform and also prefer using service A. Then the 50 and 20 are disconnected from each other. Won’t this result in increasing the socio economic gaps?

Where I come from everyone uses Facebook Messenger, so we don't have this problem.

This story feels years old.

iMessage is a pretty good messaging app, but it is hard not to also think that it’s dominance is partly ensured with Google’s scatterbrained approach / messaging attempts.

And the irony is in the Asia, using an iPhone pretty much guarantees that you'll be considered "old" / "unable to handle tech" / "unable to express individuality" :-)

Huh you’re 100% wrong because in the part of Asia I live the opposite is true. What country are you referring to? Maybe that’s true only in South Korea and China where local brands have a healthy share.

This is green bubble blue bubble stuff is so stupid.

How is this news now? This isn't a new thing

My teens use discord and instagram.

How is this newsworthy and why is it on the front page of HN?

The article tries to portray blue vs. green as Apple’s plan to create an in-group vs. out-group dynamic that leaves non-Apple users feeling left out. This narrative feels incomplete for a few reasons.

First, the article itself describes how the original engineers defined different colored bubbles so they themselves could differentiate between iMessage and SMS/MMS during development. This color indication stuck around in production, let customers differentiate just like the engineers did, and eventually grew into an instinctual association between color and messaging protocol. It doesn’t sound like there was intentional UX design to create a positive association with blue bubbles.

Second, I would argue that positive association with blue bubbles arises from positive experience with iMessage features, not from some in-group vs. out-group dynamic. Using iMessage means having delivery confirmations, typing indicators, read receipts (if desired), and encryption. The first — having reliable delivery and knowing it — was a killer feature when iMessage was first released. But all of the original features, along with newer ones like tapbacks, are enhancements and not requirements that leave out non-Apple users. Seeing a friend join iMessage feels about the same as seeing a friend join another messaging service. It’s not so much ”wow I can finally message you and you are so cool now” but more ”wow I could always message you before but we can now use these cool features together”.

Third, based on the internal emails cited by the article, Apple’s decision to keep iMessage for Apple users was an ongoing discussion years after iMessage was released. In particular, two years after release, Eddie Cue was actually arguing for making iMessage available to Android users. From his standpoint, it was an opportunity to make iMessage the “industry standard” which might or might not be monetized in the future but “it doesn’t cost us a lot to run”.

Finally, as mentioned by sibling comments, iMessage is widely used in only a few geographic locales. It’s just one of many Apple apps (Keynote, Numbers, Pages, Notes, Preview, Reminders, Podcasts, Safari) and services (Apple Music, Apple TV, iCloud Drive, iCloud Photos, Private Relay) that can add value for users who buy Apple devices. Some of those apps and services will provide more value than others and iMessage is probably not the top one for most people.

One part of the article that did grab my attention was the graph of iPhone market share among Americans age 18 to 24. The climb from 45% in 2017 to 75% in 2021 is striking and impressive. That’s certainly not attributable to iMessage alone and I would enjoy a deeper dive on all the potential causes.

(Disclaimer: Current iPhone user, former Android and Blackberry user, and potential Librem or PinePhone user in the future. I use iMessage but it wasn’t a factor I considered when switching to iPhone.)

Honestly, automatically screening people like this out of your life seems like a feature.

The blue bubble snobs or the green bubble plebs?

It's an easy way to filter out black people. "Who isn’t a target demographic for the Apple iPhone. The answer to that question would be the lower income African American community. For households that make $149k or less, just 16% of African American households will choose to invest into an iPhone. On the other hand, 42% of those households will choose to own an Android phone."[1]

[1] https://brandongaille.com/40-enticing-iphone-target-market-d...

Not sure why this is being downvoted.

Seems many commentators here don't believe that discrimination vs green bubbles is really a thing. I witnessed a LOT of "anti-green bubble discrimination" as an Android user. Furthermore, the people doing this discrimination were exclusively white.

Ignoring obvious racist parallels (or downvoting them, as the community has down here) is a sign of the systemic racism that folks here feel in their hearts. Please stop and rather than knee jerk reject a comment because it's too "social justicy for us", critically consider the many factors than encourage shitty behavior like this.

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