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Comment by gorjusborg | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

> Black on green IIRC

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

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

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.

wow

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.

More manipulation or a dark pattern than abuse.

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.

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