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Comment by schwartzworld | Hacker News Reader

It's not just kids. I know adult apple users who claim to feel uncomfortable with the green bubble that iPhones use to show non-apple SMS messages. We ended up moving band planning over to email because it continued to be an issue.

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Now I wonder how much thought went into that decision at Apple, and how aware they are of the results and how much of a bonus the team got that turned the bubble-color into a Marketing instrument to get their customers to bully other people into also buying Apple.

Bullied kids shouldn't shoot up schools, they really should go to marketing departments.

how can the color of a text bubble be that much of an issue?

or is there more to it?

it seems like apple needs to be forced to stop this.

maybe this new law in the EU will help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34993823

Color of the text bubble matters because humans are judgmental. Conformity matters to children. You can’t stop bullying. Even if iMessage is made available to all platforms, there’ll be something else that’ll become the focus of the bullying.

i can see that for children, but not for adults. not to the extent that they would prefer email just to avoid seeing green message bubbles.

At least for me there's more to it. A green bubble means I have no way to know whether the message was delivered or was swallowed/mangled in transit. There's no guarantee on delivery time - I trust iMessage to be near-instant because it goes over IP - I don't trust the duct tape and garbage that handles SMS delivery especially across carriers.

Agreed that iMessage needs to be open, but let's not pretend like SMS is a fine replacement for it - it's not.

thank you, that's actually helpful. good point. i agree with the issues of SMS. it's the same issue with the signal SMS integration i think. in fact having to use SMS on android to be able to talk to iphone users would also bother me and i'd seriously want to pressure them to use a cross platform messenger instead.

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