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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

What is the messaging lock-in? I have lots of text threads with mixed Android+iPhone users, and never have any problem.

Those plain SMS threads are green instead of blue. That lets iPhone owners judge Android owners from afar. /s

Only half kidding. The real issue is just SMS vs data. And a little bit of feature parity - it's changed a few times, but until recently, if I "liked" a message in an SMS thread, we'd all see something like "Alistair like 'something said by somebody'" instead of just applying the thumb-up icon. This only gets worse for media sharing, link shares/snapshots, etc.

I've bumped into a number of iPhone users who seemingly randomly don't get my text messages.

I've switched largely to communicating over alternative platforms since text messages can be unreliable.

This has been a huge problem in my social circles.

I really like my current android device, but my wife and our friends have iphones and we are all constantly inconvenienced by the messaging and other poor sharing options between platforms.

They share things without having to think about it, and I have to come up with solutions that are acceptable to them.

Between this issue and the differences in performance in the last few years, it has me thinking of moving back to team blue after 10+ years on green.

> The real issue is just SMS vs data.

From what I understand (I am European, so never met anyone using iMessage) the real issue is that Apple refuses to distribute its application on Android, forcing instead communication from and to Android to travel via SMS. It's not a problem of SMS (which nobody really uses anymore), it's a deliberate choice. The genius is to allow enough communication between iPhone and Android as to not force iPhone users to switch app, while making it as uncomfortable as possible for both sides.

If it were possible at all, the best solution would be for Android to just block SMS from iMessage, citing some bogus security reason. Then iPhone users would be forced to switch app to communicate and the spell would be broken.

Due to the distribution of cone cells of different colors in your retina, white on green is the hardest to read. Apple has probably caused car wreck deaths with the green bubble, even though you shouldn't read texts while driving, but they probably think a few deaths is worth it for the lock-in and stock incentives.

A simple example is the media sharing quality is horrendous when you transcend the iPhone/Android boundary. Can you communicate, yes. Is it as good as an all iMessage interaction, no.

Yup...my parents share videos from their iphone to my android and it is of a quality where you can literally count the pixels. Maybe there is a way to share higher quality, but they're not tech savvy and just do what is the default.

Maybe you could use any app asking WhatsApp, Telegram, Skype, Signal or even Messenger (is it still a thing?) They work well with video. WhatsApp wouldn't be running Europe if its videos were bad.

Telegram is by far the best one for video/photo quality because it doesn't do any (visible) compression, meanwhile WhatsApp and Messenger (yep, still exists) noticeably degrades the quality.

It's basically impossible to share e.g a long screenshot of text because WhatsApp compresses so aggressively, it's a joke.

Telegram has very visible compression, especially when you send screenshots with text.

There is definitely a way to share higher quality, my feature phone could send better images and videos in 2010. EMS standards haven't gone away, apple just chooses not to use them because...

SMS can only handle a certain number of phone numbers. If a non-iPhone user receives a group message where their number is past the limit, they cannot reply. It has happened with my mother a number of times.

https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

In my view, that's a feature, not a bug. Group messages are a plague.

Android users that interact with iphone users via the default messaging apps end up going over SMS. This has a lot of annoying limitations (can't modify groups, for example).

iOS users will tell you how terrible that is and effectively put pressure on people to switch to iOS "like everyone else".

I'm not sure if I even have any regular contacts who have iPhones, as an iPhone user.

Everyone uses Discord or Facebook Messenger. Or Slack for coworkers.

Yep, same boat here. All my Android friends are on Discord so that's where we talk. I talk to a small handful of friends on iMessage, my family, and then some work stuff for my side business but I do most my chatting in Discord at this point (and Slack for work).

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