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Comment by ronyeh | Hacker News Reader

This is a wonderful project. It highlights how silly Apple is. For those defending the existence of green bubbles, why don’t we swap blue with green then? Would you be okay with all your iMessages in that ugly green while your SMSes with Android friends are in calming blue?

I am typing this on an iPhone 15 pro max and I have several MacBook pros (M3 Max on the way) and everyone in my family has their own iPad.

I hate that Apple has created this thing where some folks ostracize others because they can taint your group chat with ugly green.

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Absolutely lqughing at anyone who thinks the particular colors matter. Ugly green? Calming blue?

The specific color does not matter, the only thing that matters is that they are differentiated for the Star-Belly Sneetches hadbellies with stars and the Plain-Belly Sneetches had none upon thars...

fantastic reference

The color kind of does matter, it pains me to read white on light green.

Actually the green is far less saturated, making it less contrasting with the white text, making it look much worse.

It's not the "ugly green bubble" that people hate, and ostracize others because of. It's the limitations of SMS messages coming into an iMessage group chat that can mess up the whole experience. Media is crappy, group messages don't work well, it's not encrypted. That said, It doesn't justify people being jerks about it. And yes, if the colors got swapped it would turn out the same - nobody cares about the color. I grant that the blues chosen probably have a branding and emotional draw to them, but this is seriously not about the color of the bubble.

That's not entirely true. By one metric, at least, the green bubble is "uglier" - https://uxdesign.cc/how-apple-makes-you-think-green-bubbles-...

Thank you.

Old school iOS SMS used black text which was much more readable.

It’s as if I’m writing with yellow highlighter on white paper. Painful.

Worse, it changes the color of (gasp) the iPhone owner’s outgoing messages. So as an android user, you’re messing up MY texts and ruining MY perception of myself. Ugh.

Yes, humans are stupid. But it would be nice if Apple let me customize the colors in my app. I did just pay them over $2K for new phones for my wife and me.

Normal people choose an app that works for everyone. If they can’t be bothered to switch to something, like Telegram, or Whatsapp, or Discord, or Line or Signal, or… is because they value your companionship not worth the bother.

So buy an iphone to fit in, or respect yourself a bit more and move on and find a better group to interact with.

I think we started using WhatsApp for our family communication because my wife (the only Android user) _hates_ group messages. She hates them because the SMS experience has been so crappy in a mixed environment, but iOS users (my mom, our exchange students, our nanny) default to it in messages because it’s so easy otherwise .

I swear my 75 year old mom doesn’t care about the limitations of SMS. White text on a bright green background is tough to read and straining on the eyes. Luckily it is only her own texts that are colored that way (even though she is on iPhone).

We switched to using FB messenger because it’s easier to use and read for everyone in our family.

I'm so glad I don't have friends who give a darn what color my texts show up in - or the ones who do, are using customizable SMS clients on Android/Linux phones/who-cares-what.

iOS makes culture wars where there is no need to have one, for people too immature to have better things to worry about.

SMS messages on iOS have always been green. iMessage was released four years after the original iPhone.

People keep telling me this as an excuse but the original color scheme was more pleasing to the eye. The current color scheme is painful to the eyes. I know because I see the ugly green bubbles on my messages app on my iPhone. I also have an iPhone 3 in a drawer that sadly no longer works.

You know you wouldn’t want to swap the green and blue bubbles.

I run dual sim, so my other number is not enrolled in iMessage and is all green. I don’t care and imagine most people don’t. It’s a neutral, normal, natural green color.

I’m glad the white text on green is neutral and pleasing to your eyes.

I wish I could change just that one color in my iMessage app without messing up the rest of my iOS color scheme.

It's 2023, why can't the iMessage app allow some user preferences. Christ.

Apple.

Instant messages on the Mac were the same green for a decade before that.

They used to be black-on-green, now they are white-on-green. iMessage also used to be black-on-blue, see the announcement at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrBIgjodpFs

Who cares what the color is? One message type is E2E encrypted over Apple's infrastructure, and you can message while not on cell. The other is not E2E and may have carrier billing and whatever other restrictions on it.

XMPP/Pidgin coming back!

Seriously I don't have the chops or time to do it, but creating a Pidgin wrapper around this tech would be awesome. Just for basic texts/emoticons, it helps a lot with Teams and WhatsApp chats already for me (along with the Pidgin notification extension for GNOME that pops up a box I can type a quick reply into wherever I am).

A moment where we can all learn from those with blue/green color vision deficiency. Who sees the world more accurately in this context?

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