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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

...in the US.

The rest of the world uses Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal.

This blue/green bubble SMS but not SMS -thing is a 100% an American issue.

It's really not an American issue. It's an immature people issue. I've yet to meet anyone who actually cares about whether their messages show up as blue or green when they send them. My social network (in the US) is about 50/50 for Android and iPhone users, and we have a variety of group threads that have both types of phones in them.

The only people that care are:

- Maybe some children

- Some immature adults

- A lot of people who have never used an iPhone and don't even know what the blue/green bubble is but whine about it anyways.

100%. It's nice to have the typing status, delivered/read status, higher quality of pictures, etc. But I could care less what color it is, and group conversations with SMS/MMS work pretty darn well. I would like a desktop SMS/MMS/iMessage client for my Linux desktop though without having to run a Mac.

If you think that SMS/MMS group conversations "work pretty darn well" you really should try something made in the 2000's instead.

The amount of features you get for groups in Telegram for example is galaxies ahead of SMS groups.

What I mean is I'm not constantly fighting to keep messages under a certain size, getting message rejections, weird formatting, or even annoying tapback quotes anymore: basic functionality is all I care about and working fine. Plus I can send funny GIFs back and forth! I have used Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, etc and they're "nice" and have lots of emotes, but I don't really care too much as long as basic functionality is good.

Android user here who is a member of a group that is all iphone. Those users don't care about the color of the bubble. What thy care about is that if I am in the group, they lose functionality that they are accustomed to. The big ones that I hear about are adding/removing users and high quality media sharing. Not to mention the janky handling of message reactions that seem to always suck for one side or the other.

The problem is that having just one non-iphone user in the mix causes imessage to drop to SMS, taking them back a decade in functionality.

And yes, some of them do complain about it vocally. Maybe they're immature, I don't know. But it's an annoying bit of social friction, and I'm sure many android users have caved to the pressure to "upgrade" to an iphone.

This is the same with my wife. She didn't care about what phones anyone had, she just found that her group chats with iPhone friends (when she had Android) were janky, as you describe. She doesn't care about apps or phones, but we got her an iPhone because she wants her chats to work well.

Ye you are probably right that I am american-centric in my perspective. Only one that really matters in tech tho.

Percentage share of iphones are rising in korea and japan tho for similar reasons though.

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