Whoa, citation needed there. I don't use one, and most people I know don't use one.
Regardless, the original point stands regardless of it being 50% or 80%.
Even in the metro you can go days without seeing one.
Despite that, I am yet to hear about their version of the whole “blue bubble exclusion” controversy. It could definitely be just due to the japanese users not being super active on western internet, and not necessarily due to that controversy not being a thing in Japan. But it could just be a non-issue in Japan.
Can anyone with knowledge of this chime in?
0. https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-...
Thanks to your point, this way we can easily see that despite SK being android-dominant and Japan being iPhone-dominant, both are not heavily into iMessage and prefer their native super apps instead.
Which provides a solid data point in favor of those claiming that the iMessage proliferation and dominance don’t necessarily have a direct causation stemming from iOS/Android dominance in a given market.
So in practice my wife uses FaceTime quite a bit with her siblings, and falls back to KakaoTalk when needed. Her iMessage usage isn't zero either, but mostly 1:1, group chats happen over KakaoTalk, since you know everyone will be there.
I don't know if similar patterns are seen in Japan.
Out of my friends who moved to Japan, pretty much not a single one of them uses LINE aside from rare one-offs. But with Kakao? Hell, everyone I know who even traveled to SK uses Kakao on regular (not even talking about those who moved there) pretty much as the main app in general for so many different things.
EDIT: oh wow, this sent me down a pretty interesting rabbithole. Apparently 85% of people under 30 in SK had an Android as their first phone, with 53% of those people having switched to iOS since then[0].
0. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/30-south-korea...
Blue / Green bubble is a total non issue.
We use Telegram or Facebook Messenger.
Facebook Messenger and FB Groups are the main form of comms for School networking.
Whats App is huge in the Uk by all accounts.
I have friends in LA who say the blue / green bubble situation is a non issue for them, and they use Android.
However it might be an issue for other non Middle Ages demographics and so on.
Still, I have a suspicion the drama over bubble colour is hyped up but the US media.
The result is that as an iPhone users I feel sometimes feel left out because different friends circles on Android turn to different secured messaging services (WhatsApp, FB messenger, Telegram, Signal, etc...).
I firmly refuse to give my personal ID to all theses companies just to keep in touch so I often default to sms/mail (or I get left out of group chat).
iMessage is not perfect but they did get the sms fallback right and with upcoming RCS support maybe it'll be easier to bypass theses competing closed and incompatible walled gardens.
So from my point of view, the whole "blue bubble" tyranny look like a joke. Apple kept conformance with SMS/MMS standards from the beginning and added a secure layer on top. I wish others services just did the same.
Did they though? It’s unreliable.
Other than this point, I very much share your position.
> I wish others services just did the same.
Signal did, then someone convinced them that the risk of accidentally sending an SMS which you thought were an encrypted message, was bad enough to break messaging integration on Android.
I wonder if whoever convinced them of that maybe didn't want it to be so convenient to use.
I think bundling different protocols in the same app is a bad idea in general. Besides the security and functionality problems, it just creates confusion. The whole iMessage/bubble-color mess wouldn't exist if Apple made it clear to their users that the iMessage protocol is different from SMS and incompatible with most phones.
Signal always warned me very clearly if it was forced to send a message via SMS, and even pushed me to invite the recipient to Signal. It made sense to support it still, because it's the second most basic service in the Android world (after calls), and now that Signal doesn't offer it, it can't be the default service any longer.
Signal's task as I see it isn't just to protect your communication, but encourage widespread use of strong encryption so that you don't stand out for using it. For that, there are tradeoffs. I think being able to handle the forced insecure communication for the user, clearly marked as such, was a great tradeoff for the sake of wider adoption.
What % of iPhone users do you think understand the difference between SMS, MMS and iMessage protocols? I bet most don't. But if iMessage had its own separate app, they would know it's an Apple-only protocol. And that would make them less likely to exclude non-iPhone users and more likely to use cross-platform alternatives. It's not like all iPhone are jerks, they're being mislead on how "texting" in the default iPhone app really works. That's what I meant by confusion.
iMessage is not a "secure layer on top", it's a totally separate proprietary protocol and it requires an Apple account to work. It just happens to run in the same app as SMS/MMS messages, which has its pros and cons.
Not true.
“The “magic” is that you don’t have to sign up for an account, or create a new username or account identifier. You just send a message from your phone number to another phone number, and if both numbers are registered for iMessage, the message goes over iMessage instead of SMS, even if you don’t have an Apple ID. Beeper had that working last week. Now, Beeper users need to have an Apple ID, and sign into that Apple ID within Beeper. (Beeper should actively encourage users to create and use an app-specific Apple ID password[1] for Beeper.)”[2]
You're not left out because of what kind of phone you use. You're left out because you refuse to use messaging apps that are available for your phone.