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Comment by iwanttocomment | Hacker News Reader

I got an iPhone 15 Pro Max last month. It's great, I dig it. I'm a case-free dude and there are zero scratches on the screen or titanium, the industrial design is tight and amazing. There's finally USB-C, and the camera is great. This was an expensive phone, but it's a timeless design and unless something crazy happens, I strongly suspect it's actually going to take me into 2030.

But I have to tell you. Not a single friend has commented that I'm now on an iPhone. I asked my elderly mom - yes, I previously got her an iPhone before I did, I'm a good son - if I had obtained the magic blue bubbles. She was like "oh yes, I thought something had changed." I am not sexier, thinner or more popular since I suddenly appeared with blue bubbles on iMessage. My own (iPhone-toting) adult daughter didn't mention it. IMO, nobody outside of teenagers care.

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This is fundamentally the wrong analysis. The idea that people care about being "cool" to get blue bubbles or whatever is not what this is about.

This is about the fact that messaging between an iOS device and Android just sucks at present if the iOS user is on iMessage. I won't hash over all the details, but Google's site trying to convince iMessage to support RCS (which Apple has said they will do in 2024) gives a good overview of the problems: https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

I'm not a teenager, but I certainly care. I'm the only Android user in my family, and I'm sick of getting pixelated videos from my parents. I'm sick of the "Bob liked an image" messages. I'm sick of random messages not showing up in group chats. And while it's not a huge everyday concern, it sucks that there is no secure encryption when I message my family, and worse, all of the group chats that I'm part of result in nobody, even all the other iOS users, getting encryption in those chats.

It's not like Google is unbiased here, especially with their ownership of Jibe. Most RCS messages in the US are/will be going through Google...

I don't doubt at all that Google is biased, but I don't care. Their bias in this instance, which is that users on different platforms should be able to have a good messaging experience between each other, is the correct one IMO.

All I want is to be able to have a good messaging experience with my friends and family without trying the useless push of "Let's all use WhatsApp" or whatever (it's a losing battle when there are 10 other iMessage users and you're the only Android one), or worse, have people complain about your presence in a group chat because now all the videos look awful.

So, Google resolved the interop issue with "liked an image" and similar reactions back in 2020. I can't remember that being an issue for years with reasonably modern Android phones.

Yeah, I've had some isues in the past with pixelated videos but again, almost zero in the past few years. But there are ten billion better places to post videos than via group chats, especially to conserve memory on people's devices, and pretty much everyone knows it at this point. Literally everyone I know has been posting videos via Youtube or Facebook or Instagram or Whatsapp or Discord or Slack or Google Drive or Dropbox for years at this point.

But yes, Apple should absolutely support RCS for encrypted messaging in group chats with other devices. 100% with you on that one.

These types of responses are so aggravating. Congrats, it's not an issue for you. But it is for tons of other people, and your response is the equivalent of "well, works on my machine." Just sick of this borderline gaslighting where people are basically unable to imagine this is a significant issue just because it doesn't affect them personally.

> So, Google resolved the interop issue with "liked an image" and similar reactions back in 2020.

Except they didn't. I'm looking at a group chat from 2 days ago on a Pixel 7 that has a "Loved an image" response on it. About 90% of the emoji responses are "correctly reinterpreted", but I still often get the text printed out like that for whatever reason.

> Literally everyone I know has been posting videos...

Congrats, again, so this issue doesn't affect you. But literally whenever I go on a vacation with a group everyone posts pictures and videos in the chat. And they're barely viewable if I'm in the chat.

People say only teenagers are keyed into it, but I’ve gotten comments from people in their 40s that my Android phone was lame or “I don’t know why you bought that thing”. Not to the extent that it affected my relationships with them though.

Sounds like a good way to suss out the materialistic people in your life to be honest.

Honestly, it's probably just small talk. Normal people tend to try to have opinions on things to signal worldliness to other people. It's akin to when a coworker mentions hating a teenage pop star, or a sport. The vast majority of the time, they aren't expressing deeply-held conviction: They're just trying to fill the air with noise in a way that provokes a sense of comradery.

It’s not because they thought my Samsung was cheap, rather they believed Android is inelegant or tacky compared to iOS. Another part of it was the lack of interoperability with FaceTime and iMessage.

I don't have an iPhone and I don't really use text messages with anyone that does, so I can't speak first hand. But teenage bullying and status symbols / materialistic people aside, my understanding is that the big blue bubble / green bubble thing is group chats and photos and videos. Group chats "just work" via iMessage where as they can be strange via SMS, and photos and videos end up compressed and ugly via SMS.

If you don't group chat or send and receive photos or videos, then yeah, it probably makes zero difference. But e.g. for a family with a new baby, I think I'd be pretty upset if I was the Android user in the sea of iPhones and the baby photos group chat was janky and gave me 10x10 pixel photos.

As a professional adult I have never come across anyone who has ever commented on someone else’s phone positive or negative or neutral except once in a while someone gets the just released latest and greatest Y and someone may say “oh you got the latest and greatest Y phone, cool, how do you like it?” and that’s it.

I can’t imagine interacting with someone professionally who even thinks for one second positively or negatively about someone based on their phone choice, from five year old Androids to yesterday’s iPhone pro.

Usually the problem I run into is iPhone users can't be bothered to install other messaging apps so it's either MMS, email, or iMessage. MMS ruins picture quality so is pretty useless

Attaching pictures to email is pretty crappy as well

Status symbol products don't make you a more loved or more valuable person? What a concept.

This isn't meant to be condescending to you, I have just gotten SO MUCH CRAP from friends, coworkers, and the like for using a sort-of-old Android phone. We shouldn't be praising Apple for switching to USB-C, we should be asking why they didn't do it 9 years ago.

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