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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

... And they've already announced[1] that they will be retaining the exclusive blue bubble for iMessage messages for... reasons? The green/blue bubble distinction will continue even when there is no technical difference between messages.

1. https://mashable.com/article/apple-rcs-support

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People use “green bubbles” to just mean “no guaranteed delivery or delivery receipts, no read receipts, very low quality image and videos, bad support for reactions, threaded replies, and group chats”.

…the color isn’t the problem. It’s shorthand for the real underlying issues

The color is a big part of the problem, white on green is one of the hardest to read because of the distribution of color cone cells in our retinas. Only maybe white on yellow would be worse.

Dark mode is the way to go anyway.

What color combo does plain sms get there?

Other person is white text on black background. Yours is white text on green background. The app's background is also black.

Yep, why would they drop it? It’s especially egregious as Apple disregards its own human interface guidelines to make green bubbles excessively low-contrast. Very intentional.

I bought the very first iPhone the day after its release. Long before iMessage was introduced, it only supported SMS at the time. People forget, but those bubbles, the original SMS ones, were green. Blue bubbles showed up only when iMessage debuted three years later.

I wonder if those had different contrast or not? I switched just a few years ago.

There is a technical difference though- the current RCS standard doesn’t have end to end encryption.

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