The messages will still be green apparently.
I have no interest in iphones, and also don't really participate in any group texts, so it's double academic for me though.
It also works really well and is a lot of fun for interacting. Many people aren't just using "text", its quite rich forms of interacting. Enough people have grown up with that now to not care about the more rudimentary way form of communication you associate with "texting". It also signifies that there are even MORE ways you can communicate, with the integrated location sharing when desired, video chat, video voicemails, and more.
(I'm sure android users have the possibility of all these things, but not as deeply integrated or without any other app.)
> and also don't really participate in any group texts
shocked /s
So literally every non-US phone user just installs it as the first app whenever they get a new phone and that's that.
Having grown up on XMPP, I don't love that it's not federated, but at least it's available to everybody, and reasonably secure at that.
iMessage is regularly glitching out for me, doesn't work in the browser, has a more confusing sent/received/read indicator system than WhatsApp in group chats (not that I particularly care about the "read" part, but knowing who actually had signal and received the message is useful when traveling internationally), and most importantly isn't available with all of my contacts.
WhatsApp location sharing works just as well in my experience.
Apple, Google and ironically European regulators felt this is a big enough audience to cater to
Deeply integrated? How about a button that just does that? My android messaging app (that came with the phone) has a video call button in it. It works. Is it an app? What app is it? I don't know. I never installed it. It's just called "Video Call".
It seems that the main reason you can't video call or send emojis across Apple's garden wall is that Apple doesn't want you to. As you note, all the MORE ways you can communicate are things that I've done without an Apple product. I'm not sure what "without any other app" means. Other than what? Is Facetime a separate app from iMessage? Are those even the right names?
If someone thinks less of me or won't communicate with me because of something as meaningless as the color of my messages on their phone, then that person isn't worth my time to begin with.
It's not about the colour of the message, it's what it signifies: this is an insecure conversation that is not end-to-end encrypted. To me it signals "switch to whatsapp/signal"
Today green means SMS, which also means that deliverability can be unreliable (in the past I've seen SMSes send and never arrive, arrive multiple times, or arrive hours late), and delivery notification is limited and unreliable. Same with tapbacks, and that voice/image/video involves MMS (which is bad, and in many countries carries per-message fees).
P.S. the incoming message bubble is black-on-grey, the same as all incoming messages no matter the medium - it's unencrypted outgoing messages that get a green bubble
Regardless, if people are ostracizing others because of it, those people aren't worth interacting with anyway.
The only time they’re blue (your own messages) is if everyone on a chat is using iMessage, so you know you’re sending over a different protocol and a ton more features plus e2e encryption are available.
This won't change with RCS either, since RCS does not support many features of iMessage, but at least RCS will be more reliable than SMS.
And if you captured the kids, that's the entire future market after a few generations.
Sounds like that still true of RCS since it still works with the phone company. Why in the hell are they needed when every modern messaging app just worked using, you know, The Internet?
The only thing they'd need to do is tweak the signal identity servers to federate KPI lookup (which RCS practically does for you).