Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

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This is hopelessly exaggerated and bad-faith.

First of all, when Apple created iMessage, there was no possible way for them to predict that friend groups would use it as a reason to treat members of their groups poorly due to using Android phones.

Second of all, Apple did not deliberately make interacting with non-iMessage users in group chats "look like trash" in order to exclude them. Apple went out of its way to make it possible for iMessage to interoperate with the ubiquitous (in the US) SMS, with reduced features because SMS did not support the better features. If, instead, Apple had just made iMessage not interoperate with SMS at all, you'd be screaming about that instead.

Third of all, if people are leaving others out of chats, that's not Apple's fault. That's something for those families and friend groups to work out amongst themselves. "Hey, guys, I don't have an iPhone, and don't really have the money to get one, so maybe we could use GroupMe/GChat/WhatsApp/Signal/IRC/email/smoke signals/meeting in person/any of the myriad other ways of communicating instead?" A) "Oh, sure, that shouldn't be a problem!" (everything is solved) B) "What? No, we're not going to change anything just because it makes it impossible to actually include you in stuff. That's a you problem!" (turns out, the problem is your friends are assholes)

Apple cannot by any reasonable standard be held to blame for the way bullying, status-seeking teenagers treat each other.

What Apple could have done, for sake of clarity, sanity, and good practice is to handle SMS using one app, and handle iMessage using another, *separate* app.

The problem is not that iMessage exists, it's that it operates in opaque and unpredictable ways, mixing SMS and iMessage (and now RCS) communication in a way where even more tech-savvy users do not understand how it works (first-hand experience - had to explain to someone why their images are super compressed when they send them to me, but OK when they send them to their friend with an iPhone).

And now it's the same with RCS (Android-iOS). I send person A an image, the conversation switches to RCS. They use the "automatic reply" when I call them, conversation switches back to SMS. With person B, the switching between RCS and SMS is even more unpredictable.

> What Apple could have done, for sake of clarity, sanity, and good practice is to handle SMS using one app, and handle iMessage using another, separate app.

That sounds like a terrible user experience ?

I'm in a frequently-used group chat in which some people apparently have Android phones and others use iPhones. It works perfectly well.

If some teenagers see green bubbles as some sort of challenge to their identities, it's probably a useful life lesson.

http://theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-android...

>“iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” was Federighi’s concern according to the Epic filing.

Among other statements. Apple was very aware of the social effects of iMessage, and leveraged it to force people into getting iphones.

Tech companies have done lots of evil shit. But never, not once, has one ever crossed the line into turning my friends and family against me (however slightly) because I didn't want to lock myself in Apple's cage, however comfortable it is.

Yeah, you can call my friends and family shitty, but the reality is that the are regular non-tech people, explaining the situation to them is impossible, and iMessage Just Works(TM).

I'm sympathetic to the position that Apple could, if they chose, have made a version of iMessage for Android.

But your position that it is somehow uniquely evil just reads as a coping mechanism—a way of not having to blame your friends and family for being shitty for you.

I know plenty of "regular, non-tech people" who understand perfectly well that a) different computer systems do not work properly together, and b) if you choosing to use a particular computer system excludes someone because they do not have access to it, that's rude, discriminatory, and generally shitty behavior.

SMS not having the same features as iMessage is a technical issue, sure.

Apple not providing iMessage on Android was a business decision, no question.

But people being exclusionary and obnoxious to each other over group chats is a social issue, and should be treated as such, and not blamed on either the technical or business side of things.

"Public transit is bad because people like driving cars, it's a social issue, not a business one"

Just think about your logic.

Your family being willing to isolate you and leave you out of conversations because it would slightly inconvenience them says more about you and them than it does about Apple. I downloaded WhatsApp to include random neighbors in our neighborhood group chat, and your family who has known your forever won’t do the same? Ever thought about why?

Why would I use a random app when I can use my expensive phone's default message program that already does everything?

Apple was perfectly right when they did this way back as they were not a dominant platform. Different legal rules applied.

However making an argument that some key aspects of the iPhome were not designed for viral growth is disrespectful to Steve Jobs who, like many of that time, was very familiar with engineering platform growth - probably more and better than most.

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