I actually think iMessage group chats should have a minimum age limit, from a kids perspective they are no different than Snapchat et al.
Parental controls may prevent some of the kids from installing third-party messaging apps, or maybe they're just unwilling to. There are a weird number of adults in my social circle who I can't convince to do so, though I'd imagine kids to be a little more flexible.
Ban an app, another appear. Ban all apps and they would join any of the services that provide a web frontend. Kids in the late 90's/early 2000 were using IRC when ICQ and MSN messenger didn't support group chat, usually from a web client before they were introduced to mirc and other irc clients.
Bottom line: they would find a way.
The equivalent is simply lacking from Android due to RCS group chat being a broken mess.
At least in Berlin (School and Uni) my experience was that WhatsApp was far more prevalent already (due to more mixed Android/iOS environment likely).
Src: my 12 yo daughter
All of that has been (and still is) available on everyone's phones since the dawn of time except for "name them": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service
- create group: send an MMS message to whoever you want in the "group". Now you have a group chat.
- invite people: send a new MMS message including all past participants and the one additional participant.
- kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all past participants except for the person you want to remove.
- send messages + audio/video: MMS supports all of this. > kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all past participants except for the person you want to remove.
So far semi-extrinsic provided a list of features they think is uniquely enabling bullying in iMessage but I've just established those features are actually commonly available to everyone, so what other features does iMessage have that uniquely makes it enable bullying compared to MMS?
(a) create new group minus Becky and minus all previous messages, plus every participant has to migrate over (b) "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything and all the history and context is retained
I've been in plenty of MMS group chats where we've had to create a new group to add or remove someone (for non-bullying reasons) and it has always gone smoothly without issue. SMS/MMS apps tend to sort your list of groups by most recently received message, so as soon as people stop using the first group it will naturally decay to the bottom of your list where no one looks.
> "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything
"admin" creates a new group chat, no one else has to consciously do anything because they're just selecting the group that has the most recent messages and therefore is at the top of their SMS/MMS app.
There is one difference here in that with SMS/MMS there is no "admin" so anyone can create new groups, but if you're going to start evicting people without buy-in from the group then the dissenters are just going to form their own groups anyway regardless of platform.
> all the history and context is retained
That is a fair point, you wouldn't maintain the history/context but how important is that for bullying? My ultimate point here is that fastball is correct in that the iMessage platform isn't enabling bullying, it is just the kids preferred platform. We have all been perfectly capable of the same bullying since long before the iPhone existed, and I don't think losing history/context when forming new groups changes that.
MMS is the worst standard in telco and that's saying something. The spec is impossibly complex, so it's not properly supported by carriers or device manufacturers, and even basic cases like "send this photo" fail alarmingly regularly.
Verizon had the wackiest system with their vtext service where it really tried to customize more than the GSM carriers and they ran their own web portal. When they phased that out a few years ago it broke picture scaling for pretty much all non-iphone devices on their network. This is another big reason I wanted working RCS because if I send a picture to Android users on Verizon it ends up scaled down.
I have sent exactly zero MMS messages successfully. They've always failed on some stupid carrier setting being wrong. I've also "received" MMS image messages - that were links to a carrier portal because the image could not be delivered.
It's a shit standard that nobody bothered to implement properly =)
I was brought up in a household where we had very limited access to TV. As a teenager I thought this was terrible. As an adult I realise what a huge benefit it was to me. I am sure that the same goes for kids and smartphones and group chats. They are not necessary. No one is missing out.
I feel like I am missing something important here.
The great-grandparent comment was talking about things like not being invited/kicked out of group chats, not being spammed/harassed through the messaging protocol in question.
Unless I am genuinely missing something important, I agree with the grandparent comment. How does not being invited to certain group chats is different from not being invited to "cool kids groups" at school/playgrounds? As in, how is it "always on"? Not being invited to a chat or being kicked out of a group chat isn't "always on".
I was able to send full fat (640x480 at the time) videos to people over SMS in 2008 using a flip phone. I was able to do group chats and share photos and all sorts of nice things.
I could do all that in android land as well over SMS with other android users, before RCS.
It's only when my iPhone having family members attempt to send me multimedia texts that things don't freaking work. My dad's new wife tried to send me pictures of their wedding and Apple reduced them to a hundred pixels because fuck you.
Some of this blame can be placed on carriers but they don’t care.
Friendships are importance for psychological health and development.
When you're excluded from the primary means of communications with potential friends, and can never find out where and when they are meeting to get together, it's not "minor".
And who's talking about bullies? When most of your kids' potential friends communicate using iMessage, it seems pretty presumptuous of you to say that they're all "not the best potential friends anyways." Actually, they might turn out to be great friends, because people are complex, and their messaging preference isn't determinative of their entire personality, or much of it at all.
> Kids don't need to be treating their phone as a status symbol. Nobody needs to treat anything as a status symbol but they do. You see it all the time with different brand names, including Apple. It could even happen with different/older models.
> Blame Apple all you want, but don't make your kid suffer socially for it. Buying your kid an Android phone should not make them suffer socially. It's just as capable of running quality messaging apps minus the arbitrary exclusivity of iMessage. I wouldn't want my kid using iMessage even if they had an iPhone just because it will exclude other kids for no good reason.
But in the real world, if it does, then buy them the damn phone. Used, if that's the only way to afford it and that's what they want.
Don't make your kid suffer because of your stance on a corporation. That's just being mean to your kid. Go ahead and use Android yourself if you want, but don't do that to your kid if they're having trouble making friends and Android is a reason. That's just cruel.
Nobody wants their kids to be bullied so I understand. But even worse than that I wouldn't want my own kid to be a bully. Kids are going to be a lot more likely to bully others if they befriend others who are bullying.
It's not bullying or shaming by most kids. It's just, including SMS in an iMessage group chat is a terrible user experience. It's genuinely super annoying and breaks all the time. To the kids, the Android kid basically just has a broken phone. The kid won't get added to group chats because it doesn't really work.
If you give your kid an iPhone it's not going to turn him into a bully. That's absurd. It's just going to let him be included in the group chats where friendships grow and plans get made.
Don't make a poor kid suffer when there's no reason for it. Their suffering is not going to make Apple disable iMessage.
> The kid won't get added to group chats because it doesn't really work.
Yes, but exclusion is a form of bullying. Apple is enabling it by making iMessage only work on Apple devices. There are many other messaging apps that are far better than SMS and are inclusive. It's better to encourage everyone to use one of those.
> Don't make a poor kid suffer when there's no reason for it.
It's quite literally the poor kids who suffer from things like this. It's not just fancy phones that they miss out on. Could be clothing brands, games, toys, etc. being used by kids to exclude others. Buying into everything is not a solution.
> It's better to encourage everyone to use one of those.
But if you can't succeed at this (and you won't), then don't make your poor kid suffer. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
> Buying into everything is not a solution.
No, but buying a few important things goes a long way. A cool pair of shoes isn't functional, but sharing the same communications platform is. And you can buy a lower-end used iPhone on eBay for next to nothing.
I have a parent who thought they were fighting a lot of these battles and on the "right side", and I was miserable because of it. Don't do this to your kid. Making friends is hard enough without a parent putting even more obstacles in the way.
But I don’t think either platform lets you control messaging group chat functionality this way. They just offer approved contacts and complete disable as your options to control messaging.
I also think your “amount of drama” might be badly measured simply because the majority of kids in the US use iOS.
87% of teens have an iPhone.