Switching from iphone, which all my friends and family use, to a pixel caused so many issues with texting I almost went back to iOS solely because I was causing headaches for others.
FOMO is real for sure, but plain old inconvenience is also at play. If your entire family and social circle is on iOS, it's a massive pain to leave. This is by design.
I completely understand what you mean by this, and what bothers me the most is that this is problem should be entirely avoidable. Pleaes correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't think of a single technical reason why "a non iphone in a group chat" has to cause such infuriating levels of inconvenience for everyone involved. Someone had to put explicit effort into making it as unbearable as it is.
The only reason I can think of is Apple using a dominant position in a network in order to sabotage alternatives.
> Pleaes correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't think of a single technical reason why "a non iphone in a group chat" has to cause such infuriating levels of inconvenience for everyone involved.
SMS/MMS is the lowest common denominator for non-Messages devices. So including a non-Messages device in a group chat means the whole chat needs to be downgraded to SMS. Even if Apple added support for RCS tomorrow, group chats would need to downgrade to it and lose E2EE and rely on the participants carriers to deliver messages just like with SMS.
There's no good way for Apple to integrate the shit show of non-Messages protocols in a sane way. Carriers made a mess of RCS in the design, implementation, and deployment. Google has had to run their own RCS backend to allow Android users to actually use RCS thanks to the carriers' bungling and meddling. Even they haven't helped the situation with a decade of half-starts in messaging apps.
Blaming Apple is a bit ridiculous. They're not going to spend a billion dollars fixing the problems created by carriers and Google when they already have their own messaging system.
It's a problem APPLE CREATED! this is texting, plain and simple. Apple decided to do their own thing and call it texting instead of just making their own entire messaging system. Now people are brainwashed... But only in the US really...
> Apple decided to do their own thing and call it texting instead of just making their own entire messaging system.
They did make their own messaging system. Their Messages (née iMessage) is entirely separate from carrier provided SMS/MMS. It's accessed via the same application as SMS because on early iOS they only supported SMS. The Messages/iMessage features were added to their existing application.
Saying "this is texting plain and simple" ignores a ludicrous amount of complexity about the underlying systems. There's nothing plain and simple about text messaging systems. If you're going to bash Apple for supposedly creating problems at least familiarize yourself with the subject.
>Blaming Apple is a bit ridiculous. They're not going to spend a billion dollars fixing the problems created by carriers and Google when they already have their own messaging system.
I blame Apple for making communications software (iMessage, FaceTime) that is utterly useless to me as an Apple customer.
There are exactly two useful ways to make this kind of software.
(a) Build on top of a standard that others can implement for other platforms.
(b) Support all big platforms yourself.
Apple has decided to do neither. They made something that is totally useless for everyone outside of some close-knit circles in the U.S. Lock-in strategies are always lock-out strategies as well.
But they're not just pissing off their own customers, they're also playing a very risky game. Messaging apps have a tendency to become platforms in their own right (e.g WeChat).
By taking itself out of the picture, Apple is creating a power vacuum that is being exploited by the likes of Facebook. Ultimately this could even threaten Apple's hardware sales, for instance if Facebook manages create something interesting out of WhatsApp + Oculus.
So in my opinion, Apple's strategy is unintelligent and norrow minded. It's classic short sighted "corporate greed".
When Apple released iMessage and FaceTime respectively there weren't really good "standards" for them to adopt.
For iMessage there were desktop messaging standards like XMPP or the immature at the time RCS from cellular carriers. XMPP is not a great protocol for mobile devices with unreliable/changing network connections and background processing constraints. RCS was immature when iMessage was released and hadn't really been deployed by carriers or was deployed but not interoperable between them. It also requires a SIM and a cellular service. So it's a non-starter for non-phone devices. Additionally it doesn't offer E2EE without proprietary extensions and running private relays like Google has done.
For FaceTime there was never a really good video telephony standard to implement. FaceTime uses some existing standards but all over Apple infrastructure. Remember FaceTime has always been an over the top data service and like iMessage has no tie to carriers. When FaceTime was released it didn't even work over cellular, it was WiFi only.
So what standards should Apple have adopted? As a minority player in the mobile or computer markets which of their own services should they have pushed as standards?
Obviously standards are the way to go since WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Google's 400 different messaging systems all implement the same standar...oh wait they don't.
Messages is a value-add for Apple's platforms. Google isn't bending over backwards making Nest devices work with Apple ecosystems and Microsoft doesn't offer an XBox SDK for the PlayStation. WhatsApp isn't opening their messaging for Apple to adopt. Companies compete with one another, making products and offering services to attract customers. Why is this unintelligent and narrow minded when it's Apple?
If there was no suitable standard then they should have created one. Either that, or support all major platforms.
>Companies compete with one another, making products and offering services to attract customers. Why is this unintelligent and narrow minded when it's Apple?
Because it's classic short-termism for the narrowest financial reasons, showing no creativity or vision whatsoever. They prioritised locking in some U.S based users at the cost of creating an oppportunity for the likes of Facebook to serve the overwhelming majority of users for whom Apple's offering is useless.
I have no problem in principle with proprietary software that is only available on a single platform. What I find unintelligent and even offensive as a customer is choosing this approach to create this specific type of software that so obviously requires a different approach.
For me, iMessage and FaceTime do not add value. It's preinstalled crapware that causes massive security issues.
> They created their own messaging system and let SMSes enter it.
Apple supported SMS before iMessage/Messages existed. Their Messages app didn't even support MMS until iOS 3. It didn't gain the iMessage functionality until iOS 5.
Apple supports the global standards of SMS/MMS. Their own Messages service can be disabled entirely so a phone will only send SMS/MMS messages. Just about any phone able to connect to an extant cellular network can receive these messages and send messages to an iPhone.
SMS and MMS lack a lot of capability that people want in messaging systems. SMS was born out of unused space in control messages in the GSM spec. That's why fucking everyone from DoCoMo (i-mode e-mail) to RIM (Blackberry Messenger) to Apple have added some over the top messaging system to phones.
SMS is a fallback because it's supported by essentially every carrier. Carriers have tiptoed towards a better messaging standard with RCS but they are at cross purposes with OS vendors and end users. They want a messaging system that allows them to charge per use and the ability to snoop on user messages. So they turned RCS into a mess of a standard and have bungled or slow walked it's rollout.
But no, I'm sure it's Apple that caused all the evil in the world.
A trillion dollar company should be able to easily figure out how to avoid "reaction" messages from dumping a screenful of text and destroying the messaging experience for everyone. I"m sure they can do it for less than "a billion dollars".
I'm not suggesting that Apple should be responsible for making cross-platform messaging 100% compatible, but someone at Apple has made conscious decisions to make the experience as infuriating as possible.
RCS is great. They should have done it ten years ago.
Sure, ten years ago it probably didn’t seem to matter, but the iPhone 5 already bumped the screen size from 3.5in to 4in the rear camera was already 1080p, and “phablets” were already a term in 2012. It was totally foreseeable that MMS size limits where going to be a problem, if they weren’t already!
What a great case of skating where the puck is, instead of skating where it’s headed. RCS existed as a spec, just not implemented by carriers. The fact that Apple, and even Google, are routing around their MMS servers is totally their fault.
And if everybody is on WhatsApp or Messenger or Telegram nobody really knows of you have an iPhone unless they look at you carefully when you use your phone. It becomes a commodity if we care only about messaging.
Oh it's real. It's very frustrating to text people who can't receive live photos, videos sent are reduced in quality by a significant degree, can't receive replies to specific comments, and can't receive link previews. People don't click links without a preview, period. So no use sending a video or live photo via icloud link either. I have absolutely minimized texting android users due to these issues. It probably helps that 80% of the folks I text regularly (or have at some point) are apple users.
>videos sent are reduced in quality by a significant degree
What is the purpose of this? It's an issue solely with apple phones, people sending me videos from Android phones come through fine in full quality but anything from an apple device comes in looking like a Minecraft video.
>can't receive replies to specific comments
Apple actually started having their phones start sending texts with the reaction a few years ago, see this from my girlfriend earlier today
MMS video and picture sizes are size constrained by the carrier in the profile. As many carriers already allow 4MB or even unlimited sizes it is purely an issue of carriers being cheap and lazy and leaving old limits on MMS. It would probably even be profitable for carriers as MMS already counts against data and RCS allows the larger sizes anyway. Yet Google prefers to roll yet another new protocol and complain instead of getting the carriers to just fix MMS configuration issues to solve the biggest ongoing complaints.
Just as a data point from outside the US: a 4MB MMS is about 5$ in Germany, even on a 30+$/mo base price package. Sending that to a group call multiplies the cost with the number of recipients.
MMS (and in all likelihood RCS) is a complete non-starter for this market.
That picture is the description of a reaction, not a reply. And the description is much worse than having the reactions on the message like in iMessage.
It doesn't matter whose fault it is. I mean its really users fault for not using messaging apps, but that's clearly by design. Apple crafted iMessage to be good enough that iPhone users overwhelmingly use it and it provides a much worse experience when texting non iPhone users.
RCS is an inferior anti-user unencrypted "standard" to iMessage; too little, too late, and driven by Google who effectively bribes carriers to get behind it by providing backend servers to them and sell out the user. No user wants additional say from carrier and potential opportunity for billing. The only reason RCS has even become a thing and Android is playing that game is Google intended to force Apple's hand by ganging up on them with carriers. They failed and now they whine. What they are asking iMessage is to basically fold their pocket ace hand and join and be a lower-class participant in a Google-controlled messaging world. No wonder Apple will always say fuck you.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Considering there are dozens of other chat apps with huge market shares on both platforms, is it inconceivable that they had a better product than most chat apps? (Until quite recently iMessage was the only widely distributed and usable end to end encrypted messaging platform out there, for example.) It is Google who controls the majority of smartphones, not Apple, yet they have not been able to effectively "abuse" their market position, mind you.
Personally, whenever I carry an Android, I'd very much prefer Signal or WhatsApp than Google Messages app.
Bundling and control of defaults are powerful levers. If users were presented a ballot on first use then perhaps these incumbents would have to compete on an even playing field.
Oh I agree completely. Not only should there a regulated standard for texts placed upon any company with 5% marketshare, there should be a similar standard places upon social media over 5% marketshare.
Ah yes the "standard" that the carriers have slow rolled, rolled out only partially, or rolled out in certain regions. Such a great standard Google themselves have proprietary extensions only available in their Messages app and only when using their back end.
Apple and Google don't want to play nice with one another. That's on both of them. The carriers are a third pole that don't want to play nice with each other or Google or Apple.
Google and Apple want value-add features on their platforms. Carriers don't want E2EE so they can mine text messages for advertisers.
You're not going to legislate or regulate a platform into existence. Apple and Google didn't appear on the scene yesterday. They both started at zero users amid a market full of competitors. They are the competitive upstarts that actually competed and and were successful.
Before the iPhone and Android there were a number of mobile platforms that all sucked in their own special ways. The mobile market was the incumbents' market to lose and they then lost of their own accord.
IMO Windows Phone was a superior alternative yet could not complete because the two incumbents were too entrenched. Network effects don't impact only users but developers as well.
> IMO Windows Phone was a superior alternative yet could not complete because the two incumbents were too entrenched.
Seriously? Windows Phone flopped because Microsoft couldn't get its act together. IE sucked and couldn't handle even mobile sites that iOS and Android had no problem with. The messaging and e-mail had anemic features. And Microsoft simply couldn't execute on a third party developer strategy.
For whatever interesting ideas the OS had it was a dumpster fire of execution. It didn't help them at all that Windows Phone 7 had no backwards compatibility with Windows Mobile so they burned anyone invested in that platform. They repeated the trick with Windows Phone 8 where Windows Phone 7 devices couldn't run 8. Being the third place platform and repeatedly burning your customers was just an asinine choice for Microsoft.
Windows Phone had interesting features and UI concepts. What killed it was Microsoft's absolutely terrible execution. It had little to do with Apple and Google being "entrenched". Microsoft wrapped a handful of interesting features or good hardware (Nokia phones) in layers of crap.
I had never heard of it either until I switched to an iPhone for unrelated reasons. Half my contacts suddenly were congratulating me on being "blue". It was... weird.
anecdata: I heard about it a lot. ESPECIALLY when i was in high school and college.
Definitely heard girls (with iphones) gossip and discussing prospective men and say "but his texts are green". Its not code for "he isn't rich" - I went to a private school and hung out with sorority girls so everyone was well off, but something more ambiguous. Something makes blue bubbles feel better.
Maybe its just that iMessage is a more rich form of communication vs SMS, and people hate needing another app to check for that one android user in their life.
> Maybe its just that iMessage is a more rich form of communication vs SMS, and people hate needing another app to check for that one android user in their life.
The user experience of conventional SMS is often terrible; it's not encrypted (I'm not even talking about E2E but simply in-transit encryption as mobile carriers are nasty and may want to snoop), vulnerable to number spoofing, delivery reports aren't supported on iOS (and even then it really depends on carriers) and is slower than iMessage.
Yeah, I use Signal for a few of my friends and I try to get others in so we can all be in the same chat group on PC and phone, the responses I get would make you think I asked them to feed their children to piranha.
Or perhaps we shouldn't trust apple with our communication data and move everyone to something lime signal
But yea, I wouldn't want to date someone who thinks like that anyhow. Their values are obviously too different from my own if they value iMessage over security, privacy, and the ability to modify my own devices
> But yea, I wouldn't want to date someone who thinks like that anyhow... if they value iMessage over security, privacy, and the ability to modify my own devices
Yeah. I think the sorority girls would agree that it may be a bad match.
> if they value iMessage over security, privacy, and ...
Its not source available, but iMsg has long been e2ee and with a focus on privacy - but i can imagine that their word isn't enough for you to trust them.
> Its not source available, but iMsg has long been e2ee and with a focus on privacy - but i can imagine that their word isn't enough for you to trust them.
This is a marketing lie fed to you by Apple. In reality, thanks to pressure from the FBI, if either you or your contact has iCloud backups enabled, iMessage is effectively plaintext. (Same with WhatsApp on iOS, but the situation is much better on Android.) https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/what...
Its not a lie, it can still be e2ee as a protocol - thats stored client side in plaintext. If that client uploads it unencrypted... that's their fault. (conceptually).
I think its only a lie in that apple has it upload by default (opt-out) which means as you pick it up from a store, its not e2ee, even though minor setting changes (one boolean button?) can make it real e2ee.
Everything is "effectively plaintext" if anyone can actually read it. You could screenshot your texts, and that ruins encryption. And obviously in a multi-person setting any weak link ruins it for all.
Personally, i'm disappointed its opt-out not opt-in, but i think plaintext backup and easy backups are a net-good for the users, even at expense of e2ee. Most customers don't need e2ee, but many will need backups. That said, i think most data, especially texts, could benefit with auto-deletion of old content. Some things don't need to live forever online.
These are all really weak excuses for the fact that the FBI applied pressure on Apple specifically to not add encryption to iMessage backups on iCloud, and there's documented evidence showing that it takes advantage of that.
Apple is acting in the FBI's interest, not in yours.
Besides its E2E, Signal has all the downsides of iMessage; it still relies on phone numbers as identity, is a centralized walled garden hostile to third-party clients and the desktop client is an Electron pile of shit.
Your list of complaints is valid, but iMessage has another major downside: it only runs on Apple hardware. Using Signal means almost everyone can participate in a group chat if they so choose.
On TikTok there's a lot of GenZ videos about green bubbles being ugh. It is definitely a thing with younger people. I got an iPhone after never thinking I'd buy one ever, but decided Apple is the lesser of 2 evils, and everyone I text that has an iPhone immediately recognized the blue bubble. Also, it sucks if you want to send a picture or video to a green bubble.
I saw a guy on tinder once say not to even bother if your texts are going to be green. It really rocked my world to realize there are real people actually like that out there
Honestly I wouldn't want to date someone who thinks like that anyhow, so good. It filters them out because their values obviously don't line up with mine.
You can't really have text conversations between iMessage and android because SMS is so slow. It's like having a conversation where each person can only say two sentences a minute.
This could actually work as a decent filter if you don't want to waste endless hours doing tech support and fixing up their stupid Android full of malware.
Can I just ask where you live? I know a lot of countries don't have proper Google Play stores so have to resort to sideloading. Obviously in western countries we don't have this issue so android malware is a non-issue but I'm interested in what country android phones are full of malware to the point where you're apparently wasting a lot of hours doing tech support.
Hours was hyperbole as I actually don't even bother to clean the device and just recommend getting a used iPhone and help them migrate the data, but technically cleaning a device after malware would've involved backing everything up, resetting the device, potentially updating the firmware (or installing a trusted third-party ROM like Lineage) and then reinstalling & configuring all the apps & accounts - I can easily imagine this taking hours especially on a slow internet connection.
I don't think it has anything to do with getting your apps from Play Store vs elsewhere. This is in the UK and despite Google Play being available, back when I worked in a phone store, customers bringing compromised Android devices was fairly common (in fact some of them didn't realize the bullshit ads or spam on their lockscreen/notifications was malware, they thought it was just normal and accepted it), and that was only the stuff I could see - technically there could be plenty more malware that chooses to remain stealthy.
I imagine blue-bubble FOMO is more popular within the US because most younger Americans use text messaging instead of WhatsApp/Telegram like you would find in Europe or South America (aside from occasional group chats or college teamwork)
Lol completely untrue outside of a demographic of people online. Maybe the people in computer science majors at universities, not
your average young American
Friends, yes, and family if they're on Discord as well. The IRC style of group communication genuinely works better than a ton of different group chats.
It gets talked about a lot (I've seen many articles talking about it over years), so I guess I think it must exist. Never ever heard of it in real life. Maybe just Wealthy Zoomers? People from New York? Teenagers? I have no idea, but things keep telling me it is real. Like, I know more people with android than not, I have an iphone, I think I've never been in a group chat that was "blue bubble."
MMS isn't as bad as it used to be, however. Less regions have service that is too poor for MMS to work but SMS works fine I think.
Green texts are objectively worse. It's hard to have text conversations with iPhone users as a none iPhone user because they refuse to use messaging apps and sms takes like 20 seconds. Not to mention degraded media quality and lack of all the other features iMessage has.
I have yet see a meaningful difference between Whatsapp and iMessage. The degraded media happens because Apple like to use non standard formats for media and the framework of iMessage is based around compatibility with MMS and SMS. MMS is pretty limited even in the age of 5g. Apple could easily allow iMessage to work on android but they don't because they know people will buy iPhones for iMessage.
It's "as good" except for Zuckerberg creeping around in the shadows and using Whatsapp as a backdoor to your contacts list to infer who you're talking to.
Apple has yet to do this and so far there's little indication they are going to. WA having terrible uptake in the US is a good thing.
In Europe not only Android is dominant but people use WhatsApp or Messenger. iPhone owners must use them too as their primary messaging app. I guess they have their iMessage full with SMS from banks and other notifications, like my Android SMS app.
Yes Or mms or rcs. Sometimes you could be texting another person on an Android that's just on a different carrier and for whatever reason you can't get the rcs status. And this applies to way more than just texting... Some carriers let calls that stay within their own network sound way better. Switch sims and boom, crap quality.
I use whatever The other person wants to use though. Telegram, discord, Skype, email, text, Twitter, whatever
It wasn't FOMO for me, but rather a exhaustion from interoperability between the two platforms.
Group chats become impossible with iphone users, so you stop being invited. Texts were constantly dropping, so people would think I was ignoring messages.
Just switched from android to iPhone after 12 years of owning and working with android as a developer. I just got tired of fiddling. Most of my social group and family uses iPhone and there's no way the non-technical folks in my life are switching, so... If you can't beat, join.
So now least you've now heard of it from someone other than these articles :shrug:
A success for Apple's strategy. It can't work in all the other countries were the primary messaging app even for iPhone users are WhatsApp or similar apps.
I was never an American teenager in this century. IDGAF what color my "bubble" is, and neither does anyone else I care to communicate with. That said, even in the olden days as a teenager there was a lot of social pressure for things that just don't matter.
Yes, it might not exist for you and your age group, but saying that it "doesn't exist at all" is just wrong. It does matter, and it is a factor for certain age groups.
You can disagree with it, but that doesn't make it not real.
There's no FOMO here but when iPhone users bitch about it like it's my fault and not Apple's, I think less of them. It's a shame so many people are allowing themselves to be manipulated by Apple to peer pressure their friends into buying Apple products.
