17 ms·

They would have captured 100% of the messaging market. Reminds me of '90s *Nix companies with sales bros wanting to sling around overpriced hardware, preventin

They would have captured 100% of the messaging market. Reminds me of '90s *Nix companies with sales bros wanting to sling around overpriced hardware, preventing expansion of the company in other fronts.

vmception 6y ago
Agreed. They could probably monetize that better than hardware sales too, most likely via Apple Wallet payments and data. And the whole blue/green bubble pretentiousness would have never happened, which is funny because so many Android users still have no idea that's even happening to them or just assume they don't need to care about anybody that cares about that. (protip: its affecting your life and relationships)
- musingsole 6y ago
  I quite literally don't need to care about the blue bubble nonsense. It's a great flag for a person I can happily ignore.
  - orangepanda 6y ago
    For 1:1 messages it doesnt matter, but breaks group chats when a green bubble is added
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - kop316 6y ago
      uhh...no it doesn't? I have a lot of group chats as the only Android (soon to be Pinephone) user. Group Chats work fine.
      - prepend 6y ago
        And you likely miss a ton of group chats where there are no android (or Pinephone) users because you’ve been excluded because group chats don’t work fine.
        kop316 6y ago
        ....what? I am honestly having trouble parsing your meaning. My family mostly has iPhones, and we have several group chats with me in it on Group MMS. They work fine.
        ncw96 6y ago
        There are some features for group messaging on iMessage that aren’t available in Group MMS. If you add a non-iMessage user to your group, the group downgrades to using Group MMS, which does still work for basic messaging, but the group loses all of its iMessage-exclusive features.
        rblatz 6y ago
        I bet they also have side groups without you in it for when they want to share videos/photos or not deal with MMS jank. Nothing personal, we had to do the same thing to my brother and his fiance. Group MMS is busted it has inconsistent delivery, videos and images are compressed to the point of being basically worthless. Sometimes I'll get 3 of 4 people's messages leaving me with a partial conversation, then hours later I'll get the 4th person's messages. Sometimes they never come through. Sometimes I just don't get images, sometimes my wife and I will get different parts of the conversation and can piece it together. And the thing that causes all that friction is including an Android user in the group text. It's entirely not your fault, but also it's very natural for people to want to exclude Android users when the majority of the group uses iPhone.
        kop316 6y ago
        I'm really not sure how to respond to this, because you are assuming a lot of unheatlhy family dynamics there. I will say would hope if you value you relationship with your brother and his fiance, that you actually told him you do that and offered a comprimise on how to chat.
  - oneplane 6y ago
    I suppose you are one of the special few in that case. In other social groups people tend to gravitate towards a common messaging infrastructure, only sharing the absolute essentials when reminded of those that are not part of that shared system. This means that while you might be part of the group while physically present, you are not a part of the group outside of that. For billions of people around the world that is a problem (not the tech, but the isolation), and as such, that is where a good deal of focus goes towards. This isn't about selecting your friends or social groups based on tech, but about groups of people dynamically interacting. Replace the applied construct with something else and it still applies. (you don't like smoke signals because big smoke is evil to you, so you use carrier hawks, but al your friends still use smoke signals and can't be bothered to learn how to maintain a hawk)
    - musingsole 6y ago
      Eh, if you aren't able to stay connected to a group despite not using that group's chosen technology, you're not that critical to the group. I'm not advocating to hold your participation hostage, but someone organizing a group to use exclusionary practices despite knowing specific members can't or won't participate is a classic bullying tactic. Family members employ it often.
      - oneplane 6y ago
        Eh, a social group isn't a business gathering nor is it a calculated construct. We're talking about people following their natural attraction. People don't consciously 'organise' a group with some 'group manager' and a nice hierarchy, technology choice panels, and acquisition procedures. There isn't some grand evil plan where the 'group CEO' selects the technology that everyone now has to use. This is just users using an end-user service on their end-user device that doesn't cause them friction and makes them happy. People don't think "I want to send an instant message to my group-colleagues on their mobile OS on their mobile hardware over their WWAN link to setup a meeting in our shared calendar for a ninety minute gathering for a consumption of nutrients". They generally think: "I could go for a bite, I'll let my friends know so we could go together". Everything that makes that harder just gets thrown out.
  - afavour 6y ago
    I have a family, small children, relatives. Grandparents loves to see videos of their grandchildren. Sharing a video via group MMS is fraught with problems, it often doesn't work, or the resolution is garbage. iMessage works every time. I'm not dismissing your experience but the green vs blue bubbles do make a big difference for many of us.
    - jonp888 6y ago
      There are many popular messaging applications(Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp) that are cross platform and handle multimedia content well. This is what is used outside of the US.
      - afavour 6y ago
        I'm very aware of that. Convincing an entire extended family to switch app is not simple. Making sure they are all set up with an alternative messaging app is not simple. Getting them to remember to use it with your specific chat while they use the default app for other conversations is not simple. Using an iPhone is simple.
      - rrrazdan 6y ago
        They don't. Whatsapp degrades image/video quality massively. Just a choice they made given that a lot of their customers are bandwidth constrained. If I have to send a photo that I took with my high quality phone camera, I prefer to use iMessage.
      - vegardx 6y ago
        There are, but... Incoming rant: The one big thing about iMessage is that it never really changes. And it cannot be hijacked by some other application like on Android. For better or worse, and for basic services like text messages I'm erring on the side of better. I have no idea how many times I had to go fix messaging issues when my grandparents were using Android. Facebook tried to take over all messaging. Then it was Google, with whatever iteration of failed messaging application they were pushing out. Or when they had phones that actually received updates it would suddenly drastically change the user interface. We're having weekly video calls on FaceTime, and the superior sound quality of a FaceTime Audio has made it possible to even have a phone call with my hard of hearing grandpa. They don't even know they're using it. I send them high resolution pictures and videos of my hikes, that they can enjoy on their iPhone or iPad, whenever they want. Pictures and videos stay there without them having to do a ton of complicated tasks in a forever changing user interface, like Snap and the likes. The Apple Watches lets them know when someone is calling, and it gives us peace of mind knowing that they always have it with them. Everything uses a format they're used to from long before smart phones was a thing: Phone numbers. My grandmother is writing her life story on her now 7 years old MacBook Air. All their devices are backed up to my iCloud-family subscription. We've started using AirPods with Live Listen to include my grandpa in our conversation when I'm visiting them. If you haven't tried this, you should. It's mind boggling good. The amount of time spent fixing things for them have gone from an almost weekly thing to non-existing. Being seniors they also have a lot of time on their hands, and Apple-partnered stores, at least around here, provide excellent support for anyone that owns an Apple device, regardless of where it was bought. All their devices are updated almost effortlessly: They get a notification about a pending update that tells them exactly when the device will be updated and what they need to do. The one big wish I have would be to postpone major updates for a couple of months. The recent trend of Apple radically changing the user experience is not a welcoming trend. There's a lot of things I've really started to hate with Apple. And to be honest, at this point the things I just listed are more or less the only things holding me back. But the things mentioned in this post is such a huge quality of life improvements for all of us, almost like a cliché of Apple advertising. It's almost embarrassing.
  - vmception 6y ago
    "Does the person appear disconnected from family, friends, community organizations, or houses of worship?" https://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/indicators-human-trafficking https://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/indicators-human-trafficki...
    - musingsole 6y ago
      The weirdest thing is how gleeful you are in supporting socially exclusionary practices.
  - patja 6y ago
    I feel exactly the same. But it was a bit infuriating to realize how huge an impact it was having on my kids who were being socially excluded for the sin of Android. Many children have ipads and hand me down iphones with no SIM just for iMessage, which they all just refer to as texting.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  > (protip: its affecting your life and relationships) Haha, what? Anyway, joke's on them, I use Signal.
  - sodality2 6y ago
    Group MMS is terrible (group chats in general) and you can't really expect a group of people to all download and install a new app because one person has it. In all likelihood, you will simply be excluded or if it's important, you will be forced to use something like facebook messenger, google hangouts, instagram, etc which is worse than SMS.
    - musingsole 6y ago
      That logic would've applied to imessenger when it first appeared on the scene. Yet it is possible for challengers to displace the previous method despite not (yet) having the requisite network effects. To now argue that nothing can or should supplant it is just Applecronyism.
      - sodality2 6y ago
        Sure, I agree, but that's not the majority of the population...
    - kop316 6y ago
      I'm curious, why do you say it is terrible?
      - sodality2 6y ago
        It becomes terribly low-res. The MMS media limit means each video, if longer than a few seconds, has its bitrate crippled to fit in the limit. Photos too have their resolution lowered, less so than videos but if you send a bunch at once it gets worse.
        kop316 6y ago
- llampx 6y ago
  The bubble is a US thing primarily. Not because Americans are uniquely prone to it, but because iPhones are not as common outside of the US. But don't worry non-Americans, people are judging you on the basis of how you dress, eat, walk and talk and deciding silently whether to let you in their social circle or not.
  - vmception 6y ago
    Yes and WhatsApp is not as popular in the US, with messaging being very fragmented between a variety of other Facebook products.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      WhatsApp was a game changer for people that had international contacts. Before WhatsApp, all the mobile networks (at least in the US) charged exorbitant amounts of money for international SMS and MMS. Then, WhatsApp came and it was free and cross platform, compressed images and video to send them quick with decent quality, and free of spam. Absolutely perfect execution, in my opinion. If it was not owned by Facebook, I’d probably pay a considerable amount for it if it promised security and privacy.
      - sumedh 6y ago
        > Absolutely perfect execution, in my opinion. There were no usernames with watsapp, its just your phone number, its so easy that even my mom can use it.
      - patja 6y ago
        All it asks is to hand over all your private contacts. For me that is a ridiculously high price.
      - ChrisArchitect 6y ago
        they owe a huge part of success intially to tricking people into what you describe -- that it's a replacement/better than SMS -- that it's "free". When it was simply that ppl couldn't tell difference between SMS network and Internet. And using phone numbers as accounts got a ton of people in non-American areas to use it (also north american texting rates crazy cheap unlike alot of the whatsapp-popular countries). Ridiculous. When all it is is another internet messaging app.
- madars 6y ago
  Sure, not using iMessage means missing out on certain social interactions but so does not using Facebook, for example. Life can't be played optimally.
- rovek 6y ago
  > And the whole blue/green bubble pretentiousness Honestly, reading the rest of the comments in this thread to this effect, it's terrifying that the runaway success of a single company can so degrade the fabric of personal relationships this way. The only people I've met who use iMessage have been Americans and the Americans I've met that live in the UK use WhatsApp or Messenger as their primary local comms, though frequently iMessage with friends in the US. I wonder why it is that iMessage hasn't enjoyed the same dominance here, even when the iPhone has. (45% iPhone in the US vs 40% in the UK)
  - monic 6y ago
    iMessage only makes sense on the iPhone with its full suite of Apple solutions. I don’t know why Google split up their video and then their chat into multiple directions but on Apple these exist as a workflow of solutions. Thus they are vulnerable to a do it all app like WhatsApp. IMO just exporting iMessage wouldn’t have been enough, they would’ve needed to combine FaceTime too.
    - jonny_eh 6y ago
      They promised FaceTime would be an open standard when it was first announced.
  - snowwrestler 6y ago
    The blue/green thing matters mostly to young folks, who are constantly on the lookout for signals of social distinctions. If it wasn’t chat bubbles, it would be something else. This isn’t derogatory; it’s literally how the human brain develops. Everyone goes through this phase. It’s not something that Apple created.
- lemonade5117 6y ago
  Doesn't the green bubble mean that it's sent over SMS? I'm pretty sure the reason it exists isn't because of some "pretentiousness"
  - criddell 6y ago
    Yes. And messages sent over SMS are not private. It's a useful thing for Apple to indicate.
- aryonoco 6y ago
  I'm in Australia, and here iPhones have about 50% of the smartphone market, with the other half being Android of course. I obviously know many iPhone users, including my wife and many close friends. I know of no one who uses iMessage. Here everyone uses Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp (and to a lesser extent Telegram and Signal). Is this iMessage fascinating a US thing? Why?
  - tobobo 6y ago
    In the US almost everyone uses SMS. iMessage uses the same app as SMS, changing the message type based on whether the recipient can accept iMessages. So, most iPhone-to-iPhone communication ends up being SMS because we don’t have to change what we’re used to.
    - prepend 6y ago
      s/being SMS/being iMessage/
  - HWR_14 6y ago
    iMessage in the US took over before WhatsApp or Messenger landed. So it's still going strong based on that (although I wouldn't want to switch to a FB product, so I may be biased.) But SMSs are free and therefore the number of people who use SMS (or RCS, whatever it's followup is), is really high.
    - asiachick 6y ago
      SMS is not free while traveling abroad. I know most people int he USA don't travel abroad but I do and is one reason I detest SMS. Further it's tied to my phone number, something I'd prefer not to give out.
      - HWR_14 6y ago
        If you don't like SMS requiring people to know your phone number, wait until you hear how Signal and WhatsApp work. iMessage also works abroad (in fact, I tend to use iMessage when abroad because it appears to US based iPhone customers identical to domestic texts.)
- monic 6y ago
  The blue green bubble is no more pretentious than letting people know if your messages are encrypted. It’d would’ve been inflammatory but accurate and informative to put an insecure padlock for unencrypted messages which may be read by your carrier.
- MomoXenosaga 6y ago
  Anyone who has the audacity to send me an SMS in the year of our Lord 2021 has my full and undivided negative attention. WhatsApp or go home.
- exabrial 6y ago
  Agree. One only has to look at the success of WeChat in China to see how this would play out.
- bscphil 6y ago
  > so many Android users still have no idea that's even happening to them or just assume they don't need to care about anybody that cares about that. (protip: its affecting your life and relationships) To be as blunt as I know how to be: good. I really hope that anyone inclined to treat people that way goes all the way and cuts me out of their life completely. I don't need or want friends like that, and I've had no trouble making friends (including iPhone users) who aren't so absurdly shallow as to treat people differently based on the color of their message in a fucking texting app. In other words, I really do hope you're right about this and it's affecting my life and relationships, because the only way it could possibly affect them is positively by cutting assholes out of my life.
afavour 6y ago
Depends on location, IMO. I was an Android user for years (since the Nexus One!) and the vast majority of my contacts were on iOS. My lack of iMessage was a constant frustration and I would have signed up in an instant. But I'm in the US, which has a disproportionately high amount of iOS users. Across the rest of the world iMessage would be competing with WhatsApp and its existing network (something the e-mails in the article note) and I think it would have been an uphill struggle.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  Strongly agree. The US is weird in two ways: 1. iOS being uncommonly popular (in other words: the US is weirdly rich compared to even most developed countries) 2. People texting a lot (maybe other countries’ carriers used to just make texting too expensive?) Outside the US, people more commonly use messaging apps, and there is less peer pressure to be on iMessage as it is less likely for someone (in a certain social class…) to have a big majority of iOS-using peers. I had never even heard the term ‘green-texter’ until I went to the US
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    >2. People texting a lot (maybe other countries’ carriers used to just make texting too expensive?) Yes. US mobile plans gave enormous buckets (thousands) of SMS messages a month to mobile users 10-15 years ago, so there was little incentive to move to other mobile messaging systems. Conversely, the lack of such generous SMS allotments in most non-US countries drove widespread adoption of WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger/etc.
  - kiadimoondi 6y ago
    Adding on to what others have said, it's also that some non-US countries have much better internet infrastructure than telecom (which might've affected pricing, can't say for sure), so people flocked to internet-only messaging apps to avoid their telecom's faulty SMS/call handling.
draw_down 6y ago
Gee, that sounds an awful lot like a monopoly to me. Not sure why we as consumers would want that. Not sure why as a business they would want to take away a major selling point for their actual product, which is not a free messaging service.
mcphage 6y ago
> They would have captured 100% of the messaging market I'm not sure that would have helped Apple in anti-trust battles.
Longhanks 6y ago
No. In 2013, WhatsApp was already the de facto standard messenger in Europe. See https://web.archive.org/web/20140412064444/http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2013/12/400-million-stories https://web.archive.org/web/20140412064444/http://blog.whats... Is this the typical american point of view where the US == the world?
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  I don’t know why you’re taking this needlessly snide tone. It seems obvious that GP thinks that iMessage would have dominated, even WhatsApp in Europe.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
r00fus 6y ago
> They would have captured 100% of the messaging market. Isn't that against their DNA? Apple doesn't like to capture market share - they instead go for high profit share regardless of marketshare. High profit share but median market share helps to avoid antitrust regulatory action.
pwthornton 6y ago
I don't know. Android is not exactly a place with a lot of paid software. No way Apple would make it free for Android and ad supported. Maybe they could have come up with some kind of iCloud Android bundle, and maybe it would have done well, but I am not convinced there is a massive market for a paid consumer messaging service.
- cglong 6y ago
  OP doesn't sound like they were arguing that iMessage should be a paid service, just that Apple could've captured most of the market.
- RandallBrown 6y ago
  I think making iMessage free on Android and then using it as a tool to migrate people from Android to iPhone would more than pay for itself.
  - bsaul 6y ago
    i think making it free for android would have certainly made it easier for people to try android for their next device, and thus the net balance isn't really clear..

vmception 6y ago

Agreed. They could probably monetize that better than hardware sales too, most likely via Apple Wallet payments and data. And the whole blue/green bubble pretentiousness would have never happened, which is funny because so many Android users still have no idea that's even happening to them or just assume they don't need to care about anybody that cares about that. (protip: its affecting your life and relationships)

musingsole 6y ago
I quite literally don't need to care about the blue bubble nonsense. It's a great flag for a person I can happily ignore.
- orangepanda 6y ago
  For 1:1 messages it doesnt matter, but breaks group chats when a green bubble is added
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - kop316 6y ago
    uhh...no it doesn't? I have a lot of group chats as the only Android (soon to be Pinephone) user. Group Chats work fine.
    - prepend 6y ago
      And you likely miss a ton of group chats where there are no android (or Pinephone) users because you’ve been excluded because group chats don’t work fine.
      - kop316 6y ago
        ....what? I am honestly having trouble parsing your meaning. My family mostly has iPhones, and we have several group chats with me in it on Group MMS. They work fine.
        ncw96 6y ago
        There are some features for group messaging on iMessage that aren’t available in Group MMS. If you add a non-iMessage user to your group, the group downgrades to using Group MMS, which does still work for basic messaging, but the group loses all of its iMessage-exclusive features.
        rblatz 6y ago
        I bet they also have side groups without you in it for when they want to share videos/photos or not deal with MMS jank. Nothing personal, we had to do the same thing to my brother and his fiance. Group MMS is busted it has inconsistent delivery, videos and images are compressed to the point of being basically worthless. Sometimes I'll get 3 of 4 people's messages leaving me with a partial conversation, then hours later I'll get the 4th person's messages. Sometimes they never come through. Sometimes I just don't get images, sometimes my wife and I will get different parts of the conversation and can piece it together. And the thing that causes all that friction is including an Android user in the group text. It's entirely not your fault, but also it's very natural for people to want to exclude Android users when the majority of the group uses iPhone.
        kop316 6y ago
        I'm really not sure how to respond to this, because you are assuming a lot of unheatlhy family dynamics there. I will say would hope if you value you relationship with your brother and his fiance, that you actually told him you do that and offered a comprimise on how to chat.
- oneplane 6y ago
  I suppose you are one of the special few in that case. In other social groups people tend to gravitate towards a common messaging infrastructure, only sharing the absolute essentials when reminded of those that are not part of that shared system. This means that while you might be part of the group while physically present, you are not a part of the group outside of that. For billions of people around the world that is a problem (not the tech, but the isolation), and as such, that is where a good deal of focus goes towards. This isn't about selecting your friends or social groups based on tech, but about groups of people dynamically interacting. Replace the applied construct with something else and it still applies. (you don't like smoke signals because big smoke is evil to you, so you use carrier hawks, but al your friends still use smoke signals and can't be bothered to learn how to maintain a hawk)
  - musingsole 6y ago
    Eh, if you aren't able to stay connected to a group despite not using that group's chosen technology, you're not that critical to the group. I'm not advocating to hold your participation hostage, but someone organizing a group to use exclusionary practices despite knowing specific members can't or won't participate is a classic bullying tactic. Family members employ it often.
    - oneplane 6y ago
      Eh, a social group isn't a business gathering nor is it a calculated construct. We're talking about people following their natural attraction. People don't consciously 'organise' a group with some 'group manager' and a nice hierarchy, technology choice panels, and acquisition procedures. There isn't some grand evil plan where the 'group CEO' selects the technology that everyone now has to use. This is just users using an end-user service on their end-user device that doesn't cause them friction and makes them happy. People don't think "I want to send an instant message to my group-colleagues on their mobile OS on their mobile hardware over their WWAN link to setup a meeting in our shared calendar for a ninety minute gathering for a consumption of nutrients". They generally think: "I could go for a bite, I'll let my friends know so we could go together". Everything that makes that harder just gets thrown out.
- afavour 6y ago
  I have a family, small children, relatives. Grandparents loves to see videos of their grandchildren. Sharing a video via group MMS is fraught with problems, it often doesn't work, or the resolution is garbage. iMessage works every time. I'm not dismissing your experience but the green vs blue bubbles do make a big difference for many of us.
  - jonp888 6y ago
    There are many popular messaging applications(Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp) that are cross platform and handle multimedia content well. This is what is used outside of the US.
    - afavour 6y ago
      I'm very aware of that. Convincing an entire extended family to switch app is not simple. Making sure they are all set up with an alternative messaging app is not simple. Getting them to remember to use it with your specific chat while they use the default app for other conversations is not simple. Using an iPhone is simple.
    - rrrazdan 6y ago
      They don't. Whatsapp degrades image/video quality massively. Just a choice they made given that a lot of their customers are bandwidth constrained. If I have to send a photo that I took with my high quality phone camera, I prefer to use iMessage.
    - vegardx 6y ago
      There are, but... Incoming rant: The one big thing about iMessage is that it never really changes. And it cannot be hijacked by some other application like on Android. For better or worse, and for basic services like text messages I'm erring on the side of better. I have no idea how many times I had to go fix messaging issues when my grandparents were using Android. Facebook tried to take over all messaging. Then it was Google, with whatever iteration of failed messaging application they were pushing out. Or when they had phones that actually received updates it would suddenly drastically change the user interface. We're having weekly video calls on FaceTime, and the superior sound quality of a FaceTime Audio has made it possible to even have a phone call with my hard of hearing grandpa. They don't even know they're using it. I send them high resolution pictures and videos of my hikes, that they can enjoy on their iPhone or iPad, whenever they want. Pictures and videos stay there without them having to do a ton of complicated tasks in a forever changing user interface, like Snap and the likes. The Apple Watches lets them know when someone is calling, and it gives us peace of mind knowing that they always have it with them. Everything uses a format they're used to from long before smart phones was a thing: Phone numbers. My grandmother is writing her life story on her now 7 years old MacBook Air. All their devices are backed up to my iCloud-family subscription. We've started using AirPods with Live Listen to include my grandpa in our conversation when I'm visiting them. If you haven't tried this, you should. It's mind boggling good. The amount of time spent fixing things for them have gone from an almost weekly thing to non-existing. Being seniors they also have a lot of time on their hands, and Apple-partnered stores, at least around here, provide excellent support for anyone that owns an Apple device, regardless of where it was bought. All their devices are updated almost effortlessly: They get a notification about a pending update that tells them exactly when the device will be updated and what they need to do. The one big wish I have would be to postpone major updates for a couple of months. The recent trend of Apple radically changing the user experience is not a welcoming trend. There's a lot of things I've really started to hate with Apple. And to be honest, at this point the things I just listed are more or less the only things holding me back. But the things mentioned in this post is such a huge quality of life improvements for all of us, almost like a cliché of Apple advertising. It's almost embarrassing.
- vmception 6y ago
  "Does the person appear disconnected from family, friends, community organizations, or houses of worship?" https://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/indicators-human-trafficking https://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/indicators-human-trafficki...
  - musingsole 6y ago
    The weirdest thing is how gleeful you are in supporting socially exclusionary practices.
- patja 6y ago
  I feel exactly the same. But it was a bit infuriating to realize how huge an impact it was having on my kids who were being socially excluded for the sin of Android. Many children have ipads and hand me down iphones with no SIM just for iMessage, which they all just refer to as texting.
ForHackernews 6y ago
> (protip: its affecting your life and relationships) Haha, what? Anyway, joke's on them, I use Signal.
- sodality2 6y ago
  Group MMS is terrible (group chats in general) and you can't really expect a group of people to all download and install a new app because one person has it. In all likelihood, you will simply be excluded or if it's important, you will be forced to use something like facebook messenger, google hangouts, instagram, etc which is worse than SMS.
  - musingsole 6y ago
    That logic would've applied to imessenger when it first appeared on the scene. Yet it is possible for challengers to displace the previous method despite not (yet) having the requisite network effects. To now argue that nothing can or should supplant it is just Applecronyism.
    - sodality2 6y ago
      Sure, I agree, but that's not the majority of the population...
  - kop316 6y ago
    I'm curious, why do you say it is terrible?
    - sodality2 6y ago
      It becomes terribly low-res. The MMS media limit means each video, if longer than a few seconds, has its bitrate crippled to fit in the limit. Photos too have their resolution lowered, less so than videos but if you send a bunch at once it gets worse.
      - kop316 6y ago
llampx 6y ago
The bubble is a US thing primarily. Not because Americans are uniquely prone to it, but because iPhones are not as common outside of the US. But don't worry non-Americans, people are judging you on the basis of how you dress, eat, walk and talk and deciding silently whether to let you in their social circle or not.
- vmception 6y ago
  Yes and WhatsApp is not as popular in the US, with messaging being very fragmented between a variety of other Facebook products.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    WhatsApp was a game changer for people that had international contacts. Before WhatsApp, all the mobile networks (at least in the US) charged exorbitant amounts of money for international SMS and MMS. Then, WhatsApp came and it was free and cross platform, compressed images and video to send them quick with decent quality, and free of spam. Absolutely perfect execution, in my opinion. If it was not owned by Facebook, I’d probably pay a considerable amount for it if it promised security and privacy.
    - sumedh 6y ago
      > Absolutely perfect execution, in my opinion. There were no usernames with watsapp, its just your phone number, its so easy that even my mom can use it.
    - patja 6y ago
      All it asks is to hand over all your private contacts. For me that is a ridiculously high price.
    - ChrisArchitect 6y ago
      they owe a huge part of success intially to tricking people into what you describe -- that it's a replacement/better than SMS -- that it's "free". When it was simply that ppl couldn't tell difference between SMS network and Internet. And using phone numbers as accounts got a ton of people in non-American areas to use it (also north american texting rates crazy cheap unlike alot of the whatsapp-popular countries). Ridiculous. When all it is is another internet messaging app.
madars 6y ago
Sure, not using iMessage means missing out on certain social interactions but so does not using Facebook, for example. Life can't be played optimally.
rovek 6y ago
> And the whole blue/green bubble pretentiousness Honestly, reading the rest of the comments in this thread to this effect, it's terrifying that the runaway success of a single company can so degrade the fabric of personal relationships this way. The only people I've met who use iMessage have been Americans and the Americans I've met that live in the UK use WhatsApp or Messenger as their primary local comms, though frequently iMessage with friends in the US. I wonder why it is that iMessage hasn't enjoyed the same dominance here, even when the iPhone has. (45% iPhone in the US vs 40% in the UK)
- monic 6y ago
  iMessage only makes sense on the iPhone with its full suite of Apple solutions. I don’t know why Google split up their video and then their chat into multiple directions but on Apple these exist as a workflow of solutions. Thus they are vulnerable to a do it all app like WhatsApp. IMO just exporting iMessage wouldn’t have been enough, they would’ve needed to combine FaceTime too.
  - jonny_eh 6y ago
    They promised FaceTime would be an open standard when it was first announced.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  The blue/green thing matters mostly to young folks, who are constantly on the lookout for signals of social distinctions. If it wasn’t chat bubbles, it would be something else. This isn’t derogatory; it’s literally how the human brain develops. Everyone goes through this phase. It’s not something that Apple created.
lemonade5117 6y ago
Doesn't the green bubble mean that it's sent over SMS? I'm pretty sure the reason it exists isn't because of some "pretentiousness"
- criddell 6y ago
  Yes. And messages sent over SMS are not private. It's a useful thing for Apple to indicate.
aryonoco 6y ago
I'm in Australia, and here iPhones have about 50% of the smartphone market, with the other half being Android of course. I obviously know many iPhone users, including my wife and many close friends. I know of no one who uses iMessage. Here everyone uses Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp (and to a lesser extent Telegram and Signal). Is this iMessage fascinating a US thing? Why?
- tobobo 6y ago
  In the US almost everyone uses SMS. iMessage uses the same app as SMS, changing the message type based on whether the recipient can accept iMessages. So, most iPhone-to-iPhone communication ends up being SMS because we don’t have to change what we’re used to.
  - prepend 6y ago
    s/being SMS/being iMessage/
- HWR_14 6y ago
  iMessage in the US took over before WhatsApp or Messenger landed. So it's still going strong based on that (although I wouldn't want to switch to a FB product, so I may be biased.) But SMSs are free and therefore the number of people who use SMS (or RCS, whatever it's followup is), is really high.
  - asiachick 6y ago
    SMS is not free while traveling abroad. I know most people int he USA don't travel abroad but I do and is one reason I detest SMS. Further it's tied to my phone number, something I'd prefer not to give out.
    - HWR_14 6y ago
      If you don't like SMS requiring people to know your phone number, wait until you hear how Signal and WhatsApp work. iMessage also works abroad (in fact, I tend to use iMessage when abroad because it appears to US based iPhone customers identical to domestic texts.)
monic 6y ago
The blue green bubble is no more pretentious than letting people know if your messages are encrypted. It’d would’ve been inflammatory but accurate and informative to put an insecure padlock for unencrypted messages which may be read by your carrier.
MomoXenosaga 6y ago
Anyone who has the audacity to send me an SMS in the year of our Lord 2021 has my full and undivided negative attention. WhatsApp or go home.
exabrial 6y ago
Agree. One only has to look at the success of WeChat in China to see how this would play out.
bscphil 6y ago
> so many Android users still have no idea that's even happening to them or just assume they don't need to care about anybody that cares about that. (protip: its affecting your life and relationships) To be as blunt as I know how to be: good. I really hope that anyone inclined to treat people that way goes all the way and cuts me out of their life completely. I don't need or want friends like that, and I've had no trouble making friends (including iPhone users) who aren't so absurdly shallow as to treat people differently based on the color of their message in a fucking texting app. In other words, I really do hope you're right about this and it's affecting my life and relationships, because the only way it could possibly affect them is positively by cutting assholes out of my life.

afavour 6y ago

Depends on location, IMO. I was an Android user for years (since the Nexus One!) and the vast majority of my contacts were on iOS. My lack of iMessage was a constant frustration and I would have signed up in an instant. But I'm in the US, which has a disproportionately high amount of iOS users. Across the rest of the world iMessage would be competing with WhatsApp and its existing network (something the e-mails in the article note) and I think it would have been an uphill struggle.

dan-robertson 6y ago
Strongly agree. The US is weird in two ways: 1. iOS being uncommonly popular (in other words: the US is weirdly rich compared to even most developed countries) 2. People texting a lot (maybe other countries’ carriers used to just make texting too expensive?) Outside the US, people more commonly use messaging apps, and there is less peer pressure to be on iMessage as it is less likely for someone (in a certain social class…) to have a big majority of iOS-using peers. I had never even heard the term ‘green-texter’ until I went to the US
- TMWNN 6y ago
  >2. People texting a lot (maybe other countries’ carriers used to just make texting too expensive?) Yes. US mobile plans gave enormous buckets (thousands) of SMS messages a month to mobile users 10-15 years ago, so there was little incentive to move to other mobile messaging systems. Conversely, the lack of such generous SMS allotments in most non-US countries drove widespread adoption of WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger/etc.
- kiadimoondi 6y ago
  Adding on to what others have said, it's also that some non-US countries have much better internet infrastructure than telecom (which might've affected pricing, can't say for sure), so people flocked to internet-only messaging apps to avoid their telecom's faulty SMS/call handling.

draw_down 6y ago

Gee, that sounds an awful lot like a monopoly to me. Not sure why we as consumers would want that. Not sure why as a business they would want to take away a major selling point for their actual product, which is not a free messaging service.

mcphage 6y ago

> They would have captured 100% of the messaging market I'm not sure that would have helped Apple in anti-trust battles.

Longhanks 6y ago

No. In 2013, WhatsApp was already the de facto standard messenger in Europe. See https://web.archive.org/web/20140412064444/http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2013/12/400-million-stories https://web.archive.org/web/20140412064444/http://blog.whats... Is this the typical american point of view where the US == the world?

imwillofficial 6y ago
I don’t know why you’re taking this needlessly snide tone. It seems obvious that GP thinks that iMessage would have dominated, even WhatsApp in Europe.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

r00fus 6y ago

> They would have captured 100% of the messaging market. Isn't that against their DNA? Apple doesn't like to capture market share - they instead go for high profit share regardless of marketshare. High profit share but median market share helps to avoid antitrust regulatory action.

pwthornton 6y ago

I don't know. Android is not exactly a place with a lot of paid software. No way Apple would make it free for Android and ad supported. Maybe they could have come up with some kind of iCloud Android bundle, and maybe it would have done well, but I am not convinced there is a massive market for a paid consumer messaging service.

cglong 6y ago
OP doesn't sound like they were arguing that iMessage should be a paid service, just that Apple could've captured most of the market.
RandallBrown 6y ago
I think making iMessage free on Android and then using it as a tool to migrate people from Android to iPhone would more than pay for itself.
- bsaul 6y ago
  i think making it free for android would have certainly made it easier for people to try android for their next device, and thus the net balance isn't really clear..