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Why Apple’s iMessage is winning: teens dread the green text bubble

• ghshephard 5y ago
  It wasn't until reading this article that I have ever heard that the color of the bubble meant anything (I'm an 8-generation iPhone user). Maybe it's my cohort, or the fact that I have a lot of international people on chats, but 100% of my group messaging takes place on Whatsapp, 30% of the time through their web interface on my laptop.
• deleted 5y ago
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• gorjusborg 5y ago
  I'm torn between being angry that U.S. law enforcement turns a blind eye to such obviously abusive business practices, and being angry that individuals are so terrified their child might not fit in that they literally buy into the scam. open standards 4 lyfe, green bubble bruthas
  • draw_down 5y ago
  • iqanq 5y ago
    What's abusive, painting chat bubbles in another colour?
    • Wiseacre 5y ago
      More manipulation or a dark pattern than abuse.
    • GrantZvolsky 5y ago
      iMessage deliberately makes the text unpleasant to read. They could just use a green/blue badge to differentiate the underlying protocols, but instead they render the non-iMessage texts on a background that makes them slightly annoying to read. How is annoying users and inducing a negative emotional response to messages from a group of people not abusive?
      • Invictus0 5y ago
        I guess dang and ycombinator are abusing me for making me read your comment with light gray text color.
        • cma 5y ago
          It would be like Apple paying off forum sites to do something like that, graying out Android users in any public discourse. Android phones are more popular in African American communities, so Apple is already doing segregation-like stuff with these hard to read text bubbles.
          • iqanq 5y ago
            That's the most convoluted reason to call someone racist I've heard of in a long time.
        • GrantZvolsky 5y ago
          A better analogy would be HN greying comments that were posted from any device that wasn't manufactured by Apple.
      • martini333 5y ago
        wow
      • xu_ituairo 5y ago
        SMS messages were green for years before they introduced iMessage, so I doubt they chose that colour to be intentionally annoying or abusive.
        • GrantZvolsky 5y ago
          The look was entirely different. Black on green IIRC. It's white on somewhat neon green now.
          • sharps1 5y ago
    • luckyscs 5y ago
      It's ends up breaking group messaging and Android people are left out due to the Hassel of having an Android in the group chat.
  • Nbox9 5y ago
    I wonder if this article/research exists to drum up anti-apple sentiment.
  • ComradeMatis 5y ago
    In an ideal world we would be all using open standards protocols/file formats/etc which would avoid this mess however in reality what ends up happening is a replay of the XKCD comic about standards - every vendor insisting that after embracing an open standard that they have some unique corner case that requires them to diverge from the standard rather than work within the system which starts off as divergence then leads to a completely new standard. The committee process is pretty horrendous as well as demonstrated by how long it took took to standardise HTML5 and the various organisations who were members either throwing around their patents or threatening to block any movement forward.
• clepto 5y ago
  I can’t imagine actually using SMS, iMessage or not. It’s just an inferior experience to basically any other chat solution. The only thing I actually use SMS for are things that make me do MFA with it, and even that is a worse experience than the alternatives(I’m not saying you shouldn’t have MFA, just that SMS is inferior to most other approaches).
  • jeffbee 5y ago
    A chat "solution" that your correspondent doesn't use is the worst experience of all.
    • clepto 5y ago
      Well I guess I’m not saying it doesn’t ever have a place, it’s nice to have a universal means of communication, but for regular ongoing communication within a given subset of people it is certainly not a great experience.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > I can’t imagine actually using SMS, iMessage or not. iMessage does not use SMS, so this statement does not make any sense.
  • vehemenz 5y ago
    I mean, it's the standard in the US. It doesn't really matter whether you can imagine it or not.
• giuliomagnifico 5y ago
  This is effective only in the U.S., in Europe whatsapp is winning and iMessage is quite ignored (unfortunately).
  • viraptor 5y ago
    Same almost everywhere not-us. WA, Line, Telegram, etc. are easily accessible to everyone. I wish the whole green bubble idea was seen more widely as just elitist BS.
  • FinnKuhn 5y ago
    At least for me I think WhatsApp is more popular with older people (at least in Germany) while teens use it too they also use combination of different messengers in addition to it (Instagram, iMessage, Signal, Discord, Snapchat, etc.)
    • YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
      I've installed (on a secondary phone) WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Discord, Instagram, Telegram just to be reachable for every friend. Germany is really scattered in regards of messengers. 10 years ago you could at least only have one client (trillian for me) for your different messenger services and google and facebook used xmpp so you didn't even need a facebook account to talk to your friends but alas here we are I guess. It's a novel and technical not great idea but I always liked https://delta.chat/en/ https://delta.chat/en/ in their approach to use a decentralized but common service like email for chat but there are just too many difficulties for a normal person to set it up.
  • pier25 5y ago
    This is because the US is the only country that kept using SMS.
    • cblconfederate 5y ago
      Apple has a large share of the us market, not elsewhere
• frogger8 5y ago
  • quickthrowman 5y ago
    You can choose the color of your message bubble, but you can’t choose the color of your skin.
• razemio 5y ago
  Haha, in Germany I do not know a single person using iMessage. In my social bubble it is like WhatsApp > Signal > Telegram > Threema > Facebook Messanger
  • sys_64738 5y ago
    As you get older you'll likely fallback to the default iMessages app. Those others are just fads to me the kids like to use.
    • entropyie 5y ago
      WhatsApp is 13 years old, like it or not, it is not a fad. I've seen it used on Nokia's with Symbian and series 40 candy bar phones 10 years ago. Outside the USA it dwarfs iMessage and will continue to do so for a very long time. Everyone in my extended family uses it, from 15 to 85 years old.
      • fundad 5y ago
        WhatsApp are on the phones that people want, including iPhones. iMessage is on the phone that iPhone users want. Neither of those is lock in.
      • sys_64738 5y ago
        Folk with iPhones will still get those IMs though. shrug
    • leoedin 5y ago
      In the UK everyone uses WhatsApp. Certainly everyone I meet my age or older. Maybe the kids are doing something differently, but I doubt it. iPhone usage just hasn't quite got high enough for iMessage to be seamless. Maybe it's similar in Germany?
      • vidarh 5y ago
        In the UK too, and yeah, at both my sons primary school and secondary school it was just expected that you had WhatsApp to be added to the year group and class WhatsApp groups. It's to the point where getting an SMS that isn't a notification from a business is really weird. A lot of people even asks what your WhatsApp is rather than what your phone number is, even though they're the same thing.
• meetingthrower 5y ago
  • Hnrobert42 5y ago
    • Justin_K 5y ago
      Straw man argument there.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • dpark 5y ago
        How is that in any way a straw man argument?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • orbifold 5y ago
    Teenagers will be cruel no matter what. Finding non-shitty friends in Highschool is an important skill, that is pretty much independent of what phone you have.
    • quantified 5y ago
      This whole thing is really about the people. Teens (really, everyone) could change their behavior towarss Apple for how it treats people who use other phones too. Even though I have an iPhone, I don’t care about the green. So what? Apple made their phone do an ugly thing, didn’t make my friends do anything ugly.
    • sitkack 5y ago
      Finding non-shitty friends in <location/time> is an important skill.
• tuankiet65 5y ago
  Color my surprise when I came to the US to study undergraduate, and somebody asks me for my number so they can make a group chat. I was like "US people still use SMS/MMS?". Turns out everybody uses the included Messages app, and on iPhone it upgrades to iMessage if the recipient uses an iPhone also. Every time I sees someone using iMessage, it pains me a lot because I feel like I'm being left out of the conversation, just because I refuse to bow down to Apple's monopolistic practices.
  • gnuj3 5y ago
    As opposed to the non-monopolistic practices of Facebook and their messengers?
    • Tijdreiziger 5y ago
      As much as I dislike Meta, at least they don't tie you to one specific brand of phone.
      • HWR_14 5y ago
        On the other hand, Meta spies on you a hell of a lot more and then leases those results to others. And SMS is cross phone - even to feature phones
        • dmz73 5y ago
          They all spy on all of us all the time, Apple is no different. Apple probably has more data on their users than any other company out there. So far there are no known instances of Apple selling this information, most likely because they believe they get better value by keeping the information for themselves. But they still spy on users and it is only one step from keeping all that data for themselves to selling it to boost profits or charging fees to keep it private.
          • krrrh 5y ago
            This… isn’t true, unless you think everything in here is a lie: https://www.apple.com/privacy/ https://www.apple.com/privacy/ If it were all lies there would be lawsuits from the FTC and EU regulators, and there simply isn’t. Because advertising is not a significant part of Apple’s business model, profiling users is a liability that they prefer to avoid. This does slow down the introduction of features. For instance Google images had usable face recognition for years before Apple because Google does it in the cloud. It happens on device for Apple, and it takes longer to scan photos for faces. A slightly worse experience, but worth it in many consumers eyes. But, I mean apple even does wacky stuff like creating unique ids for each trip you route on maps that isn’t tied to your user id, and fuzzes the precise location using differential privacy for product improvement. You can read all about it in the white papers at the link I provided above.
• janandonly 5y ago
  https://archive.fo/RJ7bl https://archive.fo/RJ7bl
• WheatM 5y ago
• ksec 5y ago
  >Apple’s iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy. Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this. This is very very strange coming from Google. I am surprise because Google has stopped acting like they do no evil. And somehow Apple picked that up from Google since 2016. And now they are in reverse situation.
  • epistasis 5y ago
    My thinking has evolved somewhat in this. There's a big difference between a standard and an integrated platform where the client is under control of the server operator, and can guarantee timely updates for changes in the messaging protocols. Jabber is nowhere to be found today, yet we have a plethora of messaging services, perhaps most notably WhatsApp, which seems to have word domination. There are big consumer advantages here, in addition to the known disadvantages.
  • jayd16 5y ago
    What is this quote from? Someone at Google said this? I don't see it in the archived link.
    • re 5y ago
      Looks like it's a tweet from Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP at Google for Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, Play, Comms and Photos https://twitter.com/lockheimer/status/1479865157753147395 https://twitter.com/lockheimer/status/1479865157753147395 See also https://twitter.com/Android/status/1479875457667448837 https://twitter.com/Android/status/1479875457667448837
• MBCook 5y ago
  I know people like to pick on this. And I know that it is a factor. But this seems so incredibly reductive. “80% of teens have iPhones? Must be the blue bubbles. RESEARCH DONE.” There isn’t a single other reason kids might like it? This is literally the ONLY reason? Did you even talk to a couple of kids? I’m not denying iMessage is powerful. It sees incredible usage. I don’t know what the numbers are but it wouldn’t surprise me if they would put Facebook to shame (on a message/post/attention basis). But couldn’t anyone do a deeper dive than the first thing that comes to mind?
  • mgh2 5y ago
    Research: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807
    • danaris 5y ago
      That research definitely doesn't seem to support the thesis that it's the green bubbles that are the reason.
      • tata71 5y ago
        It's network effect, visually manifested as green bubble plebs.
        • danaris 5y ago
          I'm not disagreeing that it's happening (it makes sense, and I have no data to say otherwise), but unless I'm seriously missing something, nothing in the article linked by mgh2 mentions network effect, iMessage, green/blue bubbles, or anything related.
    • MBCook 5y ago
      That’s a shallow “article” quoting a single stat from a survey. Nowhere does it say WHY teens are choosing iPhones. And the discussion just seems to assume it’s iMessage with only supporting anecdotes about its popularity and practically nothing about other possibilities.
• grayclhn 5y ago
  These articles always play up the sillier aspects, but I don’t think non-iPhone users realize how much more annoying a group chat becomes when you add even one non-iPhone user. All of the social network features (thumbs up, etc) becomes an explicit and long text, etc. None of it is a big deal individually, but it adds up. If I were younger and meaner, I’d definitely make passive aggressive comments about “green bubbles” and occasionally leave people off threads. (I realize this is a US-centric perspective, etc… but I’m definitely not a teen. :))
  • mixedCase 5y ago
    You can use any cross-platform messenger instead of iMessage. Which is what most people on earth do.
    • grayclhn 5y ago
      No shit. But when my friends and family message me, they tend to text.
• steve_adams_86 5y ago
  I don’t mind the green bubble except that it seriously harms readability for me. The green is so bright. I wouldn’t think anything of the “green bubble strategy” if it weren’t for how garish and unreadable the text appears. It’s a questionable decision from a UI/accessibility perspective.
  • barbs 5y ago
    I wonder if the illegibility is intentional?
    • basisword 5y ago
      Given the iPhone shipped for 3 or 4 years with only green bubbles (for SMS, pre iMessage) it’s definitely not intentional.
      • jtd13 5y ago
        Another user pointed out that it used to be black text on a green background. Now it is white on green. I think I agree that it is harder to read.
        • dane-pgp 5y ago
          There really needs to be some catch-all law that prevents dark patterns like this. (Please excuse the irony that in this case the dark pattern is light text). If an engineer or designer is told to deliberately spend time making an experience less good for someone, they should be able to report that to a government ombudsman, and if their whistleblowing is proven correct, the company should be forced to reverse the decision and continue to pay the developer their salary for the next 10 years even if they choose to quit. I suppose there are cases when the dark pattern is actually intended to add friction to a path that leads to user errors, like accidentally making private files world-readable, but something like a jury of users should be able to unanimously reach a verdict on whether a given "feature" is really a benefit.
        • basisword 5y ago
• bla3 5y ago
  Reminder: if you see an article reappearing every few months ("suits are in again"), it's very likely pushed by some company's PR department. Wonder which company might be interested in pushing this story! Edit: see http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
  • jarbus 5y ago
    This is a great link, thanks for sharing
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Here is a clue: https://mobile.twitter.com/android/status/1479875457667448837 https://mobile.twitter.com/android/status/147987545766744883...
    • bla3 5y ago
      Not sure why Android would want "iMessage is winning" as headline...
      • jsodw 5y ago
        It is 2022. Feelings rule the Earth. You don’t win by being better. You win by crying more (in this case, to regulators).
• tln 5y ago
  I get grief about the green bubble weekly. It not just teens
  • bloodyplonker22 5y ago
    It's the people who are mentally teenagers still.
• kome 5y ago
  why americans don't just use telegram or whatsapp like in the rest of the world?
  • vehemenz 5y ago
    Probably many reasons. One reason is that SMS was already ubiquitous, and it doesn't require an additional data plan the way 3rd-party apps do. Why did the rest of the world adopt WhatsApp and alternatives? I don't think they were any later to text messaging than the US..
    • MAGZine 5y ago
      text messaging was prohibitively expensive. wifi was ubiquitous. america bid down the cost of SMS first so there was never any urgency to move off of sms. developing nations did not have the same luxury.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Many Americans with international contacts do use WhatsApp, or even Americans who travel internationally. However, because many Americans never leave the US, and neither does anyone in their social circles, many Americans never had to deal with international messaging and call costs. Hence they went from unlimited SMS to unlimited iMessage, once Apple rolled it out. However, if you traveled internationally during 2008 to 2012 or so period, then WhatsApp was a godsend, and almost everyone I knew (since pretty much everyone in my social circles vacations or travels for business internationally) has WhatsApp. But everyone pretty much has iPhones, so the preferred chat is iMessage due to the high image quality, but if someone does not have iMessage then we switch to WhatsApp.
  • kstrauser 5y ago
    There’s no way in hell I’d voluntarily lock myself into a Facebook service. WhatsApp’s a non-starter.
• peruvian 5y ago
  Teens? This happens well into your 20s lol. I've always had iPhones but heard experiences like these from Android-using friends.
• NelsonMinar 5y ago
  Apple could easily end this by adopting RCS support into iMessage. Android's RCS implementation is very good and the default these days, at least for Google and Samsung phones. It's an open standard. As the article points out, Apple executives know it's not in their business interest to allow this kind of interoperability so they won't do it. All of this reminds me, exhausted, of the long sad story of AOL Instant Messenger and Microsoft's attempts to integrate with it. AIM was at one point even compelled to support interop as part of the anti-trust review for the Time Warner merger. But it never actually happened.
  • dan-robertson 5y ago
    What problem would Apple be solving and why would they want to solve it?
    • ianbicking 5y ago
      They'd be providing a higher-quality and more reliable messaging conduit to non-iPhone users. They might not want to solve it, but I don't think we should accept unethical business rationales. I am somewhat resentful of Apple because as a currently-Android but formerly-iPhone user I am now unable to text some iPhone users in some situations because of iMessage. I guess fucking me with their bugs is a positive business outcome for Apple, especially because they create a environment where their bugs appear to be Android bugs. But that's an unethical stance on the part of Apple.
      • deleted 5y ago
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      • cwalv 5y ago
        I had iphones from the 3G on up to about 2 years ago, when I thought I'd try android. I was surprised when group txt messages stopped working for me, even after I did whatever apple told me to do to disable iMessage after the fact. The whole time I thought we were using txt messages as a kind of least common denominator, but really it wasn't sms. I doubt if more than 50% of ppl using it realize they're locking themselves in when they start. To me, now that I'm used to Android, it's a reason not to go back to iOS. Now I just need to convince my spouse to switch
• analog31 5y ago
  I asked my kids about this. Both of them have cheap Android phones on a cheap plan, as do I. My phone is a $25 refurb. They know that they can get jobs and buy whatever they want, but it's apparently not that important to them. I asked: "Have you heard of the green bubble?" Both of them said it was basically a non issue, kids figure out how to get in touch with the people they want to get in touch with. The only exception was, my daughter said her violin teacher was puzzled why her texts were a different color than everybody else's. From talking to people, I had formed the impression that people buy iPhones because they are the default, like IBM. Parents get the same thing for their kids, that they're using themselves.
  • HWR_14 5y ago
    I think it's less "parents buy the same things for their children" and more "parents give their old devices to their children"
  • Double_a_92 5y ago
    > From talking to people, I had formed the impression that people buy iPhones because they are the default, like IBM. Parents get the same thing for their kids, that they're using themselves. But how rich are those people, that they just spend 1000$ on a phone for their kids without any research at all?
    • pixelatedindex 5y ago
      iPhone is pretty accessible - the SE is a bargain at $399 given the features and how long Apple supports their devices. You only spend $1000 if you are adamant about the “Pro” line.
      • analog31 5y ago
        Ouch. That's a lot more than a refurb Android. And given we have 4 people in the household, it would add up to quite a bit. My son's cell phone went missing, and showed up on the sidewalk outside the school, crushed. Buying cheap stuff is my insurance plan. ;-)
• dan-robertson 5y ago
  Probably needs a big ‘American’ caveat because iMessage (and SMS) seems to be much less popular outside the US. WhatsApp (or other fb messengers) tend to be the most popular choice where I live. I’d never heard of a ‘greentexter’ until I went to the US but on the other hand Android phones allow 10-finger multitouch which is pretty useful for Chwazi.
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  • taurath 5y ago
    Blame mobile carriers in the US for this. Data rates were very high for a long time and eventually texts went from $.10/each (receiving and sending) to “free” w a phone plan before most people had a phone that could install an app. We still don’t have data only phone plans in the US on major carriers, AND phone plans are insanely expensive compared to what you get in almost any other country, AND most of the country is more spread out so wifi isn’t guaranteed. The US is very expensive when it comes to telecom, and just about any other industry where there’s a duopoly/cartel that doesn’t bother competing anymore. Come to think of it, there’s very few aspects of the US that doesn’t work like this.
    • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      I get a very good rate from T-Mobile for pretty much unlimited everything, including not worrying about roaming. Google Fi is also a good deal. If anything I hear about horror stories in Canada and I'm very glad I don't have to deal with their rates.
      • taurath 5y ago
        By good rate like $60/mo? Canada is also bad. Data rates are 6x more expensive in US/Canada than Italy. 2x that if the UK or Germany.
• vikingcaffiene 5y ago
  My entire household uses Apple products. A few years ago I got fed up and went all in on Linux and Android. I liked a lot of things about it but ultimately came back to Apple. When I switched back to an iPhone my wife told me "I'm so glad you're back on iMessage..." like she'd been holding this dark secret inside her the entire time I was out of the fold. It's baffling honestly as messaging was the least of my problems. Sucky apps, weird driver issues, and just general friction with simple things like printing were what finally got me.
  • BuckRogers 5y ago
    Windows and Android play very nicely together. I'm a Windows and iOS user, but interfacing iOS and Windows definitely requires research. It's hard to not go whole hog on Apple once you have the iPhone trojan horse. A very high built quality device that receives years of security and feature updates. That said, if they don't go USB-C by the next time I upgrade, I'm going Pixel or Samsung. Or if they go portless, I'm out. The build quality does suffer, but I'm done with USB 2.0 transfer speeds and goofy Lightning ports. Apple is the only company that could get away with such things in 2022.
    • MBCook 5y ago
      There’s nothing wrong with lightning, I think it’s an excellently designed connector. I like that they seem to be sticking with it. However, the fact that it doesn’t support USB three speeds is… baffling. I hope they fix that. I was listening to a podcast last week (The Talk Show?) And they were talking about the fact that you can take this glorious 4K footage on the newest iPhones and everything looks amazing and it takes FOREVER to transfer it off the phone because you have to do it at USB 2.0 speeds or Wi-Fi speeds. They can fix that without a new connector. Sidenote: I find this kind of hilarious. So many people were up in arms when they introduced lightning because they were changing things and making things obsolescent and people had to buy all new stuff. Here we are a few years later and all sorts of people are mad that Apple is not introducing a new connector and forcing everyone to buy all new stuff. I understand the desire. It’s just sort of an ironic situation.
• jiggawatts 5y ago
  I don’t know about teens, but something that annoys me as an adult about non-iPhone users is that I can’t be sure that they’re seeing what I’m seeing when I send them a photo. If I take a photo of a sunset in my iPhone and send it to another iPhone user, I can be assured that: - The colours will be correct - The high dynamic range will be preserved - Live photos will work. Etc… With Android users, all bets are off. The colours will be shifted or wrong. HDR will generally not work. (The same thing applies to Microsoft Windows users. If I email them something, chances are that it’ll be mangled in some way.) Google, like Microsoft, just doesn’t care about quality or interoperability, and consumers like me notice.
  • mixedCase 5y ago
    Does this happen with Signal or Element? If not, you could ask your Android contacts to use a cross-platform messenger such as those, like the rest of the world does with WhatsApp.
    • godelski 5y ago
      This is the number one method for how I got my friends to contact me on Signal. No more potato videos and images. Can still do group video calls, reactions, everything that iMessage offers except it's cross platform.
  • meowkit 5y ago
    > Google, like Microsoft, just doesn’t care about quality or interoperability, and consumers like me notice. Just to be clear, Google and Microsoft care very much about interop. That's why quality and ecosystem coherence are generally lower than Apple.
  • NikolaNovak 5y ago
    I mean, I agree with problem while vehemently disagreeing with proposed cause. It somehow puts blame on "others" for interoperability, whereas my personal perception is that Apple said "&@#& screw interoperability - we will make sure things work right in our own ecosystem only, through closed proprietary systems, and who cares about anybody not using our hardware". Live photos not working on other phones is not THEIR fault for goodness sake. It's a proprietary iPhone gimmick Apple have spent zero effort in trying to work anywhere else. Same for portrait photo etc. Apple is intentionally building a walled garden of proprietary stuff that purposefully doesn't work outside. From charger to text to photos to everything else, they see their future in blazing their own path as opposed to compatibility. I too am frustrated in my iPhone photos being a pain anywhere outside, but seeing as my android Nikon canon windows Linux google adobe Microsoft etc systems all seem to talk happily with each other, I know exactly where to scream in rage at. - Sent from my iPhone, fwiw Edit: not that you're alone mind you. Apple's marketing machine and prestige identity works brilliantly - Most iPhone users I know feel that's everybody else's fault, which only makes the brand loyalty firmer - it's a perpetually self enforcing perception.
• cletus 5y ago
  There are two important lessons to take from iMessage: 1. Simplicity in product design and UX is key here. You sign in with your AppleID when you setup the phone and then it's basically seamless: it'll use AppleID through Apple's messaging systems and infrastructure when it can, otherwise it uses SMS. 2. Steve Jobs completely turned the mobile phone industry on its head by creating a product users wanted and then extracting conditions from telcos. This was the reason for years of AT&T exclusivity. It allowed devs to install apps on the device (rather than the telco gatekeeeping that). Telcos couldn't install their crapware on the phones (eg Japanese telcos resisted the iPhone for years because of this). The iMessage system broke the SMS monopoly. Google's model of creating an OS and then putting a suite of apps on top of that allowing phone manufacturers and telcos to "customize" the experience (ie putting their crapware on; Bixby anyone?). One can argue they had to do this to win market share. Or that it's "right". Either way, for many users this is a worse experience. Compare this to the 217 different chat apps that are in the Google graveyard. Maybe because of the Android model it wasn't possible but quite literally Google did everything they could not to copy iMessage. Hangouts, Chat or whatever it's called now has been around for 15+ years and seems like such a missed opportunity. Google didn't budge on your email being identity (which Eric Schmidt later stated was a mistake) and it's weird how primitive Google's chat apps are (eg AFAICS there's no easy way to send GIFs in Chat, like WTF?). I don't think the green/blue thing was planned by Apple in terms of status. It is easy marketing though. People like iPhones so the blue bubble is a kind of flex though. I suspect that was more incidental than planned.
  • paulryanrogers 5y ago
    > The iMessage system broke the SMS monopoly. Wait isn't SMS federated and iMessage the walled-garden monopoly? (At least for their value added features)
    • ummonk 5y ago
      SMS used to often cost money, even for plans with gigabytes of internet data. iMessage helped break that.
      • 5y ago
• ryandvm 5y ago
  Honestly, automatically screening people like this out of your life seems like a feature.
  • paulryanrogers 5y ago
    The blue bubble snobs or the green bubble plebs?
• aliceryhl 5y ago
  Where I come from everyone uses Facebook Messenger, so we don't have this problem.
• julietteeb 5y ago
  Am currently a teen in high school so here's my hot take. No one actually gives a shit about the color of the bubble, like beyond it being annoying that you can't add more people to a gc if one person has an android it's not an actual problem. I would love to meet a person who actually cares about the color of a message that this article is talking about because I have yet to find them lol. And plus most of the time we aren't using iMessages, (using Discord/Snap/Insta instead) so no one even knows if you have an iPhone or not, we just want to talk to our friends, no matter the phone.
  • OneLeggedCat 5y ago
    Do any of your friends use Signal? Most older adults don't care at all about privacy, so I'm guessing high schoolers don't care either?
  • i_am_proteus 5y ago
    The people this article is talking about are actually in their mid-to-late twenties. Which, with tongue like very slightly in cheek, checks out with a Wall Street Journal article about the Youths.
    • racl101 5y ago
      Youts?
    • lowkey_ 5y ago
      Was going to comment, anecdotal but I'm 24 and I absolutely prefer texting people with iMessage. It's also a slight verification in some situations — if I were to get someone's number from a dating app, or chat with someone from Facebook Marketplace and the message was green, I'd be much more hesitant to message them. It's a negative signal to me if it's green, as they may be using a Google Voice number or any other fake number system. This isn't to say someone couldn't have a burner iPhone, but it's way more effort than simply having a Google Voice number, and I haven't encountered that.
      • 5y ago
• vulcan01 5y ago
  As a teen in high school: People don't use iMessages, or for that matter SMS. We use Discord, Instagram DMs, etc. for communication. I don't know any of my friends' phone numbers and have never cared to ask, because we use Discord voice channels instead. This article seems to be of the "kids these days" type, and is, in my experience, highly reflective of the millenial generation, who are by and large not teens anymore.
  • marcan_42 5y ago
    I'm a millennial and we don't use texts in most of the world either. Sticking to SMS and SMS-adjacent stuff like iMessage seems to be a fairly uniquely American thing. The last time I had an SMS conversation was... May 2020. And before that it was October 2019. Everything else is verification/notification SMSes. In Europe you'll find people using WhatsApp or Telegram; in Japan and Taiwan, LINE is king, and of course in China there's WeChat. There's also Twitter DMs. Discord has been becoming increasingly popular lately, especially among the tech/game and adjacent crowds. Nobody has used SMSes by default for years.
    • Talanes 5y ago
      Do Americans even really "stick" to SMS? I know millennials who might use iMessage as their primary channel, but the only people I know who ONLY text are my mom and grandma. Everyone I know around my age (millennial) has a small collection of apps that they used a lot for a bit, and now maybe have one or two people they still talk to on.
      • specialist 5y ago
        Personal anecdata of one: I only text/msg with family. Am Gen X, now we're doing eldercare. Texting and voice calls (and voice mails) are the only skills our parents know. I've tried teaching them FaceTime, WhatsApp, some cooperative social games. Nope, too late. Once our parents pass, I probably won't even have a normal phone plan. The only other calls I get are telemarketers. Maybe switch to prepaid. For emergency services, and all these services using texts for 2FA.
• nneonneo 5y ago
  Blackberry commanded the same level of loyalty via BBM ages ago. Apple has definitely refined that strategy with iMessage. The network effects of it are very strong (in the markets where it is dominant, anyway). Meanwhile, Google is content to just rename their chat app every two years with zero coherent strategy. Would it be so hard to make an Android messaging service that doesn’t suck?
  • greiskul 5y ago
    It's called whatsapp. Doesn't suck, is multi platform, has a bunch of features, and the end to end encryption means that all the privacy fears people have are FUD. Only valid complaint I have is that they are too restrictive with their bot api, can't really experiment with chat bots unless you are are an established company already, and established companies are not great in experimenting.
  • v7p1Qbt1im 5y ago
    They would have done that ages ago I think. They could have made the „default“ Android messaging app similar to iMessage. But couldn‘t because they needed to keep the OEMs (mostly Samsung) and regulators at bay. Android needed to be open in the beginning so Google could catch up and overtake iOS. But obviously there are drawbacks (from their perspective) if you don‘t control the whole ecosystem including hardware.
• sebastien_b 5y ago
  To me, this is just another example of Apple's hypocrisy, where they claim to be all about inclusivity, but then build in exclusivity (read: being non-inclusive to a certain group of the population) in their products to induce FOMO and "status" among peers.
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    Apple has always had a subtle (sometimes not-so-subtle) exclusivity or "you're inferior if you don't use our stuff" angle in all their marketing.
• vhiremath4 5y ago
  this comment section is one of many reminders that i (a 29-year old millennial who uses all messaging apps but primarily iMessage) am now an old person
• js2 5y ago
  I use Google Voice with my iPhone. My cousin has an Android. The rest of the family is on iPhones. My family all have my GV #, but not my iPhone phone #. My iCloud address is my email address. I think almost everyone is on Verizon. Group Chat works great in Messages for me until someone adds my cousin, who being on Android, obviously doesn't have Messages installed. At that point all the iPhones (or the Apple Messages backend?) switch to MMS. Then the fun starts for me. For every message sent to the group chat, I get an email (to my iCloud email address) from phone#@vzwpix.com. The to list is all the phone #'s in the group @vzwpix.com, oh except one person who is on AT&T goes to phone#@icmms1.sun5.lightsurf.net. The email has no subject, and the body of the message is a single text attachment. I don't really understand why Messages Group Chat has to be all or nothing Apple Messages or MMS. I also don't really understand what this weird email thing is or where it happens. But it's annoying as heck. I've offered to buy my cousin an iPhone, but she's just really attached to Android. (Normally, I chat with her via WhatsApp, but I also can't convince my entire family to switch to WhatsApp just so we can have a common communication protocol.)
  • discardedrefuse 5y ago
    I'm glad your cousin stood her ground. Forcing her to uproot her entire digital ecosystem because someone else can't be bothered to install a messenger app (while rewarding Apple for anti-competitive behavior) is terrible and kinda selfish. The only real solution is for everyone to switch to Telegram or WhatsApp or some other platform that works on ALL devices. Vendor lock-in is bad for everyone. In the long run, its in everyone's best interest to move away from iMessage to a more open platform.
    • js2 5y ago
      She’d be happier on an iPhone. She uses a Mac for everything else. She has no digital ecosystem tied to Google/Android. She’s just used to the Android UI. No one is forcing her to do anything. But in any case, she should be able to use whatever mobile OS she wants and asking everyone to use WhatsApp or Signal isn’t the answer either. Both of those apps have shitty integration with Android/iOS compared to the native messaging apps. Rather, all of the messaging apps should interoperate with something better than freaking SMS/MMS and whatever this stupid email hack is the carriers have come up with.
• Ninjinka 5y ago
  I (early 20's) have had people complain about the green bubbles from my messages, but now 95% of my communication is over Signal so it's a non-issue.
• RedBeetDeadpool 5y ago
  Lets at least realize that Apple could easily have a department that develops a broader iMessage app, or release an imessage api, that can be used outside of its apple products to reduce the purported discrimination against SMS messages. There are certainly other ways to solve the UX as well that doesn't involve discrimination. But ... they dont. I'm postulating with this last one: they know exactly what they're doing.
  • dane-pgp 5y ago
    > or release an imessage api This is an important point. Proposed legislation in the US and EU could this year mandate the sort of interoperability you are alluding to, and it would make much of this controversy moot. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/future-interoperability-not-big-tech-2021-review https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/future-interoperabilit...
  • njerschow1 5y ago
    Yup, It makes apple billions every year Btw: check out sendblue.co
• herf 5y ago
  What about readability? It's harder to read green bubbles and you can show it with accessibility metrics. If you think about luminance contrast, blue is much darker than green. So the blue bubble text is easier to read, because the text is white.
• bagacrap 5y ago
  the much more insidious thing that I've repeatedly noticed and is not touched on in this article is that SMSes to and from iphone users, from my Android device, are completely dropped about 5% of the time. I don't know if it's a problem with the carriers or what, and I've always just assumed it's an edge case Apple doesn't care about or they'd fix it. The problem with randomly (and rarely) dropping text messages is that it can drastically alter a conversation or even make it seem to both parties like they're being ghosted.
• deepstack 5y ago
  > There is no dot-dot-dot icon to demonstrate that a non-iPhone user is typing, That sounds more a privacy feature. Why should the other guy know that I'm typing or online?
• grishka 5y ago
  As a Russian: lol sms. I can't remember the last time I actually sent an sms-type message to an actual human. We mostly use Telegram and VKontakte for messaging. Some weirdos also use WhatsApp. Every carrier has an unlimited sms option you can add to your plan though.
  • discardedrefuse 5y ago
    Before smartphones, SMS was a big selling point for US carriers. Plans were very cheap compared to the rest of the world. So we were already accustomed to texting when smartphones arrived. When WhatsApp / Telegram got here, no one in the US really cared because all our contacts already had SMS and MMS. SMS should have been retired a while ago. But now we've foolishly managed to tie MFA to it...so I doubt its going anywhere anytime soon.
    • grishka 5y ago
      We also used SMS before smartphones, but only for a bit, because most people paid per message. Some, like me, did figure out mobile data and did use ICQ (via JIMM and, in my case, NatICQ) and VKontakte (via Opera Mini) from their phones. Either way, messaging services tied to a single device have never caught on very much in the first place around me, and so stuff like WhatsApp is a tough sell. iMessage is an absolute non-starter because the only world in which everyone uses an iPhone is the fantasy one dreamed up by Apple. Today, 99% of my SMS messages are various notifications and login codes.
• cromwellian 5y ago
  My teens use discord and instagram.
• TedShiller 5y ago
  This is nonsense. If you have a group or N text message participants you really don’t want that 1 person to be non-iOS, because it ruins the benefits of being on iMessage for everyone else. You don’t even get delivery confirmation with regular texts.
  • sodality2 5y ago
    This is exactly it - as a teen I am excluded from class group chats regularly as I don't have iMessage. For group chats, it really does annoy everyone because it's hard to get everyone to switch. I've relied on the fact that I help others with work to get people to switch, and I've only been able to do that for my grade's IB class (15 people) onto Instagram and WhatsApp. It sort of helps that the school is not a rich school, that way there's still others with Androids and I'm not the only one.
  • discardedrefuse 5y ago
    RCS has existed for a while but Apple refuses to implement it. Instead of rewarding them for anti-competitive behavior, you should switch to an open platform that everyone can play in.
• njerschow1 5y ago
  I don’t really think the green bubble is despised as much as the blue bubble is loved. I mean every company and their mothers company is trying to get into blue messaging. I mean just see how well sendblue.co is doing...
• dagaci 5y ago
  Using SMS or iMesssage seems to be a very US centric thing to do. At this point i only get these kind of messages from companies. In Europe i'm gussing people quickly migrated away built in messaging system, to basically whatsapp because its availible on all platforms In any case it feels like a very low level thing to use the phones built-in messaging system. If someone sends me a message using imessage i would reply to them on whatsapp and ask if they are Ok ;)
  • AlexanderTheGr8 5y ago
    Yeah same. In Asia, almost every single person uses WhatsApp (or Instagram) for chatting/messaging. I don't know a single person who still uses iMessage or any such thing. It's definitely a very US-centric thing.
  • aulin 5y ago
    Totally US centric. Android has a bigger market share everywhere else, so these supposed iPhone lock-in tactics cannot work. But I believe it's something about sms costs and data plans. Here, Italy, telcos started to offer affordable data plans way before unlimited sms. MMS never took off because the huge costs. I used gtalk on symbian phones. Then Hangouts, a bit of Skype. At some point Whatsapp prevailed but sms were long dead.
  • pxtail 5y ago
    The thing is that US is still the "trend setter" - if using iPhones is fashionable and using other phone is not and puts teenager out of the group then they'll want it at all cost, not to mention young adults and Tinder related stuff some people mentioned in their comments where green bubble apparently means "worse, poor, sketchy". And as adults they will be submerged in ecosystem. If I were google this ~85% US ownership would make me incredibly, insanely scared about my phone related business. And not only phone related as device is gateway for everything. This is basically writing on the wall of what comes in not so distant future - it seems that Apple era is coming - which is sad for multiple reasons: their desire to totally control and lock down software AND hardware, their stance towards web browsers and API's: I'm expecting even more resistance when it comes to implementing browsers capabilities and even more eagerness for gimping existing ones or implementing something "apple way"
• lkxijlewlf 5y ago
  > Android users trigger a just-a-little-less-cool green bubble: ‘Ew, that’s gross.’ Seriously? What are people doing to their children that make them this fucking shallow? Edit: NM, apparently it's all BS anyway.
• flowctrl 5y ago
  How is this newsworthy and why is it on the front page of HN?
• toolz 5y ago
  I gotta say that one of the biggest reasons I'll never buy an iphone is because iMessages are awful. Anytime there is a group chat with an android user there's like a 5% chance your message will be lagged by hours, or sometimes not even be sent at all. I'm seeing in these comments that no one uses texts much, which must explain why this isn't an issue with most people, because I can't imagine why people would think iMessage is good when it doesn't even reliably work.
• sfifs 5y ago
  And the irony is in the Asia, using an iPhone pretty much guarantees that you'll be considered "old" / "unable to handle tech" / "unable to express individuality" :-)
  • feupan 5y ago
    Huh you’re 100% wrong because in the part of Asia I live the opposite is true. What country are you referring to? Maybe that’s true only in South Korea and China where local brands have a healthy share.
• mastazi 5y ago
  I have an iPhone but all of my messages are green: I have disabled the iMessage features because they tend to mess up certain types of links which I have to sometimes exchange with my coworkers[1]. Unlike what the heading suggests, the colour of the bubble doesn't tell you what phone one owns. [1] those are links generated using Firebase Dynamic Links service. When sent over Twilio (vanilla SMS) they work but when forwarded from iPhone to iPhone they will break unless you turn off iMessage.
• Animats 5y ago
  It's an easy way to filter out black people. "Who isn’t a target demographic for the Apple iPhone. The answer to that question would be the lower income African American community. For households that make $149k or less, just 16% of African American households will choose to invest into an iPhone. On the other hand, 42% of those households will choose to own an Android phone."[1] [1] https://brandongaille.com/40-enticing-iphone-target-market-demographics https://brandongaille.com/40-enticing-iphone-target-market-d...
  • Der_Einzige 5y ago
    Not sure why this is being downvoted. Seems many commentators here don't believe that discrimination vs green bubbles is really a thing. I witnessed a LOT of "anti-green bubble discrimination" as an Android user. Furthermore, the people doing this discrimination were exclusively white. Ignoring obvious racist parallels (or downvoting them, as the community has down here) is a sign of the systemic racism that folks here feel in their hearts. Please stop and rather than knee jerk reject a comment because it's too "social justicy for us", critically consider the many factors than encourage shitty behavior like this.
• cplusplusfellow 5y ago
  Most of this thread is about how people dont use iMessage, and summarily most of this thread misses the point. It’s not that people need a blue bubble to indicate that the other party has an iPhone. That would be silly. It’s about the features afforded to you if you use iMessage, which were revolutionary for a phone when it was introduced. remember that this was introduced a couple years after the iPhone - it wasn’t a first gen feature. Knowing if my recipient received the message, that my recipient will receive the message at all, and seeing if they are replying — these are the reasons I’m an iMessage fan. And perhaps most importantly, on my Mac I can respond to and send such messages as well. All of this works works with wifi connection only, no cell signal needed. Making it usable on airplanes etc. None of this works with the dreaded green bubble. None of this. With green bubble, I can’t guarantee my messages were sent in order. If I send a message with a photo it just as likely won’t be received at all of their phone can’t receive it in the proper time or if they are in a bad signal area. Suffering through this is not worth the effort to talk to most people (and call me whatever you want but it’s true and you know it). It’s not about what device my other person has. It’s about being able to communicate with a technology that doesn’t resemble a dial up modem.
  • Wiseacre 5y ago
    I use Android and can send texts or make calls using wifi. I also can see if the recipient received my message and if they are replying.
    • cplusplusfellow 5y ago
      I’m pretty sure this is only working if your other party has an Android - and effectively is doing the same thing, perhaps with RCS, that iMessage is doing. But that’s definitely not the case if your counterpart is using an iPhone, right?
  • Yaina 5y ago
    Well the point is not to advocate for SMS but rather to criticize iMessage for being restricted to the Apple Eco System. Where I live, iMessage is just significantly less relevant. Instead you can safely assume that most people have WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal :)
• duxup 5y ago
  iMessage is a pretty good messaging app, but it is hard not to also think that it’s dominance is partly ensured with Google’s scatterbrained approach / messaging attempts.
• unixhero 5y ago
  This is green bubble blue bubble stuff is so stupid.
• serverlessmom 5y ago
  It's interesting to consider that people are still using SMS at all as most people in my conversation bubbles utilize Facebook Messenger, Slack, Whatsapp or Discord
• howinteresting 5y ago
  Reading comments in this thread is so weird because in my own millennial bubble (west coast US), which includes many people of all socioeconomic classes, including some affluent tech people, 90% of people use Android (usually Pixels) and everyone uses Signal. Having a Signal account is the default expectation among most people I know. The kids use Discord though I've been trying to sell Signal to them too. The end to end encryption is a pretty good selling point—I pulled up the FBI chart the other day showing that iMessage is effectively plaintext for most people.
• browningstreet 5y ago
  This story feels years old.
• Razengan 5y ago
  Just 2 days ago this was posted with a source from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835437 And now it’s reposted on WSJ in 2020? Why is this suddenly appearing everywhere? Looks like someone trying to submarine a narrative about something.
• aksgoel 5y ago
  A messaging service that cannot interoperate across platforms is strictly non-inclusive by design.
  • Toine 5y ago
    So messaging services must be "inclusive" now ? What is that supposed to mean
    • aksgoel 5y ago
      100% sure messaging services should be inclusive. Imagine a world with 100 people. 20 are not able to use messaging service A because they cannot afford the computing platform needed to run A. Let’s assume 50 of the remaining 80 choose to buy the said platform and also prefer using service A. Then the 50 and 20 are disconnected from each other. Won’t this result in increasing the socio economic gaps?
• whatcd 5y ago
  How is this news now? This isn't a new thing
• divbzero 5y ago
  The article tries to portray blue vs. green as Apple’s plan to create an in-group vs. out-group dynamic that leaves non-Apple users feeling left out. This narrative feels incomplete for a few reasons. First, the article itself describes how the original engineers defined different colored bubbles so they themselves could differentiate between iMessage and SMS/MMS during development. This color indication stuck around in production, let customers differentiate just like the engineers did, and eventually grew into an instinctual association between color and messaging protocol. It doesn’t sound like there was intentional UX design to create a positive association with blue bubbles. Second, I would argue that positive association with blue bubbles arises from positive experience with iMessage features, not from some in-group vs. out-group dynamic. Using iMessage means having delivery confirmations, typing indicators, read receipts (if desired), and encryption. The first — having reliable delivery and knowing it — was a killer feature when iMessage was first released. But all of the original features, along with newer ones like tapbacks, are enhancements and not requirements that leave out non-Apple users. Seeing a friend join iMessage feels about the same as seeing a friend join another messaging service. It’s not so much ”wow I can finally message you and you are so cool now” but more ”wow I could always message you before but we can now use these cool features together”. Third, based on the internal emails cited by the article, Apple’s decision to keep iMessage for Apple users was an ongoing discussion years after iMessage was released. In particular, two years after release, Eddie Cue was actually arguing for making iMessage available to Android users. From his standpoint, it was an opportunity to make iMessage the “industry standard” which might or might not be monetized in the future but “it doesn’t cost us a lot to run”. Finally, as mentioned by sibling comments, iMessage is widely used in only a few geographic locales. It’s just one of many Apple apps (Keynote, Numbers, Pages, Notes, Preview, Reminders, Podcasts, Safari) and services (Apple Music, Apple TV, iCloud Drive, iCloud Photos, Private Relay) that can add value for users who buy Apple devices. Some of those apps and services will provide more value than others and iMessage is probably not the top one for most people. One part of the article that did grab my attention was the graph of iPhone market share among Americans age 18 to 24. The climb from 45% in 2017 to 75% in 2021 is striking and impressive. That’s certainly not attributable to iMessage alone and I would enjoy a deeper dive on all the potential causes. (Disclaimer: Current iPhone user, former Android and Blackberry user, and potential Librem or PinePhone user in the future. I use iMessage but it wasn’t a factor I considered when switching to iPhone.)
• helloworld11 5y ago
  Don't use an iPhone. "Problem" solved. Billions of people worldwide pull it off without this faux dread even entering the picture.
• poopooracoocoo 5y ago
  I don't see why this article paints this as specific to teenagers. You can find social networks that use iMessage in various countries among tons of age groups. /nit
• ncmncm 5y ago
  So there is this new thing called Jami that I had never heard of, that seems to be trying to do mostly the same things as Matrix / Element, but without the bridging? But it doesn't need a "home server", so might actually be usable. It didn't work when I tried it ("NAT-PMP: Setup failed"), but it's very new.
• decafninja 5y ago
  I'm a thirtysomething, so not a teenager. But at least amongst my peers in my social circle, I've seen more and more iPhones replacing Androids not because of iMessage, but because of the Apple Watch. Seems like the Apple Watch is the must-have gadget + fashion accessory these days.