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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

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.
  - wffurr 5y ago
    What? All 30% of smartphone users with Android in the US are scammers? I use a Google Voice number as my primary number and have for over ten years.
    - other_herbert 5y ago
      Yeah but if you see blue you have way more confidence that you are talking to a real person…
    - lowkey_ 5y ago
      The statement isn't "most Android users are scammers," but "most scammers use Android." I personally would be less likely to respond from a dating app or marketplace app in particular. Google Voice numbers are less traceable and more easily replaceable, which makes them more viable for scammers.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
        I don't fully understand this line of thinking. The vast, vast majority of Android users do not use Google Voice. They just have a different phone operating system than your phone. I mean, your preferences are your own, and if you prefer to only date iPhone users, that's weird, but you're entitled. I am just struggling to understand the Google Voice connection here.
        lowkey_ 5y ago
        I was addressing the specific commenter who uses Google Voice, but to use the comment prior to that: > 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. I'm not implying the vast majority of "green-bubble numbers" are Google Voice rather than Android phones, but that there is no verification they are not Google Voice numbers. I'm not trying to be elitist at all; there's just a verification that happens with an iPhone texting another iPhone of (1) this is a real phone number, and (2) this isn't a cheap burner flip-phone someone just bought. When interacting with strangers from the internet, that verification is important!
jb1991 5y ago
I don't think the complaint is about the color itself, but rather, what the color means.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  To me, the color means I am not sending/receiving images/video at full quality. In my extended family, we even have both iMessage groups and WhatsApp groups, the iMessage ones specifically when we want to share original quality pics/videos of the kids and family for whoever wants to save them.
  - Double_a_92 5y ago
    On Android you can send images as files in Whatsapp and most other messengers. Does Apple not allow such access to your own photo files?
    - hackmiester 5y ago
      MMS (“green messages”) are mangled by most US carriers. The carrier will often recompress the media. And phones tend to send it at a lower quality to begin with.
    - jacob019 5y ago
      The destination carrier determines the maximum allowable size an MMS attachment can be: Tier 1 Carriers -- Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T -- all MMS content up to about 1 MB. Tier 2 Carriers allow MMS content of 600 KB. Tier 3 Carriers allow MMS content of 300 KB.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I had never thought of doing that. I just tried, and clicking the + symbol in WhatsApp gives me option to send photos/video, documents, contact, and location. If I choose documents, I do not see where I can go to select photos/videos in the iPhone camera roll. I presume it may not be accessible that way. Also, I presume WhatsApp does not want to allow people to send photo/video at full size in their network to reduce bandwidth costs.
zrm 5y ago
There is a reason to not like the green bubbles. They imply that it's SMS, which is unencrypted. That is actually bad. Of course, people can avoid this by not using iMessage in favor of e.g. Signal, which runs on both Android and iOS.
- sharken 5y ago
  So don't post state secrets on SMS. I hardly think that encryption is a major issue, unless you actually have something to hide. But if Signal or a secure, universal SMS protocol could be agreed upon and used by Android and IPhone, that would be okay. I just don't see that happening anytime soon.
  - zrm 5y ago
    > So don't post state secrets on SMS. I hardly think that encryption is a major issue, unless you actually have something to hide. "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden > I just don't see that happening anytime soon. You can install Signal right now for free. You don't require anyone's permission to do this.
    - verdverm 5y ago
      Would be nice if signal did not blast out a message to contacts that I've joined signal
      - zrm 5y ago
        It doesn't do that. There is a setting in Signal to alert you when one of your contacts joins Signal. Only other people who have Signal receive this notification and they can turn it off. They also don't receive the alert because they were in your contacts. They receive the alert because you were in their contacts.
        5y ago
pmarreck 5y ago
I can deal with the green text, what's annoying is when my S.O.'s father, who absolutely insists on using Android when the rest of us all have iPhones, insists on taking a video of my son and texting it to us, and it comes through as (I shit you not) some crazy potato resolution like 192x105 and is 300k despite being a minute long; this absolutely NEVER happens from another iPhone, the downsampling of both photos and video
- asadlionpk 5y ago
  ask them to email it to you?
- simonh 5y ago
  > who absolutely insists on using Android I’m in an all iPhone household, but come on. It’s his phone. No need to get tetchy about it.
  - Double_a_92 5y ago
    Yeah I also wouldn't like to be pressured into buying a >1000$ phone when a 200$ one works just as well... Unless some people insist on using weird, non-crossplatform messengers.
    - hackmiester 5y ago
      Or a $400 one like the iPhone SE?
      - throwawayboise 5y ago
        Still 2x what I have ever spent on a phone. And grand for a phone... that's just stupid.
        hackmiester 5y ago
        Well, seems we agree, it’s a good thing you don’t have to spend a grand to get an iPhone (or a high-end Galaxy…). If you want to try an iPhone, try a refurb, to get you closer to the $200-300 price point.
Terry_Roll 5y ago
Stealth Advertising. 10 years ago it only cost £30k to get a couple of full page right side articles written up to stealth advertise in the Sunday Times & Sunday Observer. Don't know what the current rates are, as journalism is a lot of what you know and what they need to keep below the radar.
- IAmEveryone 5y ago
  Proof it and sell it to the NYT, they’d love to see their competitor go down in flames. Or to Google, because Apple’s reputation would also suffer. That opportunity also exists for any insider with actual knowledge. None of them coming forward is a pretty good indication it’s bullshit. And who, exactly, is the seller here? Is it the publishing company? In that case they would seem to be underreporting their income, which is a crime. Trump could have ended the NYT if he had managed to substantiate the charge. Or is it individual reporters? In that case, the publisher is the largest single victim of this dynamic, since they aren’t getting any cash but carry all the risk. They would have an interest to stop it and obviously a rather good position to do so.
  - zachkatz 5y ago
    My understanding is that it works like this: 1) Apple pays PR company to write a really compelling pitch for an article (maybe even writing basically the whole thing, or at least providing all the quotes and whatnot) 2) Journalist writes the article because hey, it’s a great story (which will get lots of clicks) being handed to them on a silver platter
  - Terry_Roll 5y ago
    Reevaluate your questions and start again.
anonymouse008 5y ago
Communicating with likes, exclamations and loves is most annoying with an Android in the bunch — iMessage cleverly quotes the whole message you liked, which contextually is required, and doubly grinds the conversation to content mulch
- samhw 5y ago
  I'm going to make the slightly conspiracistic speculation that Apple may be well aware of this effect.
  - strombofulous 5y ago
    Probably, at the very least they're confirmed to be aware of the network effects of the ecosystem (imessage is also specifically called out) https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1463558823109660677 https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1463558823109660677
- e_y_ 5y ago
  iOS users see those too in SMS mode? In that case the Android users might actually have the cleaner experience after the latest update: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/google-messages-update-bridges-one-gap-between-blue-and-green-bubble-people/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/google-messages-upda... I get the impression that even without RCS, Apple could have done more to keep the experience usable for the iOS users in SMS fallback mode.
theta_d 5y ago
My daughter and all her friends in middle school would have to disagree with you here.
technothrasher 5y ago
I just recently moved from Android to an iPhone, and pretty much every teenager I've texted since has immediately texted back something along the lines of, "Wow, you got an iPhone. Cool. Welcome." My son had to explain to me how they knew I'd switched, as I had no prior clue about the green/blue message colors. A couple of crusty old middle aged folks like myself have commented as well, but not nearly universally like the teens. So clearly the teens in my social circle at least are paying attention enough to notice and comment.
- wruza 5y ago
  The color is there because a regular SMS may either take a significant amount of money per message or empty your free SMS plan. That depends on a carrier, but e.g. my SMS costs me 0.7¢ or so, iirc. And more if a message spans a very short character limit (160, or ~80 for unicode). That's what some people would like to pay attention to, because when there was no/bad internet (a regular issue back in the day) iMessage switched to SMS seamlessly. Edit: or MMS, if that's enabled
  - spijdar 5y ago
    Is this still a commonplace practice? I remember (in the US) this being the case when I was a young teen, with a call time quota too (accidentally made a $400 USD phone bill once...), but now in my mid 20s, all the phone plans I'm aware of have unlimited local + "long distance" calling and unlimited SMS/MMS. International calls still cost per minute, and IP bandwidth is metered, but I honestly thought metered calls/texts were mostly a thing of the past. Is this a regional thing?
    - easton 5y ago
      In the US unlimited is common, less so internationally. That’s why WhatsApp caught on.
    - skydhash 5y ago
      Here in Haiti, it was between texting 5 messages or call for one minutes (if you have not activated any special plans). So, when WhatsApp came, everyone switched and SMS is now mostly ads from the provider. Most people only do quick calls and would wait when the internet get better to do longer exchanges. Internet infrastructure is still not good.
real-dino 5y ago
I care that it makes it super easy and free to send an image as opposed to MMS and the confusing technology that exists there.
firecall 5y ago
I'm not a teen, but a parent with almost teen kids! And I can confirm, they don't really care :-) Discord is their go-to chat platform on their gaming PCs, iPads and iPhones. TBF One of my kids did ask about the bubble colour thing, but they dont actually care. They love Discord, where as I find it impossible LOL! Which makes perfect sense! Their Discord chats are irreverent and full of memes, their avatars and nicknames are totally random to me! Which is as it should be! iMessage is great and all - but it's very stuffy and old and corporate compared to how I see my kids using Discord!
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Its kind if funny that Apple Facetime and Facebook are the way my child speeks with his grandmother. He loves his grandma, but the tech will forever be old and lame as a result. The same will happen to Discord, too. Personally, I still think ICQ and IRC are the epitome of chat applications.
  - gogopuppygogo 5y ago
    DeadAIM by JimADI was the epitome of chat for me... There was AIM+ as well... It seems like yesterday we NEEDED to hack a chat client to remove ads to make it usable... Kind of how we use adblocking on web browsers to make the web usable...
    - btbuilder 5y ago
      While removing the ad was the first feature I think tabbed messages and message logging were the most popular DeadAIM features
- wincy 5y ago
  I’m 35 and grew up on the Internet chatting on AIM and chat rooms as a teenager, and Discord feels very much like that. I like it a lot and vastly prefer it to text messaging or Facebook messenger.
  - 5y ago
shrimpx 5y ago
It's not the color, but the fact that the person with green bubbles will not see what you see if you use comment reactions or replies -- for example if you put a heart reaction on a comment, the android user will not see a heart on the message, and instead will get a separate text that says "Jimmy loved a message" and they can't tell which message you're talking about. So when you interact with green bubble people in iMessage, you have to modify your behavior and find alternate ways to express those reactions, which is annoying.
- coupdejarnac 5y ago
  Just what we need, a worse snr in group chat.
- commoner 5y ago
  > the android user will not see a heart on the message, and instead will get a separate text that says "Jimmy loved a message" and they can't tell which message you're talking about The substitute message for the reaction (known as a "Tapback" in iMessage) does let the recipient tell which message is being reacted to, though it's not very user-friendly. The format is something like: Liked "[original message text]" Examples: https://www.pcworld.com/article/395045/hey-iphone-users-stop-liking-everything.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/395045/hey-iphone-users-stop... The Google Messages app,[1] which is preloaded on many Android phones, now automatically interprets substitute messages for iMessage Tapbacks and displays them as reactions, the same way iMessage users would see them.[2] Hopefully, this feature makes its way to open source texting apps soon. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.messaging https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... [2] https://9to5google.com/2021/11/19/google-messages-imessage-reaction-emoji/ https://9to5google.com/2021/11/19/google-messages-imessage-r...
  - shrimpx 5y ago
    Thanks, I could have sworn that before I switched back to iOS, I was getting a bunch of "<X> loved a message" from iOS users. Maybe it improved in newer iterations.
throwJan22 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
desireco42 5y ago
I also can confirm Discord thing. I don't think they use messages (sms) to communicate to anyone else but us (their parents).
ComradeMatis 5y ago
Same here, 40 years old (single, no kids) but I do keep clued on what kids are doing these days (via my niece and nephew) - never heard them issue come up either, I hazard to guess the whole status of owning an iPhone and iMessage has more to do with the socio-economic circles one moves in. With that being said, in New Zealand 53.94% use Android and 44.52% use iOS with most kids either using FB Messenger or WhatsApp which is probably why so few care about bubble colours.
- veb 5y ago
  Snapchat is pretty popular amongst kids and early 20s in NZ too.
pkulak 5y ago
As an Android user, yes, people absolutely care. I care, even. If I get added to a group chat (any group chat, since my entire family and social circle uses iPhones), that chat is immediately degraded to potato videos, every like is now a whole string of useless text, etc. I'll never forgive Apple for the crap they put me though _as a customer_. My family has iPads, MacBooks, two iPhones, AirPods, you name it. I'm typing this on a year-old MacBook. But because I run one Linux desktop and don't feel like replacing my old Pixel, I have to deal with their ire. Apple demands absolute loyalty. EDIT: Reading down the page, it seems that other Android users have a different experience, where only they are degraded? That's odd. In my experience, my presence degrades the entire chat and everyone gets swapped to MMS.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  > But because I run one Linux desktop and don't feel like replacing my old Pixel, I have to deal with their ire. SMS/MMS has technical limitations you're running into. It's the lowest common denominator that's going to work between Apple and non-Apple devices. Google and carriers have shit the bed multiple times over the past decade trying to come up with an equivalent to iMessage.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    That's not an excuse. There's no good reason why Apple and Google couldn't collaborate to design an upgraded and open SMS protocol that everyone can plug into. These two effectively control the entire mobile market. They only reason they don't is spelled out exactly in this thread. Apple cares more about pressuring people into their walled garden than actually serving customers well and encouraging a vibrant market of products using cross compatible messaging protocols.
    - philistine 5y ago
      Yeah. In the time it took them to not solve that problem, WhatsApp et al. took over the world of texting from under them.
    - 5y ago
matt-attack 5y ago
The article misses the point. Green is not what makes it bad. Green just becomes associated with all of the bad features. The reason it’s bad is because it lacks all of the Rich capabilities that iMessage offers relative to sms. Also the notion that if I text a friend a blurb of text that it somehow shows up as a line item on my cell phone bill and is logged by the phone company is simply absurd. I too detest green texts. But the color has nothing to do with it.
- antux 5y ago
  Absolutely. Green bubbles are associated with a subpar, lower grade, poorer quality, which creates doubt and caution in the user's mind when they see it. It's like an asterisk next to the bubble with fine print attached to it.
  - yawaramin 5y ago
    Quite a brilliant bit of UX design on Apple's part to put SMS/MMS and iMessages in the same exact app and colour them differently to form an instinctual association in the user's mind that 'green bubble bad, blue bubble good'.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - DonHopkins 5y ago
      That's a Saturated Pattern instead of a Dark Pattern.
    - matt-attack 5y ago
      It’s worth noting that all messaging used to be green back in the old iOS days. When iMessage was added they made them blue so you knew you were using the new snazzy feature. So to those saying apple picked an intentionally derogatory color are simply misinformed.
duxup 5y ago
Not a teen by many decaf, I recently got an iPhone, I received a surprising amount of congratulations after my bubble color changed. From a wide range of people.
Shadonototra 5y ago
this, i don't understand why journalists want to create problems when there are clearly none, do they feel like they became out of touch with the new generation? do they feel like they need to do something to regain the influence they long lost?
causi 5y ago
I care about color customization only because I assign everyone their own color scheme so I won't message the wrong person. One time telling my father to "Have a good day at work sugar pie" was enough.
NobodyNada 5y ago
A few years ago, when I was a teen in high school, I was part of a decently large group that used iMessage to make plans and hang out. We never had any Android users who consistently showed up, so iMessage was an easy default. I recognized that we could potentially be excluding people who didn't have iPhones, so I brought up the topic in the group. Switching to a regular MMS group was a non-starter -- MMS is slow and unreliable, administering large groups is a complete disaster, and many teens can't receive MMS messages at all because they don't have a data plan (whereas iMessage works over a Wi-Fi connection). So I researched alternatives and suggested we switch over to Slack (this was before Discord got big, so Slack seemed like the best option at the time). I got flamed hard for this suggestion. People very much did not want to download a new app, make an account, and learn to use it just for one group chat. iMessage was working great for us, so we decided to stick with it and reconsider if an Android user actually wanted to join the group. (One Android users eventually showed up, but the group went with the path of least resistance and just relayed information to him separately rather than switching chat platforms. Of course, this meant he missed out on all the socialization aspects of this group). Eventually, we hit iMessage's 30-person limit on the number of participants in a group chat, and so we were forced to switch to Slack. This was a complete disaster: Slack was cumbersome, intuitive, and a painful transition, and it completely killed the group chat. It wasn't worth opening up a new, clunky app just to send a meme or joke to some friends, and Slack's extremely unintuitive notification settings [0] meant that nobody saw anyone's messages anyway. It didn't help that this happened in the fall right after some people had moved off to college and a bunch of new freshmen joined the group; and within about two weeks the group ceased to exist. My takeway from this was that the iMessage lockin was definitely real, not because of any social stigma but because iMessage was, at that time and place, far superior to any other well-known product for our use case. Everybody made a Slack account and switched over to the new group, but nobody used it because it was unintuitive and cumbersome. Nowadays it seems Discord is finally succeeding in this space; I'm in college now and among my peers Discord is by far the preferred means of communication in small and large groups alike. Even many of my professors are on Discord and use it as their primary communication channel outside the classroom (I've had several classes where office hours are held in a Discord voice channel). Its interface is cleaner, easier to use, and more performant/responsive than Slack's, its notification settings have sensible defaults but are easy to customize, and its voice channels are an absolutely incredible feature that puts products like Zoom to shame. I know Discord certainly has it's fair share of issues when it comes to freedom, privacy, and interoperability -- but ultimately teenagers don't care about any of that -- as you said, we just want to talk to our friends. It's all about who offers the best features for the least friction -- and I'm not talking gimmicks that nobody uses like cryptocurrency integration or talking animated avatars, but rather functional aspects including the product's reliability, usability, practicality, performance, and of course the network effect. A few years ago the winner was iMessage on nearly all fronts, today it's Discord. [0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6ROe0mU0AEmpzz?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6ROe0mU0AEmpzz?format=jpg&name=...
ryzvonusef 5y ago
I think it matters a lot for a certain social class; below the WSJ tweet of this article, this is what one concerned parent tweeted in reply (I shan't link to the tweet, don't want to hassle the fellow for sharing his opinion) > Yep. My son had a galaxy s20+ at the beginning of his 9th grade year this year. Within 2 weeks he asked if he could get the iPhone since kids were calling him the “green bubble” kid. Once he got his new iPhone 13 Pro Max, they shut up. And quite a few other parents/relatives sharing similar anecdotes. in high-schools where parents of students casually buy them $1000+ phones... it matters a lot, it seems. Peer Pressure is a bitch, even when you have no 'real' problems, kids can make up problems for themselves.
bilboa 5y ago
You're interpreting the headline too literally if you what you took from it was that people care about the actual color of the messages. The point is that they care about preserving the advantages of everyone in a group chat being on iMessage. As soon as even one participant in the conversion is on a non-Apple device, the chat switches to SMS, and you lose some of the fancy iMessage features. There also may be a status component where some kids think iPhones are cooler. Of course this doesn't apply to every group of people. As you say, in some circles other non-Apple chat platforms are more popular so this isn't an issue. But don't make the mistake of thinking that just because iMessage isn't popular in your friend circle that it's not popular in general.
tnel77 5y ago
It’s not the color itself that matters. It’s the consequences of seeing said bubble. It could be purple. The point is that these nice features such as liking a message or FaceTiming the group easily are now gone. I don’t avoid Android users, but I personally try to lump them into separate groups and/or use something like FB Messenger to get back some of those missing features.

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.
- wffurr 5y ago
  What? All 30% of smartphone users with Android in the US are scammers? I use a Google Voice number as my primary number and have for over ten years.
  - other_herbert 5y ago
    Yeah but if you see blue you have way more confidence that you are talking to a real person…
  - lowkey_ 5y ago
    The statement isn't "most Android users are scammers," but "most scammers use Android." I personally would be less likely to respond from a dating app or marketplace app in particular. Google Voice numbers are less traceable and more easily replaceable, which makes them more viable for scammers.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
      I don't fully understand this line of thinking. The vast, vast majority of Android users do not use Google Voice. They just have a different phone operating system than your phone. I mean, your preferences are your own, and if you prefer to only date iPhone users, that's weird, but you're entitled. I am just struggling to understand the Google Voice connection here.
      - lowkey_ 5y ago
        I was addressing the specific commenter who uses Google Voice, but to use the comment prior to that: > 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. I'm not implying the vast majority of "green-bubble numbers" are Google Voice rather than Android phones, but that there is no verification they are not Google Voice numbers. I'm not trying to be elitist at all; there's just a verification that happens with an iPhone texting another iPhone of (1) this is a real phone number, and (2) this isn't a cheap burner flip-phone someone just bought. When interacting with strangers from the internet, that verification is important!

jb1991 5y ago

I don't think the complaint is about the color itself, but rather, what the color means.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
To me, the color means I am not sending/receiving images/video at full quality. In my extended family, we even have both iMessage groups and WhatsApp groups, the iMessage ones specifically when we want to share original quality pics/videos of the kids and family for whoever wants to save them.
- Double_a_92 5y ago
  On Android you can send images as files in Whatsapp and most other messengers. Does Apple not allow such access to your own photo files?
  - hackmiester 5y ago
    MMS (“green messages”) are mangled by most US carriers. The carrier will often recompress the media. And phones tend to send it at a lower quality to begin with.
  - jacob019 5y ago
    The destination carrier determines the maximum allowable size an MMS attachment can be: Tier 1 Carriers -- Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T -- all MMS content up to about 1 MB. Tier 2 Carriers allow MMS content of 600 KB. Tier 3 Carriers allow MMS content of 300 KB.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I had never thought of doing that. I just tried, and clicking the + symbol in WhatsApp gives me option to send photos/video, documents, contact, and location. If I choose documents, I do not see where I can go to select photos/videos in the iPhone camera roll. I presume it may not be accessible that way. Also, I presume WhatsApp does not want to allow people to send photo/video at full size in their network to reduce bandwidth costs.

zrm 5y ago

There is a reason to not like the green bubbles. They imply that it's SMS, which is unencrypted. That is actually bad. Of course, people can avoid this by not using iMessage in favor of e.g. Signal, which runs on both Android and iOS.

sharken 5y ago
So don't post state secrets on SMS. I hardly think that encryption is a major issue, unless you actually have something to hide. But if Signal or a secure, universal SMS protocol could be agreed upon and used by Android and IPhone, that would be okay. I just don't see that happening anytime soon.
- zrm 5y ago
  > So don't post state secrets on SMS. I hardly think that encryption is a major issue, unless you actually have something to hide. "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden > I just don't see that happening anytime soon. You can install Signal right now for free. You don't require anyone's permission to do this.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    Would be nice if signal did not blast out a message to contacts that I've joined signal
    - zrm 5y ago
      It doesn't do that. There is a setting in Signal to alert you when one of your contacts joins Signal. Only other people who have Signal receive this notification and they can turn it off. They also don't receive the alert because they were in your contacts. They receive the alert because you were in their contacts.
      - 5y ago

pmarreck 5y ago

I can deal with the green text, what's annoying is when my S.O.'s father, who absolutely insists on using Android when the rest of us all have iPhones, insists on taking a video of my son and texting it to us, and it comes through as (I shit you not) some crazy potato resolution like 192x105 and is 300k despite being a minute long; this absolutely NEVER happens from another iPhone, the downsampling of both photos and video

asadlionpk 5y ago
ask them to email it to you?
simonh 5y ago
> who absolutely insists on using Android I’m in an all iPhone household, but come on. It’s his phone. No need to get tetchy about it.
- Double_a_92 5y ago
  Yeah I also wouldn't like to be pressured into buying a >1000$ phone when a 200$ one works just as well... Unless some people insist on using weird, non-crossplatform messengers.
  - hackmiester 5y ago
    Or a $400 one like the iPhone SE?
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Still 2x what I have ever spent on a phone. And grand for a phone... that's just stupid.
      - hackmiester 5y ago
        Well, seems we agree, it’s a good thing you don’t have to spend a grand to get an iPhone (or a high-end Galaxy…). If you want to try an iPhone, try a refurb, to get you closer to the $200-300 price point.

Terry_Roll 5y ago

Stealth Advertising. 10 years ago it only cost £30k to get a couple of full page right side articles written up to stealth advertise in the Sunday Times & Sunday Observer. Don't know what the current rates are, as journalism is a lot of what you know and what they need to keep below the radar.

IAmEveryone 5y ago
Proof it and sell it to the NYT, they’d love to see their competitor go down in flames. Or to Google, because Apple’s reputation would also suffer. That opportunity also exists for any insider with actual knowledge. None of them coming forward is a pretty good indication it’s bullshit. And who, exactly, is the seller here? Is it the publishing company? In that case they would seem to be underreporting their income, which is a crime. Trump could have ended the NYT if he had managed to substantiate the charge. Or is it individual reporters? In that case, the publisher is the largest single victim of this dynamic, since they aren’t getting any cash but carry all the risk. They would have an interest to stop it and obviously a rather good position to do so.
- zachkatz 5y ago
  My understanding is that it works like this: 1) Apple pays PR company to write a really compelling pitch for an article (maybe even writing basically the whole thing, or at least providing all the quotes and whatnot) 2) Journalist writes the article because hey, it’s a great story (which will get lots of clicks) being handed to them on a silver platter
- Terry_Roll 5y ago
  Reevaluate your questions and start again.

anonymouse008 5y ago

Communicating with likes, exclamations and loves is most annoying with an Android in the bunch — iMessage cleverly quotes the whole message you liked, which contextually is required, and doubly grinds the conversation to content mulch

samhw 5y ago
I'm going to make the slightly conspiracistic speculation that Apple may be well aware of this effect.
- strombofulous 5y ago
  Probably, at the very least they're confirmed to be aware of the network effects of the ecosystem (imessage is also specifically called out) https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1463558823109660677 https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1463558823109660677
e_y_ 5y ago
iOS users see those too in SMS mode? In that case the Android users might actually have the cleaner experience after the latest update: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/google-messages-update-bridges-one-gap-between-blue-and-green-bubble-people/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/google-messages-upda... I get the impression that even without RCS, Apple could have done more to keep the experience usable for the iOS users in SMS fallback mode.

theta_d 5y ago

My daughter and all her friends in middle school would have to disagree with you here.

technothrasher 5y ago

I just recently moved from Android to an iPhone, and pretty much every teenager I've texted since has immediately texted back something along the lines of, "Wow, you got an iPhone. Cool. Welcome." My son had to explain to me how they knew I'd switched, as I had no prior clue about the green/blue message colors. A couple of crusty old middle aged folks like myself have commented as well, but not nearly universally like the teens. So clearly the teens in my social circle at least are paying attention enough to notice and comment.

wruza 5y ago
The color is there because a regular SMS may either take a significant amount of money per message or empty your free SMS plan. That depends on a carrier, but e.g. my SMS costs me 0.7¢ or so, iirc. And more if a message spans a very short character limit (160, or ~80 for unicode). That's what some people would like to pay attention to, because when there was no/bad internet (a regular issue back in the day) iMessage switched to SMS seamlessly. Edit: or MMS, if that's enabled
- spijdar 5y ago
  Is this still a commonplace practice? I remember (in the US) this being the case when I was a young teen, with a call time quota too (accidentally made a $400 USD phone bill once...), but now in my mid 20s, all the phone plans I'm aware of have unlimited local + "long distance" calling and unlimited SMS/MMS. International calls still cost per minute, and IP bandwidth is metered, but I honestly thought metered calls/texts were mostly a thing of the past. Is this a regional thing?
  - easton 5y ago
    In the US unlimited is common, less so internationally. That’s why WhatsApp caught on.
  - skydhash 5y ago
    Here in Haiti, it was between texting 5 messages or call for one minutes (if you have not activated any special plans). So, when WhatsApp came, everyone switched and SMS is now mostly ads from the provider. Most people only do quick calls and would wait when the internet get better to do longer exchanges. Internet infrastructure is still not good.

real-dino 5y ago

I care that it makes it super easy and free to send an image as opposed to MMS and the confusing technology that exists there.

firecall 5y ago

I'm not a teen, but a parent with almost teen kids! And I can confirm, they don't really care :-) Discord is their go-to chat platform on their gaming PCs, iPads and iPhones. TBF One of my kids did ask about the bubble colour thing, but they dont actually care. They love Discord, where as I find it impossible LOL! Which makes perfect sense! Their Discord chats are irreverent and full of memes, their avatars and nicknames are totally random to me! Which is as it should be! iMessage is great and all - but it's very stuffy and old and corporate compared to how I see my kids using Discord!

fartcannon 5y ago
Its kind if funny that Apple Facetime and Facebook are the way my child speeks with his grandmother. He loves his grandma, but the tech will forever be old and lame as a result. The same will happen to Discord, too. Personally, I still think ICQ and IRC are the epitome of chat applications.
- gogopuppygogo 5y ago
  DeadAIM by JimADI was the epitome of chat for me... There was AIM+ as well... It seems like yesterday we NEEDED to hack a chat client to remove ads to make it usable... Kind of how we use adblocking on web browsers to make the web usable...
  - btbuilder 5y ago
    While removing the ad was the first feature I think tabbed messages and message logging were the most popular DeadAIM features
wincy 5y ago
I’m 35 and grew up on the Internet chatting on AIM and chat rooms as a teenager, and Discord feels very much like that. I like it a lot and vastly prefer it to text messaging or Facebook messenger.
- 5y ago

shrimpx 5y ago

It's not the color, but the fact that the person with green bubbles will not see what you see if you use comment reactions or replies -- for example if you put a heart reaction on a comment, the android user will not see a heart on the message, and instead will get a separate text that says "Jimmy loved a message" and they can't tell which message you're talking about. So when you interact with green bubble people in iMessage, you have to modify your behavior and find alternate ways to express those reactions, which is annoying.

coupdejarnac 5y ago
Just what we need, a worse snr in group chat.
commoner 5y ago
> the android user will not see a heart on the message, and instead will get a separate text that says "Jimmy loved a message" and they can't tell which message you're talking about The substitute message for the reaction (known as a "Tapback" in iMessage) does let the recipient tell which message is being reacted to, though it's not very user-friendly. The format is something like: Liked "[original message text]" Examples: https://www.pcworld.com/article/395045/hey-iphone-users-stop-liking-everything.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/395045/hey-iphone-users-stop... The Google Messages app,[1] which is preloaded on many Android phones, now automatically interprets substitute messages for iMessage Tapbacks and displays them as reactions, the same way iMessage users would see them.[2] Hopefully, this feature makes its way to open source texting apps soon. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.messaging https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... [2] https://9to5google.com/2021/11/19/google-messages-imessage-reaction-emoji/ https://9to5google.com/2021/11/19/google-messages-imessage-r...
- shrimpx 5y ago
  Thanks, I could have sworn that before I switched back to iOS, I was getting a bunch of "<X> loved a message" from iOS users. Maybe it improved in newer iterations.

throwJan22 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

desireco42 5y ago

I also can confirm Discord thing. I don't think they use messages (sms) to communicate to anyone else but us (their parents).

ComradeMatis 5y ago

Same here, 40 years old (single, no kids) but I do keep clued on what kids are doing these days (via my niece and nephew) - never heard them issue come up either, I hazard to guess the whole status of owning an iPhone and iMessage has more to do with the socio-economic circles one moves in. With that being said, in New Zealand 53.94% use Android and 44.52% use iOS with most kids either using FB Messenger or WhatsApp which is probably why so few care about bubble colours.

veb 5y ago
Snapchat is pretty popular amongst kids and early 20s in NZ too.

pkulak 5y ago

As an Android user, yes, people absolutely care. I care, even. If I get added to a group chat (any group chat, since my entire family and social circle uses iPhones), that chat is immediately degraded to potato videos, every like is now a whole string of useless text, etc. I'll never forgive Apple for the crap they put me though _as a customer_. My family has iPads, MacBooks, two iPhones, AirPods, you name it. I'm typing this on a year-old MacBook. But because I run one Linux desktop and don't feel like replacing my old Pixel, I have to deal with their ire. Apple demands absolute loyalty. EDIT: Reading down the page, it seems that other Android users have a different experience, where only they are degraded? That's odd. In my experience, my presence degrades the entire chat and everyone gets swapped to MMS.

giantrobot 5y ago
> But because I run one Linux desktop and don't feel like replacing my old Pixel, I have to deal with their ire. SMS/MMS has technical limitations you're running into. It's the lowest common denominator that's going to work between Apple and non-Apple devices. Google and carriers have shit the bed multiple times over the past decade trying to come up with an equivalent to iMessage.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  That's not an excuse. There's no good reason why Apple and Google couldn't collaborate to design an upgraded and open SMS protocol that everyone can plug into. These two effectively control the entire mobile market. They only reason they don't is spelled out exactly in this thread. Apple cares more about pressuring people into their walled garden than actually serving customers well and encouraging a vibrant market of products using cross compatible messaging protocols.
  - philistine 5y ago
    Yeah. In the time it took them to not solve that problem, WhatsApp et al. took over the world of texting from under them.
  - 5y ago

matt-attack 5y ago

The article misses the point. Green is not what makes it bad. Green just becomes associated with all of the bad features. The reason it’s bad is because it lacks all of the Rich capabilities that iMessage offers relative to sms. Also the notion that if I text a friend a blurb of text that it somehow shows up as a line item on my cell phone bill and is logged by the phone company is simply absurd. I too detest green texts. But the color has nothing to do with it.

antux 5y ago
Absolutely. Green bubbles are associated with a subpar, lower grade, poorer quality, which creates doubt and caution in the user's mind when they see it. It's like an asterisk next to the bubble with fine print attached to it.
- yawaramin 5y ago
  Quite a brilliant bit of UX design on Apple's part to put SMS/MMS and iMessages in the same exact app and colour them differently to form an instinctual association in the user's mind that 'green bubble bad, blue bubble good'.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    That's a Saturated Pattern instead of a Dark Pattern.
  - matt-attack 5y ago
    It’s worth noting that all messaging used to be green back in the old iOS days. When iMessage was added they made them blue so you knew you were using the new snazzy feature. So to those saying apple picked an intentionally derogatory color are simply misinformed.

duxup 5y ago

Not a teen by many decaf, I recently got an iPhone, I received a surprising amount of congratulations after my bubble color changed. From a wide range of people.

Shadonototra 5y ago

this, i don't understand why journalists want to create problems when there are clearly none, do they feel like they became out of touch with the new generation? do they feel like they need to do something to regain the influence they long lost?

causi 5y ago

I care about color customization only because I assign everyone their own color scheme so I won't message the wrong person. One time telling my father to "Have a good day at work sugar pie" was enough.

NobodyNada 5y ago

A few years ago, when I was a teen in high school, I was part of a decently large group that used iMessage to make plans and hang out. We never had any Android users who consistently showed up, so iMessage was an easy default. I recognized that we could potentially be excluding people who didn't have iPhones, so I brought up the topic in the group. Switching to a regular MMS group was a non-starter -- MMS is slow and unreliable, administering large groups is a complete disaster, and many teens can't receive MMS messages at all because they don't have a data plan (whereas iMessage works over a Wi-Fi connection). So I researched alternatives and suggested we switch over to Slack (this was before Discord got big, so Slack seemed like the best option at the time). I got flamed hard for this suggestion. People very much did not want to download a new app, make an account, and learn to use it just for one group chat. iMessage was working great for us, so we decided to stick with it and reconsider if an Android user actually wanted to join the group. (One Android users eventually showed up, but the group went with the path of least resistance and just relayed information to him separately rather than switching chat platforms. Of course, this meant he missed out on all the socialization aspects of this group). Eventually, we hit iMessage's 30-person limit on the number of participants in a group chat, and so we were forced to switch to Slack. This was a complete disaster: Slack was cumbersome, intuitive, and a painful transition, and it completely killed the group chat. It wasn't worth opening up a new, clunky app just to send a meme or joke to some friends, and Slack's extremely unintuitive notification settings [0] meant that nobody saw anyone's messages anyway. It didn't help that this happened in the fall right after some people had moved off to college and a bunch of new freshmen joined the group; and within about two weeks the group ceased to exist. My takeway from this was that the iMessage lockin was definitely real, not because of any social stigma but because iMessage was, at that time and place, far superior to any other well-known product for our use case. Everybody made a Slack account and switched over to the new group, but nobody used it because it was unintuitive and cumbersome. Nowadays it seems Discord is finally succeeding in this space; I'm in college now and among my peers Discord is by far the preferred means of communication in small and large groups alike. Even many of my professors are on Discord and use it as their primary communication channel outside the classroom (I've had several classes where office hours are held in a Discord voice channel). Its interface is cleaner, easier to use, and more performant/responsive than Slack's, its notification settings have sensible defaults but are easy to customize, and its voice channels are an absolutely incredible feature that puts products like Zoom to shame. I know Discord certainly has it's fair share of issues when it comes to freedom, privacy, and interoperability -- but ultimately teenagers don't care about any of that -- as you said, we just want to talk to our friends. It's all about who offers the best features for the least friction -- and I'm not talking gimmicks that nobody uses like cryptocurrency integration or talking animated avatars, but rather functional aspects including the product's reliability, usability, practicality, performance, and of course the network effect. A few years ago the winner was iMessage on nearly all fronts, today it's Discord. [0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6ROe0mU0AEmpzz?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6ROe0mU0AEmpzz?format=jpg&name=...

ryzvonusef 5y ago

I think it matters a lot for a certain social class; below the WSJ tweet of this article, this is what one concerned parent tweeted in reply (I shan't link to the tweet, don't want to hassle the fellow for sharing his opinion) > Yep. My son had a galaxy s20+ at the beginning of his 9th grade year this year. Within 2 weeks he asked if he could get the iPhone since kids were calling him the “green bubble” kid. Once he got his new iPhone 13 Pro Max, they shut up. And quite a few other parents/relatives sharing similar anecdotes. in high-schools where parents of students casually buy them $1000+ phones... it matters a lot, it seems. Peer Pressure is a bitch, even when you have no 'real' problems, kids can make up problems for themselves.

bilboa 5y ago

You're interpreting the headline too literally if you what you took from it was that people care about the actual color of the messages. The point is that they care about preserving the advantages of everyone in a group chat being on iMessage. As soon as even one participant in the conversion is on a non-Apple device, the chat switches to SMS, and you lose some of the fancy iMessage features. There also may be a status component where some kids think iPhones are cooler. Of course this doesn't apply to every group of people. As you say, in some circles other non-Apple chat platforms are more popular so this isn't an issue. But don't make the mistake of thinking that just because iMessage isn't popular in your friend circle that it's not popular in general.

tnel77 5y ago

It’s not the color itself that matters. It’s the consequences of seeing said bubble. It could be purple. The point is that these nice features such as liking a message or FaceTiming the group easily are now gone. I don’t avoid Android users, but I personally try to lump them into separate groups and/or use something like FB Messenger to get back some of those missing features.