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This is a complete non-issue. I have no idea why people are complaining about this, except as another way in which Android users are trying to force their ecos

This is a complete non-issue. I have no idea why people are complaining about this, except as another way in which Android users are trying to force their ecosystem choices on everyone else. The majority of people globally don't even use built-in messengers, they use WhatsApp or a similar application, most of which uses similar stylistic design choices as Apple uses for SMS, so it's hardly an issue. I'm well aware that high schoolers get bullied for being poor and not being able to afford an iPhone. High schoolers were getting bullied for being poor and not being able to afford fancy clothes before cell phones were even a thing, and prior to smartphones were bullied for being poor and not being able to afford pagers or a cell phone (or a car, or ... or ...). High schoolers are assholes and will find some excuse to torment each other regardless of what aesthetic and design choices somebody in Apple's UX team makes for their built-in messaging app. This is a massive nothingburger and I honestly have no idea why the media gives this any credence other than the shift of the media generally towards being anti-tech.

collsni 4y ago
lol
refulgentis 4y ago
I really appreciated this comment. It subverted my expectations by inverting the situation: its not Apple's phone being locked to either Apple's messaging service or the texting standard from 1997, its people forcing Apple to implement a more modern standard.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
The second the guy in the video complained about Android users getting blamed as if it were an actual problem I questioned the age demographic they were targeting.
thomasahle 4y ago
> regardless of what aesthetic and design choices somebody in Apple's UX team makes for their built-in messaging app It's not about aesthetic design, and it's not just about high schoolers. Lots of grown up Apple users don't like adding Android users to their group chats, because falling back to MMS degrades the messaging experience for everyone. Things like images sending in low enough resolution to be useless. As a European moving to the US, I can attest how hard it is to get Apple users to switch their group chats to WhatsApp/Facebook/Signal. I don't think I'm in a single such group that isn't majority non-Americans. You can say Apple doesn't need to care about Android users being socially isolated. But some Apple users might like an easier way to include their non-Apple friends.
- Karupan 4y ago
  > As a European moving to the US, I can attest how hard it is to get Apple users to switch their group chats to WhatsApp/Facebook/Signal I see this as more of a cultural problem. When I travel back to India, I don't complain that I can't use iMessage since iPhones are a rarity. Instead, I install whatever app I need to be involved in a group. And I weigh the cost against the value I get - if it's too much of a change for too little gain, I'd gladly sit it out. I'm not saying the solution is to force users to buy iPhones. But the core problem isn't purely technical either.
  - thomasahle 4y ago
    > Instead, I install whatever app I need to be involved in a group. While it wouldn't be their preference, I'm sure most Android users wouldn't mind installing iMessage to better talk with their iPhone friends. That would require iMessage being an open standard, or Apple releasing a client for Android. Some commenters mention that the Digital Markets Act might force Apple to do this. I guess we'll have to wait and see. Meanwhile, and assuming they don't want to open iMessage, it would be nice of them to just support a better fallback option.
maxsilver 4y ago
> This is a complete non-issue. No it's not. iPhones intentionally don't support modern cellular messaging. There's nothing wrong with insisting they support LTE spec (RCS), like every modern smartphone does. > The majority of people globally don't even use built-in messengers, they use WhatsApp or a similar application, Completely unrelated. This discussion has nothing to do with iMessage / WhatsApp / etc. The problem is that Apple forces your SMS texts into effectively-2G-mode, Apple lies about the quality of the messaging you're getting from your native cellular service. Imagine if they did the same thing to, say, your telephone calls from your phone number by running it through a ton of fake compression, and then said, "well, you could iMessage or Skype or Zoom instead if you don't want us fucking up your phone call audio".
- tristor 4y ago
  This is an incredibly disingenuous way to describe this. They support SMS as a fallback for iMessage. SMS is a ubiquitous and broadly supported standard. RCS is a boondoggle that nobody supported until recently when Google decided to add support for it to Android in yet another attempt at building their own messaging platform. There is no rational reason to take offense that iPhones don't support RCS. I re-iterate, this a complete non-issue. The way you are phrasing it is incredibly biased.
  - sour-taste 4y ago
    > I re-iterate, this a complete non-issue. The way you are phrasing it is incredibly biased. Again, no it's not. My family have iPhones, I have Android. Apples garbage SMS?MMS group messaging made it so that I missed a huge number of messages from them, photos were poor quality, videos were unwatchable. We switched to Signal a year ago and have been happy with it, but this impacted us for about 2 years. And I'm a tech person! The average user is going to have no idea what is going on. This affects a large number of people and saying it's a non-issue is dismissive.
    - tristor 4y ago
      > Apples garbage SMS?MMS group messaging My wife has Android, I have iPhone, I know exactly what you're referring to. But this isn't "Apple's garbage SMS/MMS group messaging", this is just SMS/MMS group messaging, period. SMS/MMS is ancient, and it sucks, it was a hack when it was originally implemented and never really got better. Nobody here is claiming that SMS is good, we're merely pointing out that RCS is not the right answer and that SMS is the most viable /fallback/. Nobody should be using SMS as their primary messaging platform in 2022. > We switched to Signal a year ago and have been happy with it Good, I'm glad to hear this. More people should use Signal. I even managed to get my 72 year old mother using it without any serious issues. > This affects a large number of people and saying it's a non-issue is dismissive. It only affects people who refuse to use any one of the myriad other carrier-agnostic messaging apps. I travel extensively around the world, nearly everyone outside the US uses WhatsApp, and nearly everyone inside the US I interact with has at minimum FB Messenger or Discord. Obviously, all of these are operated by other for-profit tech entities and getting more people on Signal would be ideal, but it is what it is. The right answer here is creating a new carrier-agnostic messaging standard with interoperability and privacy in mind, and then Google, various Android integrators, Apple, Microsoft, et al can build their own clients. RCS is not carrier agnostic, does not support E2E, and is really horribly designed protocol. Worse, because the carriers don't want to deal with it, de facto almost all RCS infrastructure globally is run by Google.

collsni 4y ago

lol

refulgentis 4y ago

I really appreciated this comment. It subverted my expectations by inverting the situation: its not Apple's phone being locked to either Apple's messaging service or the texting standard from 1997, its people forcing Apple to implement a more modern standard.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

The second the guy in the video complained about Android users getting blamed as if it were an actual problem I questioned the age demographic they were targeting.

thomasahle 4y ago

> regardless of what aesthetic and design choices somebody in Apple's UX team makes for their built-in messaging app It's not about aesthetic design, and it's not just about high schoolers. Lots of grown up Apple users don't like adding Android users to their group chats, because falling back to MMS degrades the messaging experience for everyone. Things like images sending in low enough resolution to be useless. As a European moving to the US, I can attest how hard it is to get Apple users to switch their group chats to WhatsApp/Facebook/Signal. I don't think I'm in a single such group that isn't majority non-Americans. You can say Apple doesn't need to care about Android users being socially isolated. But some Apple users might like an easier way to include their non-Apple friends.

Karupan 4y ago
> As a European moving to the US, I can attest how hard it is to get Apple users to switch their group chats to WhatsApp/Facebook/Signal I see this as more of a cultural problem. When I travel back to India, I don't complain that I can't use iMessage since iPhones are a rarity. Instead, I install whatever app I need to be involved in a group. And I weigh the cost against the value I get - if it's too much of a change for too little gain, I'd gladly sit it out. I'm not saying the solution is to force users to buy iPhones. But the core problem isn't purely technical either.
- thomasahle 4y ago
  > Instead, I install whatever app I need to be involved in a group. While it wouldn't be their preference, I'm sure most Android users wouldn't mind installing iMessage to better talk with their iPhone friends. That would require iMessage being an open standard, or Apple releasing a client for Android. Some commenters mention that the Digital Markets Act might force Apple to do this. I guess we'll have to wait and see. Meanwhile, and assuming they don't want to open iMessage, it would be nice of them to just support a better fallback option.

maxsilver 4y ago

> This is a complete non-issue. No it's not. iPhones intentionally don't support modern cellular messaging. There's nothing wrong with insisting they support LTE spec (RCS), like every modern smartphone does. > The majority of people globally don't even use built-in messengers, they use WhatsApp or a similar application, Completely unrelated. This discussion has nothing to do with iMessage / WhatsApp / etc. The problem is that Apple forces your SMS texts into effectively-2G-mode, Apple lies about the quality of the messaging you're getting from your native cellular service. Imagine if they did the same thing to, say, your telephone calls from your phone number by running it through a ton of fake compression, and then said, "well, you could iMessage or Skype or Zoom instead if you don't want us fucking up your phone call audio".

tristor 4y ago
This is an incredibly disingenuous way to describe this. They support SMS as a fallback for iMessage. SMS is a ubiquitous and broadly supported standard. RCS is a boondoggle that nobody supported until recently when Google decided to add support for it to Android in yet another attempt at building their own messaging platform. There is no rational reason to take offense that iPhones don't support RCS. I re-iterate, this a complete non-issue. The way you are phrasing it is incredibly biased.
- sour-taste 4y ago
  > I re-iterate, this a complete non-issue. The way you are phrasing it is incredibly biased. Again, no it's not. My family have iPhones, I have Android. Apples garbage SMS?MMS group messaging made it so that I missed a huge number of messages from them, photos were poor quality, videos were unwatchable. We switched to Signal a year ago and have been happy with it, but this impacted us for about 2 years. And I'm a tech person! The average user is going to have no idea what is going on. This affects a large number of people and saying it's a non-issue is dismissive.
  - tristor 4y ago
    > Apples garbage SMS?MMS group messaging My wife has Android, I have iPhone, I know exactly what you're referring to. But this isn't "Apple's garbage SMS/MMS group messaging", this is just SMS/MMS group messaging, period. SMS/MMS is ancient, and it sucks, it was a hack when it was originally implemented and never really got better. Nobody here is claiming that SMS is good, we're merely pointing out that RCS is not the right answer and that SMS is the most viable /fallback/. Nobody should be using SMS as their primary messaging platform in 2022. > We switched to Signal a year ago and have been happy with it Good, I'm glad to hear this. More people should use Signal. I even managed to get my 72 year old mother using it without any serious issues. > This affects a large number of people and saying it's a non-issue is dismissive. It only affects people who refuse to use any one of the myriad other carrier-agnostic messaging apps. I travel extensively around the world, nearly everyone outside the US uses WhatsApp, and nearly everyone inside the US I interact with has at minimum FB Messenger or Discord. Obviously, all of these are operated by other for-profit tech entities and getting more people on Signal would be ideal, but it is what it is. The right answer here is creating a new carrier-agnostic messaging standard with interoperability and privacy in mind, and then Google, various Android integrators, Apple, Microsoft, et al can build their own clients. RCS is not carrier agnostic, does not support E2E, and is really horribly designed protocol. Worse, because the carriers don't want to deal with it, de facto almost all RCS infrastructure globally is run by Google.