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> Messages from Android phones show up as green bubbles in iMessage chats, and chaos ensues. This is not true -- messages from Android users show up as grey, t
by andrewla 2y ago
> Messages from Android phones show up as green bubbles in iMessage chats, and chaos ensues.
This is not true -- messages from Android users show up as grey, the same as messages from iMessage. Messages from you *TO* Android users show up as green. I don't know why people keep getting this wrong.
That's why it's always a pain to figure out why a group chat is showing up green all of a sudden; you can't tell who brought the Android to the party.
- JohnFen 2y ago> it's always a pain to figure out why a group chat is showing up green all of a sudden; you can't tell who brought the Android to the party. Genuinely curious -- why do you feel it's necessary to figure that out at all?
- buildbot 2y agoIt really degrades the experience and often does really wonky things, like delivery 3/4 the messages to 3/4 of the people. Happens nearly every time in a decently sized group text for my friend group. I don’t know if that’s Google’s, Apple’s, RCS’s, or SMS’s fault.
- lxgr 2y agoIs it not an option to use one of the many free OTT messengers such as Signal or WhatsApp that offer the same user experience as iMessage, but work for both major mobile OSes, and as an additional bonus don't depend on 30 year old brittle protocols (looking at MMS here) and don't hand over your entire conversation history to your carrier?
- dingnuts 2y agoI spent my entire youth convincing people to move to platforms like signal, and including signal, that would then be used by said people only to talk to me, until they had some UX problem and I became tech support for them after many years of this I gave up and now I use the default: SMS life is too short for this
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lxgr 2y agoI don't doubt that, and have heard it several times from other people as well. Sometimes I think that keeping SMS and especially MMS ridiculously expensive was the greatest unintentional gift European mobile network operators could have ever given their customers: People now just accept OTT messaging as a fact of life, and enough people will be able to provide that type of tech support, just like they'd fix a parent's or friend's internet connection in case of problems.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hot_gril 2y agoYeah, whoever pushes this is way more annoying than whoever makes the bubbles green. Just one group chat I'm in uses Signal for some reason. People often miss messages cause it silently deprecates old versions. And nobody has verified each others' secret numbers anyway, so after all that work someone did to secure our bar plans, we might be mitm'd anyway. E2EE apps have inherent UX problems. It's possible to do multi-device messaging with synchronized message history and a way to get in if you lose your codes, but it requires trusting the service and/or your cell carrier in some capacity. Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support.
- lxgr 2y ago> Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support. True, but then again, neither SMS nor RCS have server-side message history either. WhatsApp lets you backup your chat history to iCloud or Google Drive, optionally end-to-end encrypted using a passphrase.
- hot_gril 2y agoWhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023. I'd have to see exactly how it works now, cause it raises more questions. If you can rely on users remembering passphrases (no recovery mechanism), it makes chat history easier, even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages. iCloud/GDrive storage is another moving part but also nice in case you want to download/copy it. Would be neat also if contacts could be stored that way, cause I ain't sending them to WhatsApp. The only major app I've seen handle everything 100% reliably is FB Messenger, since the start, which was easy because there was no e2ee. Just a server-side master with simple web and mobile clients using it. SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how.
- wombat-man 2y agoI blame apple for this. Basically forces me to use WhatsApp or something. Otherwise I'll not receive some messages or some people won't get mine. It's pretty confusing when trying to nail down plans.
- seba_dos1 2y agoI suspect that something's slightly off with Apple's SMS implementation. People often complain about lost CSM chunks that were sent to them from iOS devices. Of course lost messages can happen anywhere, SMS is inherently not reliable, but the frequency with which they point to the other device being an iPhone raises my eyebrows.
- vundercind 2y agoOne-on-one SMS was mostly fine, but group SMS was a constantly-buggy mess back when I was on Android, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if SMS experience has more to do with carriers and with the details of the network topology and composition between correspondents, than with phone vendor.
- seba_dos1 2y agoThere's no such thing as group SMS. Your phone either sends multiple SMS messages, or uses something else than SMS (usually MMS). I'm talking about SMS specifically, as CSM chunks aren't relevant to anything else. My assumption is that iOS somehow manages to lose some SMS messages when sent in rapid succession more often than it would happen for usual reasons.
- jonny_eh 2y ago> I don’t know if that’s Google’s, Apple’s, RCS’s, or SMS’s fault. It's Apple's fault for "extending" a standard messaging standard with a non-standard protocol.
- jandrewrogers 2y agoThat is mostly SMS fault. It doesn't guarantee reliable delivery either in theory or practice, and the carrier will happily drop messages if a resource limit is exceeded. Essentially all of the IP-based chat protocols are reliable, whether that is WhatsApp or iMessage.
- lxgr 2y agoIt absolutely guarantees reliability on the protocol level. If mobile network operators are load-shedding, that's on them. I've never experienced this in decades of using GSM, and it's only recently become a thing (mostly for 2FA SMS since I stopped using it for P2P communication).
- aspenmayer 2y ago> Message delivery is "best effort", so there are no guarantees that a message will actually be delivered to its recipient, but delay or complete loss of a message is uncommon, typically affecting less than 5 percent of messages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS Oliver, Earl, Design and Implementation of a Short Message Service Data Channel for Mobile Systems https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/tr/2007/CS-2007-42.pdf https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/research/tr/2007/CS-2007-42.pdf
- hot_gril 2y agoThe part of my family that all uses Samsung phones still can't rely on group chats between themselves, so I think it's them.
- KoolKat23 2y agoThat's SMS's fault and partly the reason the rest of the world moved on, it's old and janky and you never know when it works, just use Whatsapp like everyone else in most of the world.
- andrewla 2y agoI mean, obviously so that we can create a new chat without them and ostracize them from all future social interactions. Duh.
- nlawalker 2y agoSo you can remove them from the group you send photos and videos to.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoI know when my parents(on iphone) share an image with me(on android), the image is about 64x64 pixels. Whereas they send the same image to my brother on an iPhone and it is multiple megapixels...does the same kind of downgrading happen for everyone if a single person on a group chat is using android? That could be a reason to find out who it is.
- lxgr 2y agoIt depends on the combination of the sender's and the receipient's carrier, specifically on what their MMS server allows. MMS is a hot mess of a protocol stack straight from the early 2000s that is only still meaningfully used in the US, due to the unique iMessage situation there.
- Amorymeltzer 2y agoThe big one for me is image quality and metadata. Images shared in "mixed company" are lower quality and have the metadata stripped; it's not dissimilar to being sent a screenshot of a picture instead of the picture itself. It's not a big deal for "Look at how big the kids have gotten!" but if I go on a hike or beach trip with friends or family, and there's something they took that I care about, I have to say "Great thanks for sending but can you upload it somewhere else," usually Google Photos, and go through that whole dance.
- hot_gril 2y agoBecause often times the Android phone won't even do group SMS properly, and it screws everything up. You start getting messages that some other group members didn't. Maybe this is why a lot of Android users use WhatsApp, and that's what I do with my in-laws.
- lxgr 2y ago> That's why it's always a pain to figure out why a group chat is showing up green all of a sudden; you can't tell who brought the Android to the party. Or as the rest of the world would describe it: That's why it's always a pain including Americans in a group chat – they usually don't have WhatsApp :)
- Longhanks 2y agoCross-messenger groups are not a thing between WhatsApp and any other messaging app, your snark isn't helping any point. "The rest of the world" is also not the whole rest, there‚a China, Japan, Korea, with WeChat, KakaoTalk, ...
- lovethevoid 2y agoWhatsApp has been pushed by EU to have third party interoperability, so your core point won’t hold up much longer.
- lxgr 2y agoI'm not saying the rest-of-world status quo is ideal or even desirable; I'd also much prefer an open and federated network, or at least interoperability. But what I wanted to highlight is that SMS/MMS and generally carrier-based messaging is just as much of a weird communication island at this point as all of these OTT messengers are, from a non-US point of view. RCS would just be a continuation of that, so I'm not sure if it's worth cheering on Apple for taking this path, further cementing Google's hold on Android messaging in the US – they run almost all the infrastructure and get all the message content, after all!
- Ferret7446 2y agoDevil's advocate: that was an intentional design choice to incite even more user hate against Android users and build Apple cult mentality. Users will subconsciously assign the blame for their frustration of figuring out who the Android user is, to the Android user, rather than to Apple who is the real culprit.