[HN Gopher] Why Apple's iMessage is winning: teens dread the gre...
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Why Apple's iMessage is winning: teens dread the green text bubble
Author : cwwc
Score : 84 points
Date : 2022-01-08 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| ksec wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What is this quote from? Someone at Google said this? I don't
| see it in the archived link.
| re wrote:
| 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
|
| See also
| https://twitter.com/Android/status/1479875457667448837
| aliceryhl wrote:
| Where I come from everyone uses Facebook Messenger, so we don't
| have this problem.
| kome wrote:
| why americans don't just use telegram or whatsapp like in the
| rest of the world?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| frogger8 wrote:
| quickthrowman wrote:
| You can choose the color of your message bubble, but you can't
| choose the color of your skin.
| tuankiet65 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| As opposed to the non-monopolistic practices of Facebook and
| their messengers?
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| As much as I dislike Meta, at least they don't tie you to one
| specific brand of phone.
| [deleted]
| walrus01 wrote:
| as opposed to something like a Signal group chat
| ummonk wrote:
| Signal's leadership is well known for being hostile towards
| forks and alternative clients. It seeks to be a monopoly
| too. I think that's the right call, as it maximizes user-
| friendliness, but if your overriding concern is monopolies
| then Signal is not the messaging system you should be
| advocating.
| gnuj3 wrote:
| The only thing that stops you from having Signal group chat
| is you and people you talk to. When I deleted WhatsApp few
| years ago, I dropped a message to all my contacts informing
| them I'm moving to Signal and I included a link if they
| wanted to download it. Alternatively, I'm happy to still
| use iMessage/SMS or e-mail. 80% of my friends installed
| Signal.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| My "graceful" fallback is similar to yours but Telegram
| --> Delta Chat (it's just email to them) --> Element
| (Matrix) --> Snikket (XMPP). Basically by the time
| they've gotten to the second step I already have a way of
| talking to them. I have _maybe_ 1 or 2 people on Element
| and Snikket 0.
| geofft wrote:
| There's a lot of things to criticize about Apple, but how on
| earth are they monopolistic?
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| I think people tend to use "monopoly" as a catch-all for
| anticompetitive practices. Apple is not a monopoly except in
| contrived ways, but they can still be behaving in an
| anticompetitive way and some of those behaviors may violate
| regulations.
|
| U.S. antitrust has a lot of discretion and is pretty
| political but the core metric they lean on, for good or ill,
| is consumer prices. Can it be argued that the green bubble is
| increasing consumer prices?
| geofft wrote:
| Hm, I think I'd argue that the problem with this is that it
| results in muddy thinking.
|
| Practices that improve your ability to make money are what
| the market is fundamentally about. Ideally, those are
| practices that develop the best products/services at the
| best value, but there are a whole number of ways to make
| money as a small participant without doing that. Loyalty
| cards / buy-nine-get-one-free punch cards are a great
| example of this: the punch card from my local deli serves
| only to make me decide not to try out other, perhaps
| comparable delis. Then the other delis all introduce punch
| cards, and then they maintain their same set of customers,
| and a marginal improvement in product at one place will
| result in attracting far fewer customers than it otherwise
| would. The whole system is, unquestionably, anti-
| competitive. But what do you do about it? Certainly there's
| no monopoly. Do we want to make this illegal, and on what
| grounds?
|
| To be clear, maybe we _should_ make it illegal - but what
| does that world look like, exactly? Do we also make it
| illegal to drip-market customers with discounts? To offer
| them subscriptions (a la Amazon 's "subscribe and save", or
| a la Lyft Plus)? To sell products that are larger sizes so
| people make fewer decisions about who to purchase from?
| etc.
|
| Even before we get to the problem of appropriate use of
| government power, there's the question of what we want
| society to ideally look like. Is it inappropriate, even if
| it's legal, to do any of the things above?
|
| Or put another way, the grounds for anti-monopology
| legislation is that it is one of the _rare_ known failures
| of the free-market thesis, that competition will
| incentivize people to offer the best products /services.
| But if every tiny deli finds themselves incentivized to be
| anti-competitive, what should we do about it?
| Someone wrote:
| I think people use "anticompetitive" as a catch-all for
| both anticompetitive and competitive practices.
|
| Making your product better than that of the competition, as
| Apple did with iMessage (moving between-iPhone data traffic
| out of the, certainly at the time, expensive and limited
| amount of SMSes included in many phone plans) isn't anti-
| competitive. You could even say they built competition for
| the SMS network, just as WhatsApp did later.
|
| I also don't see how signaling, in the UI, which messages
| are subject to different rules would be a anti-competitive.
|
| And yes, that is useful even today. My smartphone
| subscription has a limit of 200 SMS per month (any
| following costs about a quarter of a dollar)
| gnuj3 wrote:
| People tend to dislike companies that are popular/successful
| in many sectors at the same time and they mistake popularity
| with monopoly. Do a lot of people are "Apple-mad"? Yes, they
| are. They would buy anything with Apple logo on it no matter
| the price even if there are better alternatives available
| burt that doesnt mean Apple is monopolistic, as long as there
| is a choice. You can buy Android mobile phone, listen to your
| music on Spotify with Cambridge Audio headphones on, buy
| Yamaha speaker for your house, watch Netflix on Lenovo laptop
| with Ubuntu on it if you want.
| mulmen wrote:
| When FaceTime was announced Steve Jobs promised Apple would
| create an open standard so it could be used by anyone. They
| got wrapped up in patent hell and chose to limit the service
| to their own devices rather than pay for licensing. The
| alternative would have made Apple less money.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| How did Skype and other video services deal with the patent
| challenges?
| noahtallen wrote:
| While iPhone users are free to use any messenger they wish,
| iMessage still has monopolistic properties.
|
| The key one is that it's very difficult to convince an
| iMessage group to use a different app. iMessage isn't even
| objectively better -- in many cases, other messaging
| platforms have faster, less buggy, more secure iOS apps with
| more features than iMessage. (Speaking from extensive
| experience with iMessage and other apps.)
|
| As a result, iMessage has a stranglehold on Apple users
| because of Apple's design goals and business decisions. It's
| designed to feel like you need to use it for texting someone.
| It overrides standard protocols (SMS), doesn't implement new
| messaging protocols (RCS), and doesn't allow any other apps
| to process text messages. So iMessage has a monopoly on the
| default carrier-based messaging solution on iOS.
|
| And its group lock-in makes it very hard to choose to use an
| android, since you'll have to spend a large amount of social
| capital to get everyone into a different messaging app.
|
| I would not consider iMessage to have monopolistic properties
| if it did the following:
|
| - Implemented modern carrier messaging protocols, like RCS.
|
| - Had good apps for other platforms, including android and
| the web.
|
| - Allowed 3rd party apps to handle SMS/RCS.
|
| But iMessage is a huge benefit to Apple because it keeps
| people locked into the ecosystem. Not because it's an
| excellent messenger. That's why it's monopolistic.
| geofft wrote:
| I agree that iMessage is a huge benefit to Apple because it
| keeps people locked into the ecosystem more than because of
| technical merit. I disagree that it is monopolistic,
| because they don't have a monopoly!
|
| Think about airline mileage programs and status. They keep
| people locked into the airline's ecosystem. But no single
| airline has a majority market share, and labeling a dozen
| active competitors in a market "monopolistic" would make no
| sense.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| > The key one is that it's very difficult to convince an
| iMessage group to use a different app.
|
| As someone who managed to convince half the WhatsApp group
| to migrate to signal where we held out for a couple of
| months, ended up cross posting so the ones who were left
| behind didn't miss out and eventually abandoned signal and
| went back to WhatsApp I can tell you this has very little
| to do with Apple.
| djohnston wrote:
| Lots of ways - there are hundreds of articles about this, but
| here's a recent high profile dispute:
| https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2021/06/02/the-
| epic-...
| [deleted]
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| There was a post here recently about how 87% of US teens are
| using iPhones. As somebody who was a "green bubble" in the
| past I can see how peer pressure inflated that number.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807
|
| I do agree that defining a market as "cell phones for
| teenagers" is a bit disingenuous but I definitely feel like
| there's something really unfair about not having iMessage for
| Android. The green bubbles are basically a marker of not
| being part of the in-group even if you have something more
| expensive than an iPhone.
| fundad wrote:
| Monopoly on new ideas if anything
| stefan_ wrote:
| WhatsApp and I'd assume lots of other messengers use the number
| as your identifier, too.
| markdown wrote:
| Anyone and his dog can use WhatsApp. You don't have to buy a
| specific phone to use it.
| razemio wrote:
| 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
| reboot81 wrote:
| In Sweden 50% above age 12 have blue bubbles. Out of 50 of my
| friends and family one keeps using Android.
| eertami wrote:
| Sweden has a roughly 50/50 split of Android/iOS marketshare.
| If you have a group of 50 people where 49 are using iOS, it
| stands to reason that there is probably another group of 50
| friends and family where 49 are using Android.
| Kipters wrote:
| Italy here, same.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Tired of Whatsapp scammers, who can register any temporary
| phone number without identification confirmation.
|
| Find these on crypto, youtube, dating apps, you name it
| detaro wrote:
| With a bunch of local/social group variation which order these
| are in.
| razemio wrote:
| Right, changed it to "in my social bubble". Still with
| iMessage I have never seen anybody using it here.
| iqanq wrote:
| That's because SMS have always been awfully expensive in the
| EU. People moved to whatsapp as soon as it came out.
| joconde wrote:
| When was that? We've had free unlimited SMS/MMS for years in
| France, even on the cheapest plans at 10 euros/month. Now
| it's free to/from any EU country too.
| iqanq wrote:
| That is interesting. Before whatsapp showed up, they costed
| like 25 cents each for a very long time here.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Here in the UK I think WhatsApp took off here based on the
| strength of the group chat. Now people use it (and Facebook
| Messenger) for everything.
| [deleted]
| BossingAround wrote:
| While I have the same experience, I believe this is called
| social bubble. I do not know many teenagers, and I don't visit
| high schools to see what trends are popular among them to
| assess whether they prefer to use Threema over iMessage.
| razemio wrote:
| You are right. Changed the wording to "my social bubble".
| Still these services I would consider popular in Germany in
| no particular order.
| ksec wrote:
| Why Apple's iMessage Is Winning in _US_. The world is made up
| of nearly 7.8 Billion people. ~4.5B Smartphone users, ~1.1B iOS
| users. The rest are 95%+ Android ( Both Google and China ) and
| KaiOS.
| jcelerier wrote:
| France here, around me it's Messenger / Instagram > Telegram ~
| WhatsApp > ...
|
| A grand total of three of my contacts are on Signal lol
| Hamuko wrote:
| I once got texted by a guy coming over to my apartment to
| install some stuff. Apparently he had an iPhone because I got a
| blue bubble. Took me a second to figure out why the message
| looked so weird.
| cplusplusfellow wrote:
| Do you have an iPhone, but everyone else in your contacts has
| some other type?
| Hamuko wrote:
| There's a mix, but everyone would have sent me messages via
| WhatsApp at that time.
|
| Now I'm one of those people that uninstalled WhatsApp and
| told all of my contacts that I'm moving to Signal. I'm
| still not getting any iMessage messages and >90% of my
| incoming SMS are from bots.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Folk with iPhones will still get those IMs though. _shrug_
| leoedin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| eertami wrote:
| I don't see what age has to do with it. My parents and
| grandparents message their friends using WhatsApp (in
| Europe).
| distances wrote:
| In which country? I also don't know a single person using
| iMessage, and the last non-auth SMS I received was years and
| years ago. It's as good as dead basically.
| ramphastidae wrote:
| It's not because you're older or because of fads, it's
| because you don't message anyone outside of the US.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| The US had an early incumbent SMS culture that never gripped
| most other countries, so iMessage is here to stay.
|
| Outside the US I have friends in their 30s who have never even
| sent text message.
| garciasn wrote:
| I love how we're making a class war out of MMS and a variant
| of MMS that doesn't require mobile networks to operate.
|
| Just send your fucking messages on your mobile devices and be
| done with it.
| kelnos wrote:
| Yeah, it's... pretty dumb, IMO.
|
| If we want to talk about technical issues, though, it's
| pretty stark. MMS delivery and message ordering is
| significantly less reliable than pretty much any OTT
| service out there. Message size limitations mean videos get
| recompressed to garbage when you send them. There are
| basically no add-on features, like reacting with emoji to
| messages, for example.
|
| The disappointing thing is that there's a solution to all
| of this: RCS[0]. Android supports it, but Apple of course
| loves their iMessage walled garden and refuses to, even
| though RCS has end-to-end encryption now. iMessage may be
| technically superior in some ways, and RCS certainly has
| its issues, but personally I feel interop is much more
| important here.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
| vulcan01 wrote:
| 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.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| 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
| iqanq wrote:
| What's abusive, painting chat bubbles in another colour?
| GrantZvolsky wrote:
| 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?
| martini333 wrote:
| wow
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I guess dang and ycombinator are abusing me for making me
| read your comment with light gray text color.
| xu_ituairo wrote:
| SMS messages were green for years before they introduced
| iMessage, so I doubt they chose that colour to be
| intentionally annoying or abusive.
| GrantZvolsky wrote:
| The look was entirely different. Black on green IIRC.
| It's white on somewhat neon green now.
| sharps1 wrote:
| If you turn on Increase Contrast in the accessibility
| features the green is darker and much nicer.
| Lammy wrote:
| > Black on green IIRC
|
| Yep, inherited from iChat way back in the Jagwire days:
| https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
| content/uploads/archive/revie...
| luckyscs wrote:
| 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.
| Wiseacre wrote:
| More manipulation or a dark pattern than abuse.
| draw_down wrote:
| It's horrible, horrible stuff. People liking a different kind
| of cell phone than you like? Just horrendous.
| peruvian wrote:
| Teens? This happens well into your 20s lol. I've always had
| iPhones but heard experiences like these from Android-using
| friends.
| julietteeb wrote:
| 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.
| zrm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| 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.
| jb1991 wrote:
| I don't think the complaint is about the color itself, but
| rather, what the color means.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What problem would Apple be solving and why would they want to
| solve it?
| ianbicking wrote:
| 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]
| analog31 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think it's less "parents buy the same things for their
| children" and more "parents give their old devices to their
| children"
| dan-robertson wrote:
| 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.
| taurath wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| grayclhn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You can use any cross-platform messenger instead of iMessage.
| Which is what most people on earth do.
| vikingcaffiene wrote:
| 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.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Google, like Microsoft, just doesn't care about quality or
| interoperability, and consumers like me notice.
|
| It's absurd to blame Google or Microsoft for this. If anything
| Google is the one pushing for an interoperable alternative to
| iMessage.
|
| When you send a photo using iMessage to an Android user, it's
| delivered over MMS. The technological restrictions of MMS are
| what's at fault here.
| godelski wrote:
| This is the reason I've converted a lot of my friends to
| Signal. We can share high quality images, reactions, everything
| that iMessage has. I only wish Signal would have an air drop
| like feature to transfer raw files in an anonymous manner
| without the need for internet.
| [deleted]
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I wonder if the illegibility is intentional?
| basisword wrote:
| Given the iPhone shipped for 3 or 4 years with only green
| bubbles (for SMS, pre iMessage) it's definitely not
| intentional.
| jtd13 wrote:
| 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.
| analyte123 wrote:
| I don't think it's an accident.
| MBCook wrote:
| 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?
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _This is literally the ONLY reason?_
|
| For some reason it's incredibly controversial to even imply
| that the iPhone is just a better product. You will rile up
| fanboys who are quick to let you know about reparability,
| battery life, screen resolution and RAM. If more teens are
| buying iPhones, it's not because it's better, it's because they
| are being bullied into it.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Research: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807
| danaris wrote:
| That research definitely doesn't seem to support the thesis
| that it's the green bubbles that are the reason.
| tata71 wrote:
| It's network effect, visually manifested _as_ green bubble
| plebs.
| MBCook wrote:
| 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.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The green bubble implies that iPhones are a symbol of wealth
| (of the middle class variety, not significant wealth) and
| therefore status. That's basically everything to most teens.
| leetcrew wrote:
| I wasn't a teen that long ago and I don't remember anything
| like this. in fact, I remember quite the opposite: kids who
| brought nice things into school were made fun of for it.
| having your parents buy you a brand new car was the worst,
| but excessively nice phone, laptop, shoes were also bad.
| there were only two exceptions. if you had a job after school
| and bought the thing yourself, that was very cool. high-end
| sports equipment was also acceptable, but only if you were
| really good at that sport.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I should've put YMMV: general trends don't predict specific
| examples reliably. Of course over-flexing is often seen as
| being a tryhard, but owning an iPhone isn't that.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I don't doubt this is what people think. But it does seem a
| little odd when older, still supported iPhones can be bought
| for almost nothing.
| [deleted]
| pfisch wrote:
| You could say the same thing about a Mercedes. Doesn't seem
| to matter.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| You can buy scuffed up Jordans for next to nothing too but
| kids will laugh at you for wearing them. Same if some teen
| sees you whip out an iPhone 3. Might as well have an
| Android at that point.
|
| Why do you think Apple being out new devices that are 99%
| identical so regularly and yet people still fawn over them?
| It's a new chance to show off your disposable wealth to
| other people who filled the hole where their personality
| should be with a wallet.
| [deleted]
| Anonymous4272 wrote:
| Only other thing that comes to mind is supposedly the camera on
| Snapchat is better (native) on ios whereas on android its their
| own.
| DanCarvajal wrote:
| Talking to my teen cousins we guessed that it's because most
| of the iPhones are hand me downs from Parents.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Delivery confirmation has got to be #1, right? There's no
| feedback from SMS. Messages get lost or sent multiple times as
| dups. All without having to install an app or use a Meta or
| Google property.
|
| Edit: Creepy read receipts can be turned off too (I think
| they're even disabled by default?) Delivery confirmation is one
| thing but almost nobody likes forced read receipts--they makes
| text messaging icky like a phone call, because once you pick up
| you either respond immediately or the other party knows you
| "left them on read."
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I assume everyone has read a message if it has been a few
| hours after it has been sent, or definitely within 24 hours,
| whether they deny having read it or not. Whether or not it
| was delivered is the key information.
|
| The percent of people not constantly checking their phone has
| got to be so vanishingly small.
| cletus wrote:
| 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.
| jcrites wrote:
| iMessage didn't break the SMS monopoly alone; I'd argue that
| WhatsApp played a more important role.
|
| WhatsApp launched in Jan 2009, almost 2 years before iMessage
| launched in Oct 2011. Instead of being locked to one smartphone
| ecosystem, WhatsApp supported all platforms, including Android
| and feature phones (and the iPhone). This facilitated its
| worldwide adoption, in countries where feature phones were more
| common at the time (or still are). From some rough
| research/estimates, WhatsApp's adoption is probably roughly
| 2-3x that of iMessage on a monthly-active-user basis. (This is
| based on an estimate that roughly 1 billion people have
| iPhones; and that most but probably not all of them use
| iMessage.) In March of 2020, WhatsApp had over 2 billion MAU.
|
| iMessage may have broken the monopoly in the USA (where
| WhatsApp usage is less popular), but WhatsApp arguably played
| the more important role in most other countries.
|
| I won't dispute that the iPhone may have broken the "telcos
| install crapware" standard though. (Even today, from what I
| understand, telcos can install and update software on the
| phone, or some part of its hardware, but I believe it's limited
| to the telecommunication software/hardware, not apps on the
| phone OS.)
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| SMS used to often cost money, even for plans with gigabytes
| of internet data. iMessage helped break that.
| jcrites wrote:
| This is a US-centric point of view. For most of the world,
| WhatsApp was the key communication app that broke the SMS
| monopoly. Furthermore, it's not part of a walled garden,
| being available on all platforms, including the smartphones
| (Android & iPhone), feature phones, and provides a web
| client (web.whatsapp.com) and native clients for Windows
| and Mac (and Linux as well, though that one is oriented
| toward businesses).
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| This is effective only in the U.S., in Europe whatsapp is winning
| and iMessage is quite ignored (unfortunately).
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/ 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.
| msh wrote:
| I think that you are generalizing too much. There are huge
| differences between euro countries. From what I see iMessage is
| bigger in Scandinavia and WhatsApp seems to be winning most of
| the southern European countries.
| dybber wrote:
| In some countries. In Denmark everyone uses Facebook Messenger
| it seems.
| newsbinator wrote:
| In Eastern Europe I feel like Viber/Telegram have won, with
| Instagram/Facebook messenger second, and Whatsapp a distant
| also-ran.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| In Romania at least, WhatsApp is the de facto standard. Just
| to give some idea of how ubiquitous it is, when I had to buy
| flowers for a funeral, the lady told me to send the message I
| wanted printed on WhatsApp, didn't even think to ask if I
| used it.
|
| By contrast, the only two people I ever saw using Telegram or
| Viber were a security researcher and a colleague from further
| East.
| pier25 wrote:
| This is because the US is the only country that kept using SMS.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Apple has a large share of the us market, not elsewhere
| Hamuko wrote:
| Not true. Apple might actually have a larger marketshare in
| Japan than it does in the US, but absolutely no one in
| Japan is using iMessage.
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-
| us-...
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Everyone else decided to use a proprietary app owned by
| Facebook. That seems far worse to me, I'll take sms/mms any
| day of the week.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| With end to end encryption, this is important to remember
| too. And it wasn't owned by Facebook when it started
| gaining traction. Don't make the US decision seem smarter.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| You make a good point about the mass adoption mostly
| happening before FB took ownership. Back then, Whatsapp
| was definitely a better choice for a lot of non-US places
| vs paying for SMS, and perhaps it is even now. iMessage
| has E2E encryption, but regular SMS doesn't so WhatsApp
| seems better in that case as well.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| It more than quadrupled since the acquisition, hardly "
| _mostly_ before FB ".
| Youden wrote:
| It wasn't owned by Facebook when people decided to use it.
| Facebook bought it after it became popular.
| viraptor wrote:
| 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.
| deergomoo wrote:
| I wish some other app besides WhatsApp was the default.
| Facebook ownership aside, it's the only messaging app where I
| can't access it across all of my devices (no iPad app), and
| they are very, _very_ slow to adopt new OS features (on iOS at
| least, not sure about Android). It took them forever to support
| dark mode and took them forever to support the one-click share
| sheet APIs.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| Justin_K wrote:
| Straw man argument there.
| [deleted]
| dpark wrote:
| How is that in any way a straw man argument?
| [deleted]
| dpark wrote:
| > _iMessage will literally prevent adding non Apple IDs to
| group chats if the initial start of the chat is in iMessage and
| included non SMS apple ids._
|
| WhatsApp also doesn't let you randomly include SMS recipients,
| because that's technically infeasible.
|
| This doesn't seem at all surprising. "Messages" is essentially
| a client that supports two unrelated protocols. MMS and
| iMessage. If you create an iMessage conversation, there is no
| way to involve SMS without moving the entire conversation to
| that protocol, which gives up all the iMessage features.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I have to wonder why Android simply didn't create their own
| iMessage clone.
| kelnos wrote:
| They did. Well, sorta. Google adopted RCS[0] for Android
| (and even added end-to-end encryption to it), and despite
| mostly only being pushed by Google, is an open-access
| protocol that any carrier (or company) could implement
| themselves.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
| dpark wrote:
| Because Apple would sue them. It's generally not kosher to
| make a custom client for someone else's proprietary system.
| Little players sometimes get away with this, but when large
| corporations do it, they get sued.
|
| Microsoft tried this with YouTube in Windows Phone. They
| got shut down by Google. If they had persisted with
| shipping it anyway (bypassing the block somehow ), they
| doubtless would have been sued.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| My bad, I meant rolling out their alternate protocol.
|
| If I use an iPhone with other iPhone users, the default
| messaging app simply just works. Why not replicate the
| same experience for Android users? Competing by creating
| their ecosystem where the green bubbles are the premium
| experience and the blue ones (for iPhone users) is the
| fallback to legacy SMS?
| jandrese wrote:
| Google has built (and abandoned) like a dozen different
| SMS replacement apps at this point.
| dpark wrote:
| Google doesn't want to build that. They have publicly
| stated as much in the past. At the time at least they are
| pushing for improvements to the MMS
| infrastructure/protocol to support iMessage-type
| features.
|
| But also just because they build an equivalent system
| doesn't mean anyone would move to it. They tried that
| with Google+.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| Yes, but I can run Whatsapp on Android.
| dpark wrote:
| Sure. For the sake of not being dicks, I think Apple should
| ship iMessage for Android. But that's different from
| Messages happily shoving everyone into MMS and giving up
| all the iMessage features Apple users want.
|
| Of course I think YouTube should have allowed on Windows
| Phone, too. Corporations are often very dickish in their
| search for dominance.
|
| edit: I think I misunderstood the scenario here. I thought
| you were saying it was not possible to add a non-iMessage
| recipient to a group chat. It sounds like that actually
| _does_ work? (I've never actually done this.)
|
| What you're asking for it's for Apple to violate privacy by
| reversing an Apple ID and revealing a phone number.
| Honestly that sounds pretty iffy to me.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I think Apple should ship iMessage for Android._
|
| I kinda do and don't want this.
|
| I think the ideal would be that Apple just support RCS on
| iPhones (and work with the people who define RCS to fix
| any perceived deficiencies, if any) and allow iMessage to
| fade away.
|
| Second would hold their noses and work with Google to add
| iMessage support to the Android Messages app. I really
| don't want yet another chat app on my phone.
|
| But yeah, at the absolute very least, Apple should
| release a version of iMessage for Android. I get why they
| don't, but screw that. They claim to be champions of
| security and privacy, but intentionally degrade the
| security and privacy of their own customers any time they
| want to converse with an Android user.
| dpark wrote:
| > _I think the ideal would be that Apple just support RCS
| on iPhones (and work with the people who define RCS to
| fix any perceived deficiencies, if any) and allow
| iMessage to fade away._
|
| I assume RCS is the latest message protocol for phones?
| Does this support non-phone devices?
|
| If not, I'm doubtful Apple will ever do this unless it's
| mandated or iMessage use collapses for some reason. Lots
| of people use iMessage on their Apple laptops or iPads.
| Apple isn't going to drop that support to make Android
| users happy.
|
| I find it interesting how often the industry refuses to
| change until Apple eventually says "fuck it, we can do
| better" and ships what the industry should have done
| already. MMS is extremely limited and I never heard
| anyone seriously discuss improving it until iMessage
| appeared. Ditto for USB vs lightning.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| Correct - depending how the chat is started, a non-
| imessage number cannot be added. I think it has to do
| with having one number of the group that is apple id
| based and not phone number based.
|
| So it is not about the color, but literally about being
| locked out of the conversation unless you are on an apple
| device.
|
| Edit: yes agreed that an Android app for iMessage would
| be perfect. And I'm fine with requiring an apple id. And
| I'm even fine with the color! But the sometimes it works
| and sometimes it doesn't is ridiculous.
| dpark wrote:
| Right. I think the fix is to ship iMessage for Android
| rather than support the privacy violation, though. If
| they shipped iMessage for Android, they would probably be
| more aggressive about refusing to revert back to SMS/MMS.
| pb7 wrote:
| If this is what's truly evil to you, you must live an extremely
| sheltered and privileged life. Wishing someone misery on top of
| that, what's wrong with you?
|
| There is more under the hood than just adding a non-iMessage
| recipient. The pure threads and mixed threads are not the same
| at all except visually. One would be expected to recognize this
| on a technical forum...
| BbzzbB wrote:
| The evil and hell comment is over the top I would agree. But,
| per the executive in the article, it (not porting iMessage to
| Android) is purely a decision made for ecosystem lock-in
| which "[wouldn't] cost [them] a lot to run", not a technical
| one. Linking an Apple ID to a phone number for allowing non-
| iPhone to communicate wouldn't be black magic, nor would an
| iMessage Android App be - it's already messaging over the
| Internet.
| dpark wrote:
| > _Linking an Apple ID to a phone number for allowing non-
| iPhone to communicate wouldn 't be black magic_
|
| What does this mean? It kind of sounds like black magic.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| So an iMessage group that was initiated with 5 iPhones
| using their phone numbers can add an Android in it no
| problem, but if one of them was added through Apple ID
| it's suddenly black magic? How about a notification
| asking the Apple ID user if they authorize the group to
| use their phone number instead so that "green user X can
| be included"?
|
| Sure, if the Apple ID person actually has no phone number
| associated, it becomes black magic to send them an
| SMS/MMS. But how many iPhone users do you know have no
| phone number?
| dpark wrote:
| I misunderstood the scenario. I thought you were asking
| for Apple to somehow maintain an iMessage conversation
| but add an SMS/MMS recipient. What you're asking is for
| them to reveal someone's phone number when they choose to
| only share their Apple ID. This seems like a real privacy
| issue and I'm not surprised that Apple does not do this.
|
| The idea that Apple should synchronously hold a
| conversation waiting for someone to approve this sharing
| also seems infeasible.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| >you're asking for them to reveal someone's phone number
|
| You're putting words in my mouth (hands?), I clearly said
| notify said user to get it's consent. It doesn't have to
| "synchronously hold a conversation waiting" for anything,
| the group can keep chatting between themselves and not
| add the latest recipient before they accept.
|
| Maybe/probably my napkin solution wouldn't be the right
| one, but if you think it is too technically challenging
| for Apple to adapt iMessage for Android rather than
| purely a marketing tactic, I'd invite you to read the
| article on which we are commenting.
| dpark wrote:
| > _You 're putting words in my mouth (hands?), I clearly
| said notify said user to get it's consent. It doesn't
| have to "synchronously hold a conversation waiting" for
| anything, the group can keep chatting between themselves
| and not add the latest recipient before they accept._
|
| This sounds like a very complex flow. I can't imagine
| that this is valuable enough to add. Asynchronous
| acceptance but the conversation keeps going and the new
| recipient can't see any of the new history that was
| presumably intended for them. This sounds like a mess.
|
| Apple could of course ship iMessage for android. That's
| totally different from this ugly flow.
| orbifold wrote:
| 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.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| Oh the kids were cool about it, they just started new chats
| with sms messages from the beginning.
|
| But why should they be forced to compensate for that dark
| pattern? User unfriendliness for sake of selling phones.
| quantified wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Finding non-shitty friends in <location/time> is an important
| skill.
| bla3 wrote:
| 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
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Here is a clue:
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/android/status/147987545766744883...
| jarbus wrote:
| This is a great link, thanks for sharing
| janandonly wrote:
| https://archive.fo/RJ7bl
| clepto wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A chat "solution" that your correspondent doesn't use is the
| worst experience of all.
| clepto wrote:
| 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.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I mean, it's the standard in the US. It doesn't really matter
| whether you can imagine it or not.
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > I can't imagine actually using SMS, iMessage or not.
|
| iMessage does not use SMS, so this statement does not make any
| sense.
| tln wrote:
| I get grief about the green bubble weekly. It not just teens
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| It's the people who are mentally teenagers still.
| ryandvm wrote:
| Honestly, automatically screening people like this out of your
| life seems like a feature.
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