Yep, when it comes to these kinds of design decisions, apple definitely knows what they’re doing. I call intentional.
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You can, actually. In addition to changing the background to dark mode and a quick color inversion button in control center, there are a significant number of options for adjusting things like contrast, white point and transparency (which does sometimes wash out colors on white backgrounds). Apple has always been very proactive about their accessibility features.
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When you switch on “Differentiate Without Color” does it preface messages from Android users with “Too cheap to buy an iPhone says…”?
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You won’t believe me, but that specific color green in Benjamin Moore paint is called “Too cheap to buy an iPhone”.
Also, it is so weird how the idea that the iPhone is some prestige device for the Louis Vouitton set has persisted. I mean, yeah, you can get a disposable Tracfone with a five year old implementation of Android at Dollar General, but mainline Android phones are basically the same price.
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And if price is what makes it valuable, I’ll happily sell you a disposable Tracfone with a five year old implementation of Android at iphone prices.
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If they didn’t have their own proprietary OSes we wouldn’t be talking about them—how many BB articles are there about LG or OnePlus or Dell 
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That’s delightful! My current phone is running Android Go. I shudder when I think of how Tim Cook might plan to shame me for my choices.
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Exactly. The Messages app pre-dated iMessage by 4 years. Everyone on iOS got the same color messages when it launched. Another color was added to differentiate those that were sent with the iMessage protocol.
And Android was released to beta months after the iPhone launched and was busy being a Blackberry clone.
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It was actually over a year later and more like three years before there were really competitive devices running it. I only remember that because my company got me a Blackberry Storm and I was desperate to replace it with literally anything else (back when iPhone was still AT&T exclusive). Such a pos phone.
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Contrast ratios that to my eye, on my iPhone, are really not sufficiently different to have ever made me think one was easier/harder to read than the other.
Yes - intentional, but not remotely for the contrast reason stated.
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Yes. The first beta did come out a few months after the iPhone. The Blackberry-esque prototype showed up at the end of 2007. The phones didn’t show up until the following year, and took some time to get going.
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New Dell laptops “smell of cat piss” | Boing Boing
Dell reset all Dell.com customer passwords 5 days after cyberattack, didn’t bother telling customers at the time
Dell apologizes for preinstalling bogus root-certificate on computers
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I would honestly pay to use iMessage on Android if it were available to alleviate the frustration of being the “different” one in the group chats. I know my family isn’t giving up their iPhones, and they’re also not giving up iMessage for a different messaging app. I personally don’t want an iPhone, and my family just doesn’t care whenever I’ve tried to explain what’s going on with bubble colors, image compression, etc. So if I have to give in to iMessage and give Apple money for familial harmony, I’d at least like to do it from a phone I like using.
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In fact, the message bubbles were also green by default on Macs back in the day when using the Mac specific IM client that Messages was based off of, iChat. One of the biggest things that iPhone did for SMS messaging was to make the SMS client behave like IMs instead of like email (which is what Blackberry and other smart phones at the time did).
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I am honestly flabbergasted that they would care what colour speech bubbles someone’s messages produce? Who the fuck cares?? Seriously! What is up with apple people?
ETA: this was seriously enlightening, because nobody in Europe uses iMessage, so this is a truly alien ecosystem of classism for me: Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble - WSJ
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On Android, I can decide what pukey green color my MAGA brother-in-law’s text bubbles look like, not some holier-than-thou ux designer in Cupertino.
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Apple laptops are good but I never liked the iphone I used to have for work and basically hate all apple software. I might switch back to PC when I need an new computer.
The “we know better” attitude of company towards its users sucks almost as much as Pages does.
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Don’t have WSJ access, but no articles I’ve read about this specify what proportion of iPhone users actually care about green bubbles. I have a feeling that this is some Tide-Pod style nonsense that’s looking to tarnish a demographic on the views of a few for the sake of lazy journalism. You can find shallow idiots in any sufficiently large group.
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Thank you for pointing this out, I feel like I’m old enough now that about half the articles I read are written by some child just out of journalism school that has no clue about the history of the things they are claiming to be an expert about. (Yes, please excuse me while I go yell at some clouds.)
The worst that is reasonable to say is that when they flattened the UI and went from back text on glass shaded bubbles to flat colors with white text the made the green worse than the blue, but that seems like a stretch.
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