It’s a UX feature. iMessage supports a lot of features that SMS doesn’t, so it’s helpful to know when someone you are chatting to is using an Android (SMS). It’s also helpful to see if your own bubbles are green because it means your data is shut off and it’s using SMS instead of data (which, depending on your plan, might be good or bad news).
You seem upset, but it’s nothing more than that.
Yeah, the peer pressure thing is wild. I don’t have a WSJ account, but I did read a few summaries of that article when it was first published.
For my particular case, it’s not so much that my family members care about the bubble colors, it’s that they recognize that certain features they like using are “broken” when there’s green bubbles in a conversation. iMessage works for them most of the time with most of the people they talk to, and they’re not really interested in changing their communication habits to be more inclusive of the small number of Android users they interact with.
To be fair, I’m also somewhat set in my ways. I briefly considered getting an iPhone when I needed a new phone, but I just couldn’t give up the flexibility I’m used to with Android. I think the difference is I’m willing to install and use a handful of different messaging apps to keep in touch with people.
It’s always a dark background here in Dark Mode…
Oh yeah! I totally forgot about iChat! You’re absolutely right about that.
No one cares. This is all stupid. Some writer’s kid said something about a friend that had android and turned it into an article. And then some blogger dashed off some nonsense with a desaturated image.
Ah, should have read further. @capnjimbo beat me to it.
Yeah, that’s always been a major difference in how people choose a ui they’re comfortable with, be it Mac/PC or iOS/Android. Both are fine, both do their jobs exceedingly well in some areas and poorly in others. It’s good that there are options, but I would hate having numerous messaging apps and actually like the idea of a walled garden, encryption by default and universality between my devices. I know I can get those features from various places that may afford me more flexibility or choice, but I don’t want to.
Elegantly sharpening the ingroup/outgroup distinction arguably falls in the interesting position where intensely prosocial and intensely hostile design intersect.
Another differentiator is that the blue iMessage messages are end-to-end encrypted, while green SMS aren’t. Plus if you are communicating over iMessage protocol, you have access to sending money, launching a group FaceTime chat, etc, and iMessage traffic is handed over to your Mac over iCloud as well, if you’ve opted to do that. There’s a lot of integration between apple products embedded in iMessage, iMessage apps, deep links, Handoff to MacOS, etc…
In particular, iMessage is a key link in Apple’s grand scheme to be your bank via Apple Pay, Wallet, and other services that potentially have much more return to them than simply selling you an expensive phone. Seamlessness and stickiness. So, no, they won’t be moving iMessage to Android or baking other protocol standards in. They’ve been building an ecosystem around it for 15 years. Just the original iMessage was a huge ‘fuck you’ to the phone carriers, as it kneecapped one of their huge profit centers in SMS. The other thing that Apple ruined for the phone carriers was the personalization market – Remember when a wallpaper image cost $2.99 on Sprint, and it was only good for 3 months before you had to buy it again? Setting your own wallpapers from photos or web graphics was a key feature from day one of iOS. When you think about it, it’s wild that SMS still survives. Lots of other messaging services are long-gone, as are cross-platform messaging apps like Adium.
What do you use in Europe? Everyone in Japan uses Line and most of Asia uses WhatsApp. I had never even heard of iMessage before this article.
Isn’t the main problem here that as a society we’ve allowed a bunch of different tech companies to usurp and balkanize the telecom infrastructure? This was the thing that the internet was in-part designed to prevent - and cell-phone networks would never have proliferated without interoperability with the landline networks - which are under the purview of FCC and similar regulatory bodies. Having a bunch of different incompatible “consumer options” isn’t really a valid alternative to having a unified set of interoperable protocols - as is the case with voice comms.
No, I convinced her to switch to a better Android device so I don’t have to provide her with tech support.
It seems counterintuitive, but the iPhone did a lot to de-Balkanize the mobile industry. Cell phone networks weren’t exactly interoperable, other than the ability to take phone calls and send texts. There were GSM and CDMA networks, with the phones incompatible. You couldn’t take a handset to another carrier, and indeed manufacturers like motorola had multiple versions of the same phone with subtle differences based on carrier. If you could move the handset to another carrier, you still couldn’t move the apps, if your phone even supported apps. Apps for Blackberry and other smartphones sold for about 20-30 dollars on the carriers. If you were an app or game provider in the US market, you had to support about 400 different handsets, and apps were handled differently on each carrier. Verizon used an app platform called BREW over CDMA, AT&T used Java apps over GSM, and Sprint was a weird hybrid due to their use of CDMA and Java together. If you made ringtones or wallpapers, each carrier provided a list of handsets that you had to author for, with different sound and screen specs. You’d write a game and port it across all these handsets. The carriers also controlled access to servers needed to support your games as well, and getting the carriers to accept the games was a continual struggle unless you were a major brand. The iPhone did an end run around this, created a wide-open marketplace for apps, and had a large enough install base of compatible devices that you could actually make money writing a game without having to dumb it down for cheap phones. Though the carriers hated losing that control, they were all too happy to increase their sales of data plans and upgrade their networks.
When Android came on the scene, the carriers tried to wrest some control back, but the model of a carrier-independent app store has stuck. Now the carriers have limited control over the bloatware they can put on the phones, and the manufacturers are asserting their own footprint of apps and services on the devices as well. Much more competitive landscape, and the carriers are more profitable than they ever were when they controlled everything.
Now that every paint company released their 2022 Color of the Year, we can see a clear trend in the home decor colors of 2022. Every color of the year 2022 is either a green or a blue shade.(Home Decor Color Trends 2022: Natural Hues with Bright Pops - The Nordroom)
We need red bubbles for hipsters using flip phones. Their meticulous irony is being missed with everyone assuming green always means android.
It’s a bit different from country to country, but WhatsApp seems to be the most popular. In more privacy-oriented societies Telegram and Signal are gaining. Back when everyone had a Facebook account anyway, Facebook messenger was a big one, too, but that seems to be fading.
What you say is true, (and a net-good) - but having (relatively) open app-stores (for add-ons to in-device functions, particular to given individual users) is not really equivalent to the issue of compatibility for cross-network communications, call it subscriber-to-subscriber or what-have-you, network spanning functions should be carrier independent. In the history described - the platform/OS companies, (largely Android and iOS, (r.i.p. Symbian)) have simply replaced the position of the carriers and basic telephony functions like voice and text comms should operate under Common Carrier type rules.
I was responding specifically to @Stapy 's account of their family, but also informed by the first few times I heard about green bubbles (or about iMessage in the first place).
As I said, it really isn’t a thing in Europe. If I don’t count my brother’s work phone, I know, I think, two of my friends and a handful of my (invariably older and richer) work colleagues who have iPhones, but if I had to guess less than 5% of my phone contacts use them. So when I first even heard about green bubbles was when (American GenX and Millennial) people on a podcast complained about green bubbles from their friends. I was taken aback. From context I could gather that it was an iPhone/Android compatibility thing, but they sounded like the most horrible classists and not at all self-aware about what they were doing. Just genuinely disgusted that their friend would show up green. It really made a big impression on me because I knew these people to be otherwise liberal open minded people.
I have since heard that attitude several times from different podcasters but never in real life (I communicate with my American friends via Discord or, increasingly less so, over Facebook Messenger).
So this isn’t entirely based on media scaremongering, more on unselfaware first-person reporting. The WSJ article (which is open for me?) just reinforced these attitudes I had independently observed and frames them as a youth thing:
Grace Fang, 20-years-old, said she too saw such social dynamics among her peers at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. “I’ve had people with Androids apologize that they have Androids and don’t have iMessage,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s Apple propaganda or just like a tribal in-group versus out-group thing going on, but people don’t seem to like green text bubbles that much and seem to have this visceral negative reaction to it.” Ms. Fang added that she finds the hubbub silly and that she prefers to avoid texting all together.
She uses exactly the right language here: what took me aback that first time I heard about it was that their reaction was noticeably visceral. As you can tell, it really made a deep impression on me.
Jocelyn Maher, a 24-year-old master’s student in upstate New York, said her friends and younger sister have mocked her for exchanging texts with potential paramours using Android phones. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, his texts are green,’ and my sister literally went, 'Ew that’s gross,’” Ms. Maher said.
She noted that she once successfully persuaded a boyfriend to switch to an iPhone after some gentle badgering. Their relationship didn’t last.
Tbf, that might be light-hearted banter between friends. Impossible to tell without knowing the people and their dynamic.
I’ve been giving this some thought, and I think the main reason why Apple doesn’t let other devices into the iMessage club is because Apple cannot verify the device behind the message. iMessage isn’t tied to the phone, I type most of my iMessage texts on the MacBook since I like the keyboard, so it’s tied to the AppleID and also the fact that Apple knows the device isn’t a spam bot, since it’s an iPhone/iPad/Mac that can do the super-secret Apple handshake.
I think it’s bots that have Apple too scared to open up the protocol to non-Apple devices. The blue chat bubble means it most likely was a real human sending the message and not some spoofer or spammer. And because Apple only allows its own hardware in on the game, that means they don’t have to tell non-Apple engineers how it works.
I can only speak for people I know in the UK but basically everyone here uses WhatsApp. A few of us use Signal too. I’m not sure what young people use though (possibly Snapchat?).
“Raspberry Blush.”
This screenshot is from an apple iPhone, to my wife’s Apple iPhone.
A) Green.
B) They can’t even get responses correct. Nobody typed “Loved” or “Liked.” She just used the reaction buttons and this is how it shows up for me.
Apple is so lame these days. I’m really unimpressed with all this “smart” technology. It’s so dumb.
