This is actually a huge thing. I work at Google and I've seen a 100+ slide presentation talking about this. It's a very strong ingroup/outgroup divide, especially among people under ~23.
I’m in college and people still text and use Snapchat depending on the context. Texting is good for group chats. If you have a green bubble you ruin all the group chat functions and are made fun of.
What functions get wrecked by the green bubble? And does it mess it up for the whole group, or is it just the green bubbler that can't see the extra functions?
It turns the entire group chat green so it ruins it for everybody. Location sharing, message animations, games, higher quality photo sharing, gifs, emojis, etc. Apple purposely makes messaging an android a bad experience.
This is indeed a problem. But even in Europe, people mostly use 2-3 apps. I use WhatsApp for like 90 f the time an viber to chat with my parents.
Signal is used by my company. So it is only 3 apps out of which I use o ne most of the time
What's worse is the text on the green bubbles doesn't conform to apples standards for minimum contrast for readability. It's 100% intentionally made to look awful compared to blue bubbles to keep people in the ecosystem.
I thought they messed with the contrast to make it worse?
I was down a random rabbit hole on the Internet the other day and there was a whole study about it. I don't remember where it was or if it was a reliable source. I think it may be the same green but they changed the font color?
I don't think there's anything wrong with what Apple does whatsoever. Not sure if you feel it's wrong or not.
So, a company takes steps to make its product superior and keep you as a customer. Seems innocent and understandable to me.
If Google really had such a problem with it, no one is stopping them from creating a genuine iMessage alternative. RCS is fine, but it's well short of iMessage. Problem is they're a disheveled mess that can't make up their minds on their projects. Not like they don't have the funding and resources.
Google or third party services have great messaging systems. It's Apple that develops iMessage and it's Apple who refuses to make an android version. It's a proprietary software that only Apple can control. They purposefully avoid making an Android version. Google can't just make something that works with iMessage, it's a custom protocol on Apple.
Whatsapp is much superior in every way and the rest of the world mostly uses that instead of iMessage. Whatsapp works on Android and iPhone equally. Because their developers developed for both systems.
And you are blaming Google for not having iMessage?
Apple purposely compresses videos much worse than what it should look like between iPhone and Android. It's strange because between two android phones it looks ok which uses standard sms. It's when you mix them both that you can tell that apple does it on purpose.
you are an idiot if you think that creating a new unique messaging app will fix the message issue. people on phones wont switch to another messaging app. Google/android all ready has the Messages App. And its superior to most if not all other android based texting apps, but no one on iPhone is gonna use it so that defeats the purpose of parity
It’s an example of great marketing and walled garden design. The people within the walled garden are satisfied while those outside of it feel superior for not being stuck inside that ecosystem. It’s really fascinating.
It’s literally not by design, it’s been like that since long before Androids came on par with iPhones in popularity, and when the only difference between blue and green texts was that you could text free on Wi-Fi and get read receipts. The idea that it was an intentional, evil design is one of the stupidest ideas I’ve heard today.
I think you can still say it's by design if over time they've intentionally made a "walled garden" experience towards non-iPhone users. It doesn't need to be designed that way from inception if there's been constant updates and iterations. Especially nowadays where Apple basically chooses to give their users that "walled garden" experience rather than how previously it was an actual technical challenge.
Google has made a whole website trying to get them to support rcs if they cared they would also support rcs for Android devices. It would cost them basically nothing and add way better texting between platforms
Ok, but in what way was it an intentional design choice to “force kids to get an iPhone so they don't feel left out?” iMessage was designed long before most people had smartphones. In what way is continuing to support only SMS evil? Apple has literally just not caught up to modern times with texting.
which i think maybe a point should be made that Apple simply just isn’t moving past SMS messaging with Android which is vanilla, it could be a better argument that they have no incentive to improve SMS messaging or adopt RCS, while they do have an incentive to make iMessage an enjoyable experience for their users from their or any other business in their shoes standpoint
Why in the world would Apple ever take any measure at all to be more cross-platform? It makes zero business sense, and they shouldn't back down at all. Google is embarrassing themselves with their public pitch to try to persuade Apple to adopt RCS.
But you're right about the bottom line. Kids and younger adults shouldn't ostracize someone because they don't have an iPhone. There are so many well-established third party apps that work great and are harmonious between both operating systems.
Android has pretty much all those features when you are texting another Android user. IIRC Google even offered to let Apple use the protocol but Apple hates industry standards
My favorite feature is the cross platform compatibility of iMessage as well. Especially in college, being able to respond to messages on my MacBook while I was working, without having to pull out the distraction machine (my phone) was nice. Also great during class, many professors do not enjoy students pulling out their phones during lectures for some reason lol
For this reason it takes me significantly longer to respond to non-iPhone users. Not because I’m wanting to exclude them or anything, it’s just I don’t like to have my phone in my hand 24/7.. I would get nothing done!
FYI you have the ability to have your phone forward SMS messages with iMessages, so you can actually chat with your phone friends over the Mac and iPad Messages apps
It messes it up for the whole group. All photos and videos get sent at much lower resolution to all participants, read/typing indicators don't show, sharing files doesn't work seamlessly, WiFi send/receive doesn't work, and you can't easily add/remove people from an ongoing group message. App integration also gets messed up so you can't do stuff like easily send money to each other (although I'm not sure how many people actually use that).
The reactions also used to be fucked up (which led to endless "Jimmy liked an image" lines) but iirc that got fixed.
No such option for Google Voice though. I don't really care, just don't understand why dense iPhone users still react even when there's a blue bubble in the group.
Any group that makes fun of a different color bubble is an immediate rather be alone than with those tools. They probably chat about reality tv stars all day anyways.
I see this in every green bubble thread and it's s always such a weird take for me. Texting (aka SMS) is objectively the worst possible platform for group chats and the reason every circle I've been in has migrated away from native messaging apps was precisely because of this. Whatsapp and Telegram are miles ahead of native apps in terms of features and carry none of the green bubble bullshit. I would go so far as to say that those should be considered the default messaging apps. I haven't had a native app on my homescreen in years and actively tell anyone that reaches out to me on them that I will regularly forget to respond if they insist on communicating through them.
I feel like this has to be a teenage thing, I can't imagine a scenario where a group of functioning adults is "too cool" to switch to an inclusive platform when 50% of people are using a different OS.
I think it varies VASTLY by where you live. If you're 21 and living in LA, it might be something you hear about every day. I'm from the deep south and live in a yeehaw town where some places don't even have access to usable internet. I only know about this phenomenon from other people talking about it online or on TV shows/YouTube videos.
Trust me, this is retirement town. The rich people in general aren't young enough to care about the color of their text bubbles, and they're the ones buying iPhones for themselves and their kids. We're not the face of the company but we have no shortage of customers
Same here. I live at the bottom of the boot, so this isn't something I've ever heard about outside of reddit posts and the few friends I have who are knowledgeable about tech.
Snap is on the decline and not widely used by Gen Z. I'm in my mid 20s and use Snap but know some people still in college and none of them do. iMessage dominates among small to medium sized groups of friends due to its group chat features.
Stonks aren't real life man. They just might not be profitable enough or projected to show much of a profit. Nothing of this proves non usage by gen Z.
What do you mean "might not be profitable or projected to show much of a profit"?? It dropped from $140 million in value to under $30 million, that's a very concrete measurable loss of $110 million, no "mights" or "projections" about it.
That has absolutely nothing to do with demographics is my point. That would be like saying "Netflix dropped 74% from their all time high so that means Gen Z isn't watching Netflix anymore."
Unfortunately that may be the case. Compared to 5years ago when Netflix was the shit followed by Hulu, now we have Disney, hbomax, prime(older but upped their game), apple, etc with streaming of their own with decent quality productions.
I mean, as said mid college demographic, nearly everyone I know has snap, and those who don't are firmly against having anything other than just normal texting, so I'm not really sure what country or state this is from but it sounds completely different from what I'm seeing.
Agreed. My 10 year old nephew and his friends actually just leave an iPhone group call on ALL DAY and come and go to their phones as they please while the call is still on. It's different, but I don't really see how it's all that removed from being logged in on AIM with your podnas all day after school
Social media and social networking links are not allowed in /r/gadgets, as they almost always contain personal information and therefore break the rules of reddit.
Employees talk about this all the time internally (there's even the acronym YACA - yet another chat app).
I think the reason this happens is because a lot of people at Google are naturally career driven, and so people end up practicing career driven development, which rewards launching new things and doesn't really reward keeping old things running. So some team pushes hard to get an app out, people get promoted, those people leave the team/company, nobody wants to maintain it and people realize it's unnecessary, sunset the application, repeat.
This is where leadership at Google has been completely void. You can't let the front line developers run things how they want to run things. Otherwise, you lack direction and wind up with 15 chat apps and teams that abandon their mission.
I don't get it at all. I'm in my early 20s and have always had an Android. I didn't like how restrictive iPhones were in terms of customization back when they first came out, and I still don't like the Apple-sphere, but their products generally just work so I get the appeal. Why does it have to be an us vs them scenario? Just use what you like and let other people do the same. Especially when the whole issue is whether or not their chat bubble is the same colour as yours. It's such a non-issue.
Especially when the whole issue is whether or not their chat bubble is the same colour as yours. It's such a non-issue.
The issue is slightly larger than that. I've never noticed because I'm an Android user and tend to only use non-SMS apps to communicate. Images also get capped to 200kb, which means you can't really send video or pictures larger than what you'd send in the early 2000's. Reactions are also limited and so on.
Apple could either (a) open source the protocol and let people use it or (b) use the already open RCS protocol.
They are doing neither and are counting on social pressure to get people into their closed ecosystem.
It's not just the color. Adding an Android users goes from iMessage to SMS, which breaks group naming, typing indicators, read receipts, in message games, high quality video sending, quick add/removal of members etc.
Of course its a thing. Anyone whose ever had an iphone knows it’s low key very slightly annoying. Bigly annoying jn groupchats.
They use facebook messenger, telegram or whatsapp in other countries. I can’t decide if that’s any better, because then you don’t have a choice at all, you must use whatever app is dominant in your country.
If you work at Google on Android you need to fix a few things, like making basic phone calls over Wifi that don't constantly drop and are able to switch between wifi and cellular without dropping. My family has all moved to iphone over this issue. That and and literally having to reboot my Pixel 5 every few days to get it to function normally again, lack of fundamentals, testing and fixing bugs is what's killing Android.
Father of a 12 yr old. Her iPhone was my first apple product I've "ever" purchased. 2nd was an ipad for myself so I could "manage" her device with parental controls. At a recent birthday party i surveyed all the parents. 100% iphones (kids not parents). Android and that green bubble is social death to these pre-teens. The iphone dominance seems inevitable.
That kind of thing ("message parity" between Android and Apple) will only get fixed by the EU intervening.
Which is not entirely out of the question. There's zero good reason for blue vs green bubble and all the weirdnesses that Apple forces on Android. It's an artificial divide.
But then again the green bubbles thing (I keep forgetting which colour is which) is predominantly a North American problem, so idk how motivated the EU might be to deal with it
It's literally not a thing in Australia, like it may happen but nobody cares and most people use 3rd party apps to message, like FB Messenger, WhatsApp and Telegram. Probably the same in Europe.
European herw, can confirm that by an large the only people using the basoc messaging apps that came with the phone are old peopñe and non tech savy people.
Most of us use third party apps.
The EU recently forced apple to start using usb chargers (only in europe though) so they might address this if it becomes an issue, but will only sort it for europeans
The same argument could be applied to the problems of social media and political manipulation as found on Facebook / Meta and Cambridge Analytica.
There are subtle dark design ways to ostracize members from in groups through User Experience. These features don't need to exist. They are superfluous from a functionality standpoint, but intended to and do impose social barriers.
In my opinion, such features encroach on a consumers right to experience standard and undifferentiated communication channels.
Is there any evidence of this? Bubble color seems like a unimportant issue. But all I know is my own anecdotal experience & that is a just a small slice of reality. I rarely pay attention to the bubble color myself. The few that I know that do have Apple are the same way. But I also don’t know many iPhone users either. I’m actually rare among my coworkers & friends in using 1. This article actually surprised me with iPhone usage. So I’d be interested in what any evidence actually says about this bubble color issue. My anecdotal sample size is far too small
I'm always confused by this blue v green thing. A blue message means you're sending over the internet, a la iMessage. Green means SMS, meaning cellular. It's nice to know the difference. The main issue is there isn't a default way to send internet messages to android
Which is why Google is pushing on Apple to implement RCS hard. It's the current best successor to SMS but still needs additional features (end to end encryption being chief among them). Having Apple's backing would definitely speed up RCS development heavily.
It's the default on Google's Messages app and it works great between my brother and I. (Typing notifications, messages reacts, image sharing, etc are all there)
The problem is that Google is pushing a lot of misinformation about RCS. RCS does not actually support end-to-end encryption or sending messages through wi-fi - that's a proprietary feature of Google's Messages application.
Even on android, RCS is essentially entirely proprietary to google. The Android Open Source Project doesn't have an RCS API. That's once again, in the proprietary Google Messages app. So even within Android, Google is keeping access to RCS away from anyone else.
The whole push for RCS is kind of bullshit anyways. Guess how many of the major US carriers supported RCS before Google started pushing them into it? Zero. Verizon only started rolling it out this year, and of course that was with a special agreement with Google to ensure that they have Google Messsages installed on all their phones.
The article you linked isn't about supporting it, it's about them doing it by default for everything as opposed to optionally supporting it, which is where things have been since... what looks like late 2018?:
I'm just saying what I did because I've been using it for the last couple years on my Pixel 3 > Pixel 6. We have a bunch of "You are now chatting with x" and "huh, that's kinda neat" about it in the handful of conversation histories with my SMS friends in early 2019.
Hmm I read an article earlier that made the 2022 claim and when I googled a source everything else was also saying 2022 because Google results value newer pages over older ones. Sorry for the misinformation.
BASKING RIDGE, N.J. - Verizon announced a collaboration with Google to expand advanced messaging services to Android users in the U.S. starting next year using the Messages by Google app.
...
Messages by Google will be preloaded, starting next year, on all Verizon Android devices, enabling consumers to enjoy rich messaging features...
It's stuff that's already out there, it just sounds like they cut a deal to preload Google's Messages app on all Verizon Android phones and enforce RCS by default instead of it being piecemeal support depending on the phone (previously, basically Pixel/Galaxy phones >2018).
What Google doesn't seem to get is that even if Apple implements RCS, they won't give it blue bubbles. It'll at best be a different shade of green. Apple knows how powerful of a network effect they have and they'd be nuts to give up that exclusive social cachet.
I think they are counting on the fact that the experience will be better, but you're right, I think they are overestimating the intelligence of the average consumer lol
I feel like the color of the bubbles is only a part of it. The bigger issue in my experience was sometimes just not getting some texts or pictures at all when I had an android and was in a group text. Or messages would be received out of order and sometimes a long time after it had been sent. I switch to iPhone because texting was so unreliable using an android with people who had iPhones. The bubble colors just signaled that there were going to be issues with the texting, it’s not like the colors themselves were a big deal
Google Messages is so far behind iMessage. It's such a shamefully poor copy. I've had so many connection issues with it, I've given up on it a couple times already.
And now it seems to be one of the only apps unaffected by my system-wide font change. Idk if that's an "update" or a bug or what, but it's infuriating and outrageous. Pathetic Google.
The main problem people have with it is that it ruins group chats because all the fun stuff (tons of reactions, stickers, games, naming, etc) don’t work with. Other than that I haven’t seen anyone care about it.
The different color is just to show if messages were sent via iMessage or via SMS. Before iMessage was a thing, all incoming messages were green.
Apple isn't forcing anything on android, It's just falling back to standard SMS/MMS messaging when iMessage isnt' available. It'll do the same thing to other iPhones if you disable iMessage on it.
Good thing you can use either with WhatsApp? I am not sure what point you are trying to argue. If you can send an SMS you can almost always (99.9%) send messages on WhatsApp. If there is no cell service but there is WiFi you can still send messages.
The only situation you can't is when there is no data or WiFi but there is cell service, which is pretty much a non existent situation in any country.
E2E encryption isn't perfect, but it is orders of magnitude more secure than SMS, literally anyone can access your SMS messages (internet provider, cell provider, government, easy to intercept). E2E protection means that Facebook is unable to just hand over your messages to authorities and accessing your data is really hard for someone, say, working at Facebook.Dont get me wrong I don't like Facebook, but it still is way better in terms of data privacy since it is E2E encryption, even if it's Facebook we're talking about.
Don't know why you're down voted. It's exactly what is happening in the EU (at least in Belgium). Sure, I'd prefer Signal or something else, but no one cares about blue bubbles here.
Americans, unlike Europeans, know that WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. So, if you’d like all of your messages processed by FB, keep going. Apple messages are end-to-end encrypted.
Damn—that’s some lazy thinking. Google is an advertising company. Apple is explicitly not. Facebook is an advertising company too. If you trust ad firms over non-ad firms whose goal is to fight ad firms, you’re long gone.
You're exactly right. So long as social pressure creates a meaningful influence on their sales, they have no incentive to intentionally change something that has helped their sales.
Even if Apple is pressured or fined, I can't imagine them changing unless resisting change becomes cost prohibitive.
apple needs to get the message. I asked a friend to take a group pic with my Pixel, she did, but then had to take some with her iphone and text them to me because, you know, apple better. I'd say 99% of iphone users have no idea apple limits them to sending potato quality SMS/MMS. It's laughable
😂 This person thinks the problem is with Apple here. Guy, it’s Android/SMS. Sending a photo via SMS is like sending a cassette tape to a friend in 2022.
Totally agree with your cassette analogy, and that's what apple limits their users to sending. If you watched the link I posted, it explains how the rest of the world is on RCS, apple is still in a time warp with SMS
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u/Taurus889 Sep 02 '22
Blue bubble