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Comment by fgsfdgdfsg | Hacker News Reader

My opinion is that the "green bubble" risk is too great for teens to take, and that alone is responsible for iPhone hedgemony. No, I am not joking. Even as someone in my mid-20s, I get asked about why I use an Android device

This is true. Accordingly, "blue bubbles" (iOS to iOS) are also a thing, and Apple pushes them hard in product placements all the time. They're subtly recognizable from a distance, too. It's all very on purpose and quite clever.

It's crappy but it turns the entire imessage group chat into regular SMS group chat.

I have an iphone now because the rest of my family does and they didn't want to lose imessage functionality by having me in the group chat.

Yeah apple did this intentionally.

Phil Schiller to Tim Cook: "moving iMessage to Android will hurt us"

March 3, 2016

https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1463558823109660677

Yeah, same reason there's no imessage on the web like there is for android.

I don't like it, but that doesn't mean there's a great workaround.

From an Android user's side, we also have to put up with 'Liked "<message>"' spam.

Or you could just download Telegram/Signal/Whatsapp/Matrix/FBmessenger.

It is so baffling that downloading an app is where people draw the line and would prefer to spend hundreds of extra dollars instead.

Installing an app isn't the problem. Getting everyone else to install the app is the problem (and their choice isn't "app or money", but "install app and switch everyone over or just exclude/mock the weirdo with the low-class phone"). If you're somewhere where everybody is on Whatsapp/Facebook/... it's similar struggle with people to switch to something else you prefer (e.g. for me iMessage never was topic because just not enough relevant people had iOS for them to build an expectation that everyone has it. But there was a phase where getting people to accept that not everybody has Facebook was kind of annoying)

> Installing an app isn't the problem. Getting everyone else to install the app is the problem

Getting everyone else to buy a new phone seems to be a bigger problem, but apparently that extremely unreasonable side won.

And try as you might to get people to switch, the majority will inevitably revert back to iMessage. I really hope Apple is forced to interoperate with RCS and to make all the bubbles blue.

Yeah...facebook isn't dominant because it's the best platform, it's because moving away from it requires your entire circle to move away from it as well, otherwise you're just running two platforms side by side.

Google Plus was superior to facebook but never stood a chance.

Yeah that's like getting your entire family to switch over from facebook to something else less awful - good luck.

Oh, and then getting all of THEIR connections to also download another messaging app. And so forth.

And I think the price argument against iphones isn't valid any more. The 13 Pro Max is $100 less than the Galaxy S21 Ultra. You're paying a premium for the brand new flagship phones obviously, regardless of brand.

Because it isn't one app. You have to have them all.

It cuts out a lot of group messaging features when somebody has an android phone. Reacts don't work, nor any sort of imessage stickers.

You are forgetting the biggest feature: You can actually leave an iMessage group chat. An SMS group chat will keep texting you as long as someone keeps it alive. To stop getting them you have to individually block every user.

LOL sounds like a good reason to be contrarian to me.

Statistically speaking, teenagers don't want to be contrarian in that way.

Outliers exist, but in the average teen doesn't want to be perceived as too poor to own an iPhone.

That was the missing bit of info for me. It's not just that the color is different, it's that a non-iMessage user in a group chat degrades the functionality for everyone else.

For those of us in our 40s and not american - what's "green bubble"?

When two phones with iMessage enabled text each other, the texts are blue and the experience is better-- the texts are more responsive, have read receipts, high quality videos/images, games, and more.

However, when one of the users does not have iMessage (almost always the case when one person uses android), the text messages show up as green. Since these conversations cannot make use of the above features that you have with iMessage, and along with this, the texts have a green color to them. This has come to be known as "green bubble" problem.

The problem is exacerbated in group texts. The iMessage features are available only when every single person in the group chat has iMessage. If someone doesn't, the entire group falls back to MMS which is a degraded experience from both the iPhone users' side, as well as the Android users' side.

Teens can be fickle, and I've heard you get excluded from group chats-- hurting your social life when so much of it revolves around group chats. I think you see the point by now.

I just held out again and purchased an Android Phone, but I could see myself breaking down and getting an iPhone for my next one. Most recent problem being that you can't send videos via MMS without them becoming heavily compressed, and have to switch to a third party app like Signal or WhatsApp.

Interesting.

I've historically been an android user and have an iPhone now. Never really bothered with iMessage and my social circles use whatsapp or signal primarily.

I guess in markets where the iphone isn't dominant (UK), this social dynamic doesn't really exist.

That’s what I’ve heard. In the US the two messaging standards are currently iMessage (Apple only) and SMS (everything).

Yes FB Messages and WhatsApp and Signal and Telegram and everything else exist. But none of them is anywhere big enough to be a default that everyone has.

So you often end up on iMessage or SMS.

If you text an iPhone user over SMS, the message appears in a green bubble in the Messages app. If you use the native Messages protocol, it's blue. So green bubbles are an obvious outlier if most of your contacts have iPhones.

Allegedly (I can't confirm, since I use Android) in imessage, non iphone users messages show up in green speech bubbles, while imessage users are blue (or grey?) [0]

[0] https://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/mobile-phones/the...

That’s not quite right.

Anything you send shows up with a grey bubble. Doesn’t matter how it’s sent.

Anything you receive by SMS shows up in a green bubble.

Anything you receive my iMessage shows up in a blue bubble. Obviously only Apple users can send iMessages, And Apple devices default to iMessage if they detect that the other user is also an iMessage user.

iMessage is end to end encrypted, supports higher quality videos and pictures, sound clips, reactions, read status, little apps (no one uses this), reactions, effects, longer messages, and probably other things that I am forgetting.

Most crucial he, EVERYONE in a chat has to be on the same protocol. Obviously this is easy when talking one on one, but it becomes a big issue when talking in a group. In a group of 100 people it only takes a single non-iPhone user to cause EVERYONE to fall back to SMS.

If you use an iPhone and you send a regular SMS, the messages appear as green bubbles. iMessages appear as blue bubbles

A text message. Blue messages are iMessage

Basically its a scarlet letter that means you have an android phone.

When ios users text message each other, the messages are blue and also many forms of rich media and reactions can be sent. When a user has a green bubble it mostly means they dont have an iphone and cant receive lots of metadata, its even a great risk for misunderstanding to be made as the emojis are all completely different. The actual reason is less pretentious and is just notifying the user that the message is unencrypted (due to being a normal SMS), and that alone is a good enough warning to disassociate. But thats evolved to being a 99% correlation with having a non-iphone but specifically android device since the competitors have all left the market by now.

Android users often are out of the loop on a lot of things, like many dont even know the reality of the green bubble issue. Many will learn and choose to continue missing the social cues, opting to believe that its just a small subset of pretentious people that care and that theyre better off not being around that kind of person. They don't know that many opportunities are being withheld from them.

Why is that?

Well. Think about it. Many android users looooooove to tell people about how much control they have over their phone. Everyone knows! Nobody cares! Nobody wants to hear it! If we go on a hike and take awesome photos using their high tech transdimensional phone camera from the future, they cant share the photos offline with any built in function that all the other phones already have and their own phone might explode before we get back to civilization! Iphone users can though. We’re all content just waiting for Apple to introduce the same functionality 5 years in the future. Nobody thinks its really magical when Apple tell us an old reintroduced technology is. Android wasnt in the running, so its nice to get an extra feature.

People are just tired of the missed social cues, and lack of integration into the ecosystem now. Ironically Apple could open it up, at least to get encrypted messages, but honestly the world has evolved in such a convenient way that Apple just has to wait it out. People use Whatsapp and other stuff, and their major US market keeps gravitating to iphone.

This seems a very US problem - in markets where the iPhone isn't dominant, people use whatsapp or signal and just get on with life.

Your snark seems to be rooted in that as well. In the UK AFAICT 'nobody' cares about the amount of control they have over their phone, because 'normal' people predominantly use android devices.

I covered that, pretty specifically

> but honestly the world has evolved in such a convenient way that Apple just has to wait it out. People use Whatsapp and other stuff, and their major US market keeps gravitating to iphone.

Regarding your post:

> Your snark seems to be rooted in that as well.

You either want one of the main driving the answers or not, bring it up with US teenagers who have to react to this social pressure much more consequentially than the rest of us

> You either want one of the main driving the answers or not

But you were a dick about it, your comment is not simply explanatory - "Many android users looooooove to tell people about how much control they have over their phone. Everyone knows! Nobody cares!"

This appears to be a facet of the iphone being dominant. In the UK market for instance, this characterisation wouldn't really fly as android is used by a lot of 'normal' people.

> their own phone might explode before we get back to civilization

characterising android phones this way is like me saying that you need to hold an iphone a specific way or it won't get signal - it might have been true for one model a few years ago but isn't really relevant to most.

I guess this is why you're getting the downvotes.

It's an article and study about the US. Everyone has a variety of answers now. iOS users (in the US) really make unprompted quips about "the other" this way, when not in mixed company. I feel extremely comfortable letting people in on whats going on, 87%.

Because my elderly parents don't pay for my phone.

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