87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone | Hacker News Reader

87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

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275 pointsnudpiedo783 comments

My two oldest children - 13 and 15 - have loudly proclaimed that having a "green bubble" would be worse than death.

We like to fingerwag at social media companies for knowingly negatively impacting children's mental health and self-esteem, yet Apple is aware of how their systems ostracize children, in their own peer groups, who can't afford to carry around luxury phones.

It's one thing to be ostracized by strangers on social media, it's an entirely other thing to be ostracized by your own friends and peers. The latter is tragically more personal and leaks into the real world with real world consequences.

On the other hand, this seems like a teachable moment, where perhaps kids can be encouraged not to marginalize others based on trivial differences in messaging apps. The drumbeat of inclusivity is pretty loud these days so it shouldn’t come as too great a surprise that including their green bubble friends would be the decent thing to do.

I don’t place much blame on Apple for completely stereotypically standard teenage attitudes. If it wasn’t green bubbles it would be uncool sneakers. The answer is not to force interoperability (though that would be great!), but for parents to help their kids grow out of these tribalizing behaviors.

It's not just a trivial difference in bubble color. SMS conversations in iMessage lose features. The social rejection is a result of the features lost when an Android user participates in a messaging group.

> On the other hand, this seems like a teachable moment, where perhaps kids can be encouraged not to marginalize others based on trivial differences in messaging apps.

If you think that something something inclusivity will effect your children’s thinking more than peer pressure, boy do I have news for you.

TIL that there are people who just use whatever messaging app came with their phone.

I may not like Moxie Marlinspike's decision to host Signal on the Play Store, but it's still the best SMS app out there for providing a moderate degree of privacy, and it'll run on iOS and Android (and desktop!) alike (though, on the desktop it only supports Signal-Signal messages, not other SMS).

Why is the answer not to force interoperability? This is exactly what we should be doing because it's generally good for the communications ecosystem and the overall marketplace.

It's not an answer to the problem of teenagers having to learn decency, but I'm failing to see a downside to taking Apple to task on this.

What is the difference to Nike providing kids with flashy shoes when the sole purpose is class and coolness? According to the same report, Nike is the most preferred fashion brand among teens.

At least with Apple's message indication you know you're getting encryption and thus privacy from carriers. Would it be less problematic if Apple simply mentioned "warning: this is unencrypted SMS"?

> What is the difference to Nike providing kids with flashy shoes when the sole purpose is class and coolness?

Maybe what Nike is doing is just as bad...

Only reason its not encrypted is because Apple won't allow it to be.

Apple is free to open the iMessage ecosystem if they'd like to allow Android to send encrypted messages to iPhones as well. The truth is that Apple isn't doing this to help customers identify unencrypted messages. They are doing this for the network effect.

Because wearing Nike's doesn't visually highlight every person's shoes on the basketball court that doesn't have Nikes.

How do you know that? Because apple says so?

Key exchange happens through apple. App is proprietary and as far as I know the apple devices upload to the apple cloud in a way that makes apple able to read the messages by default.

Is the iPhone se really luxury? If you are starting from the idea that every teen will have a smart phone, I think apple has blanketed the market with products at all the cost points.

A new unlocked iPhone 13 Mini device is $850 in Canada. I can buy an unlocked Android smartphone for under $80 that'll do what I need. Though I splurged and spent just under $200 on my last phone. Something that costs 4x as much as a decent mid-range model that will meet most people's needs is luxury.

Most people do not purchase phones and service plans the way I do (separately - I buy an unlocked device up-front then use it with my preferred carrier). So they probably don't think about it like that. It's just an extra $30 a month on their bill for the lease. That really starts to add up, though.

> Is the iPhone se really luxury?

If you combine the SE with the local used market, it can get extremely inexpensive. I'm currently rocking an SEv2 that I got for $150.

I'm not saying that $150 is cheap objectively, but in relation to Android phones - even used ones - it stands up pretty well.

This is especially true since Apple supports phones for so long. If you're cost constrained, you can spread the cost of a phone over more years than a typical Android phone.

It's pretty luxury nowadays. Decent smartphones go for less than half that cost, and good ones can be even cheaper. The accessibility and affordability of high quality mobile computing devices has risen across the board.

But Apple is very much on the upper mid range to high end side of things.

Anything that has 87% of the market is by definition mass-market.

Edit: Back in the '90s, PC Magazine had a saying, "the PC you want costs $3,000". This figure was fairly stable despite the improvement in PCs' performance over the decade.

By this standard, and considering that as well as a PC it's a phone, a camera, an atlas and an encyclopedia, a TV and a music player, the iPhone doesn't seem too much like a luxury.

You can walk into a prepaid wireless store and grab a new Android phone for $20.

The average worldwide cost of a smartphone is ~$300.

Android phones can be bought new in box for $50-$170. The iphone SE which is basically last years model starts at $429 and comes without the power bring which allows you to plug into an outlet which costs an additional $18. That is iphones start at a cost more than the majority spend on a phone admittedly worldwide but that isn't what I call all cost points.

Is there a reason to allow a tech company to arbitrarily emphasize ostracization and bullying to increase their bottom line?

I know there are common accusations of fan-boyism in both directions but I would hope this community can unite in calling out Apple over their messenger bullshit. Real stakeholders at Apple need to realize how damaging this profit optimization is.

It would be great if the general population would switch to another messaging app (or better yet a protocol that multiple clients support). I get the sense that this is how WhatsApp is used in other countries. It feels like a real regression to be using SMS based messaging in 2022. Seems like iMessage succeeds only by sheer numbers and ignorance of the general population.

Messaging is pretty fascinating. WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Line, Telegram, iMessage all so strongly dominate their respective set of countries/regions and a lot of them have their own distinct set of user mannerisms/memes.

This is indeed how WA is being used.

I have few friends with iphones here in Spain and of those all of them use WhatsApp. Not sure if they use iMessage with other Apple users but nobody ever uses it to SMS me (and if they did I would tell them to use something secure)

The main messaging apps in use here are WhatsApp (#1 by far), Telegram (used a lot for groups) and sometimes signal.

I've never had a friend suggest something else like Google, iMessage or Facebook/Instagram. I'm not on any of those anyway (even though I have an Android phone I don't use a Google account with it).

Telegram has existed for a good number of years and despite all the hate from HN is the Ukrainians (and Russians) preferred way to share news (not military secrets, obviously).

There are a lot of things that succeed due to the ignorance of the population

iPhones aren't luxury phones, sheesh.

Their flagships are, sure, but the SE is extremely competitive in the US, especially when you consider their longevity and support. And then of course there's the used market.

I mean, if 87% of teens own an iPhone, then that's very much by definition NOT luxury, as luxury is necessarily exclusive to some degree.

> I mean, if 87% of teens own an iPhone, then that's very much by definition NOT luxury.

Yeah this is the point. Apple has a strong brand and pricing tactics that places itself as a high-end company. This branding works really well and Apple is perceived as luxury by many people, but the truth is that it creates consumer products and there's no luxury in that. If the iPhone was a luxury you wouldn't find it everywhere in almost all high schools. Luxury doesn't dominate a mass market.

Some tech guys seems to think that value comes solely by a sort of price/performance ratio. If you can get MORE POWER for less money then you are getting ripped off. The rest of the price is not justified, you aren't paying for anything else so you must be paying a luxury premium. That's really a shallow way of analysing apple products. You pay more because the following is included: long time support (software updated and that continues to work without random behavior for 5yrs), really high quality control and higher quality components (no things that randomly stop to work after one or two years), great customer and tech support (yeah, non-tech people actually need it), seamless software integration, privacy and security guarantees. There are so much more things included in apple devices beside than tech specs and people find a lot of value in that.

You can get a new Android phone for $20. The charging cables alone for an iPhone, which don't come with the phone, cost $19 each by themselves.

It's a good opportunity to teach your kids about how crappy and shallow other kids can be, and also teach them how to respond to criticism like this.

20 years ago, you'd get shit for not wearing the cool kind of shoes your peers had.

This is not about brand, this is more like "you can't participate as an equal in this virtual communal space".

Having a single android user in a group chat means the whole group chat is essentially crippled.

The kids are not being shallow here, Apple is being anticompetitive.

I think most kids understand that. It's just that adults reality is way easier - if you don't like some people you just don't spend time with them.

For kids, if you are not friends with people you spend 80% of your time with, you can't get the same kind of friendship elsewhere. The social games they play are way more complex than anything they teach them in school.

The shoes thing is definitely still true in some circles. It's a valuable lesson to teach, but a very hard one. And most people don't internalize it until adulthood. Most parents will shrug and just spring for the iphone rather than listen to the incessant complaints.

And kids still get shit for not wearing "cool" shoes!

When I was younger I got teased for not having a Starter brand fitted hat, and I wasn't even into team sports.

This is it, if it wasn’t the phone it would be something else.

There is quite a healthy market for used iPhones if you're talking about the blue bubble phenomenon.

Yeah, my son is entirely too young for a phone right now, but my wife and my plan is to just upgrade every few years and give him one of our old phones. It wasn't too long ago that we did the same thing for our parents.

It's frankly insane that you think that is the solution to this problem.

I don't think you actually understand the problem

Humans will invent indicators of social status whether you like it or not. Get rid of green bubbles and something else will rise to take its place.

They'll just look at what's in each other hands. Or what's on their feet. Or what clothes their draped in. All as they always have.

I just got a backup iPhone SE for $430. It's fantastic. Same chip as recent iPhones. Very decent camera. Better battery life than my 13 pro. Actually fits in pocket. More fun to play games with one-handed. Easily will last 5 years with a case. Not a luxury device, but pretty competitive with what a lot of young people in even middle-income countries would pay for phones.

$430 is getting close to luxury phone. And the features on remotely affordable iPhones are often below or maybe on par with what you used to be able to get from LG for $220 before they sadly stopped.

The chip only matters for gaming really, cheap Android phones have been fast enough for years, and if the price difference is similar to a Switch or something then I'd rather have a dedicated gaming machine if I was really into gaming.

I suppose it also matters for niche stuff like music production, but Android does very well at being a generic multipurpose device for non-enthusiast tasks, and at being cheap enough that you can afford a dedicated device.

The short support period is an issue though.

$430 is a lot of money though... and probably a lot for a "kids" phone too? You can get previous generation androids that aren't total POS for ~$150, like a Moto G 8-9.

There's a fair number of posts in the thread now pointing out that iPhones are not-that-expensive, and all of them drive up my own engagement with the plight of the people who can't afford one. If you're, say, in a 5% bracket of society who can't afford one, it's all the more awful and potentially debilitating to have a marker on you that flags you as part of the 5%, no?

And at $430 it's still a lot more than 5% in the USA.

With the SE (and regular 13 & 14) having not-that-great 60 Hrz displays, I could never switch from my 13 Pro to anything else but a 14 Pro (that's why my second phone is a Pixel 6 Pro [or sometimes a OnePlus 10 Pro], as 120 Hrz & 1440p are requirements for a phone to be in my pocket).

I used to have a SE (2nd Gen), prior to ever experiencing a better display, and now I can never go back,

However, if the came out with an SE that did have 120&1440p, I would definitely buy.

$430 is a lot to some people.

You can buy SE 2020's for significantly less, it's just that Apple themselves don't sell those in retail (but are still producing those and selling in gross).

This seriously concerns me. I'm almost of the opinion that teenagers should not have phones for anything other than strictly communicating: voice and video calls and messaging. But that cat is out of the bag and now we have people growing up literally addicted to devices that are very detrimental to brain development and intelligence, emotions, socialization, etc.

I remember my parents saying that TV was going to rot my brain... then video games... before that it was comic books. Are there any reputable studies that show having a smart phone is detrimental to the health of a teenager? I've seen studies suggesting social media has a negative influence on the mental health of certain teens, but they aren't one and the same.

Well, just use any of the litany of messenger programs out there that are available on every platform? I know there is a huge network effect, but I don’t think it is fair to blame apple here — they ought to somehow show whether a message goes from your SMS budget vs mobile data one.

This is quite frankly utter bullshit unless there is a lack of parenting going on i.e. you brought your kids up to be judgy assholes.

My kids and their friends have a right mix of all sorts of phones. They don't even talk about it. They just work out how to deal with it. Mostly that results in them picking a common platform, usually Discord or Snapchat and using that.

This is not a technology issue!

Can't help but notice the irony of how much judgment is in this post

i have a compilation of screenshots from adults saying the same thing from dating

You act as if they don’t make cheap and relatively accessible phones. They do. iphone se is a perfectly good phone that can be bought new for $400. Sure it’s not at the absolute bottom end of the market, but it is fairly accessible when you compare it to their flagship phones.

Maybe America is different but to me 400 for a phone isn't cheap. If poor people in the US are buying their children $400 phones then they can shut up about high living costs.

I'd consider my ~$130 Oppo to be the upper end of cheap with NFC and snappy performance.

You can buy a new Android phone for $20. A $400+ phone, with a $19 charging cable that is not included, is a luxury for many people.

Just because manufacturers have inflated the prices over the years that doesn't make $400 cheap.

My current $200 phone is better in every aspect than the high end flagship phones not too long ago. With its performance and features it's still far from the low end.

Apple phones also last long enough, barring accidents, that if the adults are using iPhones, the kids can probably get hand-me-downs that're still usable and receiving updates for at least a couple years.

Fortunately, an iPhone isn't strictly a luxury, as there is still a healthy market of second-hand and independently refurbished models available at a variety of price points. Apple's actions over the last few years threaten to seriously undermine this, though.

> who can't afford to carry around luxury phones.

The solution is to buy an older iPhone second-hand.

iPhones aren't luxury in 2022. They cost no more than Samsung and Google models today.

The low end goes way lower with one than the other. And that's important for everyone who's not as privileged as you and me. And believe me, an iPhone (any brand new unit), just as the Pixel or the Galaxy S22 are way unaffordable to a huge swath of the population. That being said, the low end of Android phones is quite good and quite quite cheap.

It's like saying that there are Lamborghinis that cost as much as a Nissan GT-R Nismo. Yes, that may be so (even if it isn't in reality). But your Nissan Altima is way more affordable to way more people.

Apple phones are cheaper and last longer than Android devices.

Then just buy an iPhone, or get over it? You're acting as if Android vs. iPhone is an immutable part of a child's identity. It's not.

You can get a totally workable used iPhone cheap, because they keep working for so long.

It's not like you need a lot of horsepower for texting. My kids take a beat up 8-year-old iPhone 6 out when they go to sleepovers and things. It still works fine.

The US is straight out of a dystopia from an European perspective.

Absolutely absurd statement.

Is this similar to the "trauma" suffered by teens that wore Levi's Jeans that didn't have the Red Tab, back in the 80s and 90s? To compare a green text bubble to mental health issues is offensive.

I'm pretty certain that a lot more interaction occurs through phones than through jeans.

As an adult, some of my friends have asked me to switch to an iphone so they could use imessage features in a group chat. It's not hard to imagine being left out of a group for this reason. I don't think I've met a girl in my age group who has anything other than a negative opinion of "Android Users." This stuff doesn't bother me, but I can see how it would upset kids.

> Apple is aware of how their systems ostracize children, in their own peer groups, who can't afford to carry around luxury phones.

Tell me about it. Audi, BMW, Ferrari and Lamborghini have been ostracizing me, and so have all the gas stations around where I live! Not only that, but Microsoft, developers of pro software, movie theaters, restaurants, travel agents, lawyers and hookers! The nerve of them all to exclude me from their products and services simply because I can't afford them. It's very cruel and so arbitrary.

I think people here take issue with the walled garden model of an intra-device comm protocol, not the price point or desirability of iPhones. The comparison to luxury cars is especially crude because it's an industry far more tightly regulated to the benefit of customers than any section of consumer electronics.

(iPhone user here) It does seem to me that Apple isn't playing fair and this is no longer the technical issue it once was. Apple has so far refused to adopt RCS (the successor to SMS and MMS) which is now an industry standard for text messaging. Because of that, aside from the green bubble, the text messaging experience with non-iPhone users is subpar. Images and videos are compressed and things like tapback and group texts just stink.

https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

RCS is awful. It’s an out-of-date, encumbered “standard” with poor global commonality in adoption. It exists for one reason only - because US carriers wanted some way to keep charging per message like their old sms cash cow, instead of being reduced to just proving dumb internet piping. Despite that, the carriers couldnt even agree amongst themselves on the "standard" RCS features to deploy for 10 years or so, until google co-opted the effort for their own goals semi-recently. Let it die.

RCS is not end-to-end encrypted. (But neither is SMS, I get it).

The fact that they're pushing a protocol in 2022 that has state-of-the-art design for fifteen years ago, is disingenuous, and is emblematic of all the chefs that have their hand in the pot with the Android ecosystem.

Given the iPhone's marketshare, is it RCS really the industry standard?

Naive question here. What's the encryption story here with RCS?

What I like about iMessage is that I feel its relatively secure. Given the choice of trusting Apple vs a Frankenstein arrangement between Android and the various carriers, I'm inclined to go with Apple, unfair practices aside.

They have no incentive to adopt some external standard if 4 out of 5 teens will be adopting their platform in the not-too-distant future.

RCS is less of an industry standard than iMessage.

Apple built something better. So did Google. Then Google killed theirs. Then they did the same thing three more times.

It's no wonder nobody wants to use Google messaging, and that Google resorts to smear campaigns. People would rather use WhatsApp spyware from FB/Meta or totally unencrypted Discord/Slack than bother with another Google IM product (which, let's be clear, is 100% what RCS is).

PS: Apple preserves a backdoor in the end to end crypto of iMessage for government surveillance that allows Apple to read all iMessages. iMessage isn't good either.

Lol RCS a standard. Because Google says so, just as with so-called "web standards"? In the real world, people use WhatsApp, SnapChat, Insta, Telegram, Signal, and, in fact, iMessage and SMS/MMS.

Iphone users on android devices are also subpar. When you "like" a text or whatever those interactions can get sent as a new text. One iphone user in a group text can spam the entire group with a flood of pointless interactions.

I don't want RCS. Keep iMessage for people and very very limited businesses please.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/04/google-disables-rcs-ads-in...

Show me an RSC server run by a carrier and I'd believe it.

Why would apple give up this advantage?

They do this on purpose. They know from focus groups this encourages lock-in.

Apple is the new Microsoft.

I know the "green vs blue bubbles" gets a lot of press, but as someone who is not a teenager, and on the contrary is considerably past middle age at this point, that is not the real reason iMessage has a stranglehold on users.

I've got an Android, and I recently went on a vacation with a group of friends who all had iPhones. I did feel a bit like a leper in the group chat we had set up for our vacation, and it wasn't because of green and blue bubbles. Not only was the experience pretty broken for me, it essentially broke the experience of everyone else. I couldn't do emoji responses, which are a huge way folks communicate in group chats these days. Videos I received on my phone were essentially unwatchable. Videos or images I would send to the group would randomly just not show up on some people's phones. At the end of the vacation my good friend said flat out (jokingly, but still with a point) "Dammit hn_throwaway_99, just get an iPhone".

It's the breaking of group chats that makes iMessage the lynchpin of Apple's anticompetitive stance here.

I guess I'm old in that I basically never use emoji unless the platform changes something like :-) to one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

SMS has supported Unicode since the very early 2000s. I remember getting SMS messages in Thai on my Nokia 7110 GSM when I was in Thailand in 2003. So there's no technical reason why iMessage fallback to SMS doesn't support emoji.

> At the end of the vacation my good friend said flat out (jokingly, but still with a point) "Dammit hn_throwaway_99, just get an iPhone".

My friend groups mostly communicate on WhatsApp (a lot of them are either international, or Americans with significant overseas travel). This is the first time I have ever been glad to be a WhatsApp user. Oh, and messages, photos, and emoji reaction show up just fine cross-platform.

Asking a friend to get a $xxxx device because the company you use is unwilling to make their silly messaging application cross-platform is extremely out of date.

SMS has always been pretty broken for group chats and multimedia. I don't think we can blame Apple for that

We could blame Apple for not making an Android iMessage app, though

Hard for me to disagree with that. The reason I have an iPhone is that I was having trouble with the family group chat when my mom was in the hospital.

Whenever I go in vacations with friends we talk. Rarely, we talk over the phone, otherwise we talk in person. Never text. That is the point of going together and not separately.

Seriously, do you not know any other app than "Messaging" and "iMessage"?

It's worse than that. At our kids' school, they are required to have iPads for their school work. By default then, iMessage becomes pretty much the only game in town for them to message with their friends. If they want a phone that can also then participate in those conversations, iPhone is the only option, it's not even a choice. SMS isn't a thing, if you have any other phone, your friends with iPads only don't even have a phone number to send it to. Something like Discord is really the only other option, but that only seems to have any sort of mind share with kids who are more than just casual gamers.

My school district almost went down that road before making the much saner decision to buy chromebooks.

I find it strange how iMessage has become so important (for lack of a better word) in the States. I have had to use it for the last 2-3 months, as WhatsApp cannot be installed on my not-updated older iOS anymore, and I have to say that WhatsApp is way better at doing the messaging thing than iMessage.

Granted, I'm in my early 40s and I honestly didn't know that there were different "bubble colours" when using iMessage (depending on the phones that are part of the conversation, that is).

Although in the States, most people don't use WhatsApp by default unless they regularly text overseas (which most don't). I have it installed but there is like one person who I very seldom use it with. Another person I use Facebook Messenger with. Work folks I often use Google Chat for. Everything else is SMS/iMessage and, as a non-teen, I absolutely don't care what color the bubble is (unless there's some cost implication for international texting).

Text messaging is free for the most part in the US--and most people don't care about encryption details--so it's natural to just use what's built in.

Let’s not forget that on the original iPhone, all the bubbles were green because it only had sms. When iMessage came to the iPhone, Apple didn’t intend to rule the world with blue bubbles, blue was just an indication that you were talking to one of the few other iPhone users.

> When iMessage came to the iPhone, Apple didn’t intend to rule the world with blue bubbles, blue was just an indication that you were talking to one of the few other iPhone users.

While I want to agree with that statement, Apple really makes it obvious that they try to make SMS suck compared to iMessage.

The biggest glaring example is the green and blue shown in their messaging app.

Their design guidelines literally for iMessage for businesses say contrast of text to background should be 4.5:1 or higher[0], but to target 7:1. Now what do their text bubbles comes out to?

iMessage(#FFFFFF/#4389F7): 3.4:1

SMS (#FFF/#68CD68): 1.99:1

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

I definitely think part of it was to make those iMessages more visually appealing. I don’t think they knew how well it was going to work, but to some degree I do think this is what they were going for.

Or an indication that I wasn't being f*cked by insane SMS fees.

Do people on androids in the US actually use SMS?

My experience in the UK and France is WhatsApp/telegram have basically 100% penetration and SMS is only used by businesses and 2fa

Yes. I've never used whatsapp or telegram. I use SMS weekly or daily.

Same in Australia although American cultural bullshit tends to leak/be adopted. So the blue/green bubble probably will become a thing with our teenagers after they import it via social media.

iMessage is a very US thing

... a very US thing for people with iPhones. Which exist in a ratio of about 9:1 vs Android users, apparently.

Same here in Spain. I have not communicated over SMS with a real person for 5 years or so. Only thing I get is MFA and spam crap.

I love the idea that somewhere, there are a bunch of high-priced antitrust lawyers having multi-hour serious discussions and debates about green and blue bubbles.

and what would those lawyers do? green just means sms. if you disable iMessage you should get that on iPhones too. there has to be a way to differentiate the method of sending texts, as they may incur some costs in some markets.

My two high scoolers are produ members of Android generation and apparently dong give a damn as long as they get to play games and chat on discord and text with girls. I am going to count that as a win against the industrial marketing complex.

You think giving them phones from an Ad company is a win /against/ the marketing industry?

Granted I don't live in the US, but is Apple even spending a lot on marketing the iPhone in later years? I feel like their success is based on social pressure/word of mouth more than bombarding the public with messages. At least where I live, most of the iPhone ads are made by carriers if anything

What's a "green bubble"?

Yeah, I had to google it too:

"If you see a green message bubble instead of a blue one, then that message was sent using MMS/SMS instead of iMessage. There are several reasons for this: The person that you sent the message to doesn't have an Apple device. iMessage is turned off on your device or on your recipient's device."

So apparently iPhone users see text messages from us Android users in a green bubble instead of a blue one. And apparently they've been conditioned to think this is icky?

In iMessage, which seems to be a thing in the USA (I don't know of any other market where it's a dominant messaging system), non-iPhone users participating via SMS appear to iPhone users with a different (green) background color to their message bubbles.

Android users’ text message bubbles show up green, and you can’t send the “tapback” reactions (or rather, they show up as a “so and so has liked your post” rather than a thumbs up icon). This is annoying for Android users and it’s kind of tedious for iPhone users to have to vet group chats to see if there is a single Android user who might be annoyed. Apparently this is factoring into people’s phone purchasing calculus.

See today's other story:

One trick Apple uses to make you think green bubbles are “gross”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33176668

The way an SMS message is displayed in iMessage (sent from a non-Apple device, as opposed to a "blue bubble" for iMessage-to-iMessage messages).

Who tf uses imessage? Its all whatsapp, telegram or fb messenger or discord here. Sweden. SMS is not used. Only for... passwords, spam and reminders for packages.

87% of american teens

imessage/sms/texting is king in the US

Anecdotally, my twins (both 17) have been asking for Android phones since they got their first phone at 14. I thought they’d be excited to get iPhones because I read reports and stories like this, but it doesn’t appear to be universal.

perhaps it's because the adults they look up to aren't iPhone users?

This proclamation is likely triggering for the HN audience

It's basically social suicide for kids now.

But it's great for people like me, because I'm much less likely to be added to a family group text.

It's about as anti-competitive as you can get. Even putting aside the shortcomings of SMS, simply putting bright white text on an acid green background is visually nauseating. Why would a company that cares so much about aesthetic make this deliberately terrible visual design choice? If iPhone had a market share below 50%, this would be a terrible business decision. Turns out, since they have a very high market share, it's an excellent business decision.

> My two oldest children - 13 and 15 - have loudly proclaimed that having a "green bubble" would be worse than death.

They'll get over it quickly, since in reality (I also have two teens) all group chats with friends are "green bubble" chats because participants include Android users. They'll instead grow to loathe the "blue bubble" chats with their parents and/or guardians.

I read your comment to my wife and her response was “what is a green bubble?”.

We are living in Japan and here we only use Discord, WhatsApp, and Line for messaging.

I think the mobile phone market in Japan is also dominated by iPhones now?

I had hoped the younger generations would move away from being complicit in manufactured corporate status schemes, as a kind of rebellion against the terminally online & connected older generations. Sad to hear they're more compliant with these schemes than any other generation. Hopefully the next generation will rebel.

Everybody should just install Signal and be done with this nonsense. Teach children that when they use Imessages, Apple can intercept them. This is not a complete endorsement for Signal as decentralized E2EE protocols are better for other reasons, but Signal is the easiest for people to adopt.

Sounds like their attitude may be a good reason to get them android phones

They would rather be dead than be uncool! Yikes.

Generalizing here, but that sounds exactly like teenagers. No perspective, and under way too much pressure to conform.

What astonishes me is how the mind of teens just cannot palpate the world they live in. Not to plagiarize Louis CK but even with an android flagship in their hands at 14, being cast away due to strange techno/market forces is enough to forget everything and suffer.

in 2050 kids will storm out because their pocket nuclear fusor isn't the trendiest. 'thanks moooom'

A lot of teenagers would rather be dead than uncool.

One day, someone will figure out how to become a "blue bubble" with an android, and that person will make a lot of money.

from someone who is not too long outside of high school and so maybe remembers this better:

imessage is specifically impactful because it doesn't exclude from individual communication as much as groups. you can still talk to your friends just fine but i remember being left off group texts because the experience is otherwise just so bad. can't add people can't react to stuff whatever.

what usually happens is there ends up being a second gc: 1 is ostensibly the "main one" with everyone in it and the unofficial second is with just blue bubbles. but communication usually ends up in the blue bubble one.

i will add it's not nearly so bad now, most people just do a snap gc but that wasn't the case e.g. 6 years ago.

This gives me an idea for my Halloween costume this year. I am going to be a green bubble. I am actually proud to be one anyway.

Since the green bubbles are an Apple issue appearing on Apple phones, the way you avoid them is by avoiding Apple phones.

suggesting teens avoid iphones, in a thread about 87% of teens having an iphone is a very interesting strategy

I would be so much ashamed by the education I would have provided to such kids, I would never tell this in public.

Same with mine!

Sounds unbearable. I hope they survive to adulthood as a green bubble.

Maybe you should start by not being a bitc* to your two children

Entitlement Overflow, common bug in teens.

That’s probably because feature-wise it is

Take away their phones, problem solved.

Is this a new thing? And if so, given that iPhone have been around so long why is this new?

It is definitely not new, at all.

Source: I am in my mid-20's.

what about whatsapp and signal, do kids not use them?

Seems like an opportunity to teach that it is folly to "Keep up with the Jones."

Wait till they hear that they can make purchases in other areas to "Keep up with the Jones" - fancy cars and McMansions. By then they will be fully enslaved to debt, but boy will they have that glorious glorious status.

I hate apple with a passion for not opening up iMessage, but here we are.

That being said, I am getting my first iPhone in just a few days because I am sick of the 100000 choices between android phones that all suck in one way or another. I don't believe they will last more than a few years if my last samsung is any indication. And I don't give a crap about what android can do- I just want a phone that works.

So I guess you win Apple.. but it's criminal that a vast reason they have so much market share is because of imessage and the fact that it's "broken" with SMS to some degree.

I see this a lot around here. HN user hates company with a passion but buys their products rather than deal with some minor annoyance.

I guess you don't hate Apple with a passion then.

> it's criminal that a vast reason they have so much market share is because of imessage and the fact that it's "broken" with SMS to some degree.

That's just speculation, though. It's entirely plausible that the fundamental reason they have so much market share is because people agree with you:

> I just want a phone that works.

I've gone back and forth between Android and iPhone myself, and what draws me back to iPhone is the lower TCO and more appliance-like nature of the phone. I have enough tech toys to play with every day, I don't need my phone to be one of them.

Is there some sort of troll farm apple campaign going on here? In my experience Apple has been much more troublesome, their walled garden pretty much guarantees bugs and errors and ofcourse the trademark throttling of CPU, battery, functionality in general when they think it's time for you to get a new phone, where's the die-hard fandom come from? My $340 Android works better than a $1000 iPhone.

I admit they're actually better built phones, but Apple is shooting yourself in the foot and paying for the bullet.

> So I guess you win Apple

You can still push back against the bubble elitism: Settings → Messages → iMessage Off. My bubble’s not turning blue until Android users can participate.

My next smartphone is gonna be an iPhone as well. Android is becoming ever more locked down, hardware attestation is already a thing and there's really no reason for apps to not require it. What's the point of putting up with Android's imperfections and Google's bullshit if my rooted and customized phone can't run the apps I need because I "tampered" with it? Might as well get an iPhone.

Sony Xperia still offer a great experience. Near stock Android, regular updates, quality cameras.

> I don't believe they will last more than a few years if my last samsung is any indication.

I think this is the real reason for kids using iphone, most a seeeded with parent's castoffs. If your parents are android users the phone is probably broken. :)

I remember when Steve Jobs said it would be an open protocol.

We went through exactly this 2 months ago, I motivated her to buy Iphone 13 mini, first Apple products between both of us ever.

We both regret it at this point sourly, its a properly shitty overpriced device with decent (but not extraordinary) photos. Compared to any average android for half that price its - fugly and looks cheaply, too thick, too thick black borders on screen, properly fugly and dysfunctional front notch camera (faceid doesn't work half the time, ie when its dimmer, with masks etc), you will lose pattern unlock for good, there is no fingerprint scanner under the display, battery is average (meaning really not impressive despite thickness like its 2015). Apple supports only basic bluetooth protocol so any properly good headphones will have slightly worse sound. iOS is fast but rather poorly architected (I understand a lot of this is down to what folks are used to, but stuff she showed me that annoys her is outright poor engineering and step down from current Android in usability).

The way its done and architected insults your intellect constantly, "we know better what you want/need than you, and you have no say/options".

You can argue its not for power users, but my wife is exactly that - just a normal user who just wants to use the phone. For long term android user devices like comparable Samsung galaxy is simply much nicer device to use. She likes her 5 year old Samsung much more than new Apple. So much for wow factor.

At this point we both regret getting it, she for paying for it and me for recommending it. The only benefit is decent resale value. Since this is mostly US forum I expect to be grilled for this, but this is proper long term android user's point of view, who gave recently Apple device a chance and regrets it.

Have you tried a Pixel? I've been happily using them for years.

What sucks about Xiaomi 12/12X or Pixel 6A for instance? S22 would be also nice phone if it were not for not so great battery life (and most of the people won't notice slow shutter).

There are plenty of great phones depending on what's your requirements, now if you want SMALL Android phone you have very limited options with lots of compromises usually, if you don't care about size too much there are plenty of good options.

iPhones are amazing, and there are definitely a few brands of Android-based phones that also deserve to be called amazing. iMessage definitely helped, at a time when SMS sucked and nobody (not Google) was stepping in to improve the situation, but they also crush Androids in accessibility and ease of use all day. Something that gets teenagers hooked early...

Hmmm, this probably will change when the Digital Markets Act starts.

Apparently Android is the new Open Social.

how do you know that iphone works?

What 100000 choices?

There are basically 6 Android phones. Of which only one matters - the Samsung Galaxy in it's 2 biggest sizes.

So basically you need to pick between 2 Samsung phones, the major difference being size.

I tried avoiding the iPhone bandwagon for practically a decade, going from flip phone to the HTC Droid Incredible, to some HTC M<#>, to Samsung S4, and then a series of Pixel phones, starting with the OG Pixel, and ending with the Pixel 3.

I have to say: besides a few clunky swipe experiences, the iPhone is better in every single way. The camera opens when I click the camera button. The phone pairs wonderfully with my airpods. With Android, the camera would inevitably lag after pressing the button, sometimes taking 10+ seconds to load, and making me miss a photo.

I don't miss Androids/.

>The camera opens when I click the camera button

I've been a lifelong Android user but this problem is very real and has only gotten worse, and even with a brand new current-generation device it still takes 2-3+ seconds (sometimes up to 10 seconds like you mentioned) for the camera to open. Extremely infuriating. Does no higherups at Google use an Android phone and see this happening? Or maybe they just don't give a shit

I switched recently due to divorcing myself from Google services and products. Overall I've found the iPhone experience to be basically the same, but with a much worse notifications system.

> ...Pixel 3. ... The camera opens when I click the camera button.

I still have a Pixel 5 and one of my favorite features is double pressing the power button to activate the camera. It works so well that my camera is ready to go before I have even focused on the subject. I don’t know if this feature is available on an iPhone.

I was forced to iPhone 18 months ago and while it isn’t as bad as I’d feared, notifications just don’t seem right to me on iOS. I’m constantly missing things that I never would have on a Pixel.

Same. Used android for eleven years and switched a year ago the iPhone.

You can feel the dedication and craftsmanship with the iPhone.

I am on an Android bandwagon since first Samsung Galaxy. The sheer joy of being in a total control of my hardware and software is still here. I am installing some apps directly from vendors and thus avoiding big companies censorship. My current phone is more than four years old for now and I am thinking about buying a new one only because the battery is slightly degraded. This is just a phone, a tool, used mostly for communication (including right now).

That is a camera problem in the Google Pixels, specially 3s and 4s. Never a thing in old Samsungs and Motorolas I had.

> The phone pairs wonderfully with my airpods.

For some users. If you somehow fall through the cracks or off the happy path of AirPods usage, modern iPhones that lack the headphone jack are miserable experiences. I've had enough struggles getting AirPods to connect to switch back to wired IEMs for good.

I don’t mind the Android OS but other than one of the Google models I had the handsets were crappy, with pocket dialling or freezing on the numeric pad to make a call, sometimes full of telco adware. I could only handle 3 years or so of it before switching back to iphone.

This claim seems a little odd to me. I searched more about it and found this article: https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/01/06/gen-z-survey-says... from January saying the exact same thing as this fall survey, and this article form 2020 which says it was 86%: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/apple-rules-86-pe... . I can't find an estimate for teen iPhone ownership besides this company but this just seems very high to me when you account for teens without a phone as well as non-iPhones. In comparison from what I can find about half of adults own an iPhone. The fact that it is this high and stable for several years seems suspect to me.

If not owning an iPhone really makes you the social outcast that some comments here are suggesting maybe people don't even admit to it for a marketing survey.

It's like a survey on how may times you have sex in a month.

On instagram is even higher. 99% of influencers have iPhones.

Showing an Android is basically declaring you are some sort of a monster.

Americans, do people not use whatsapp over there? In Europe everyone uses whatsapp for literally everything, with a sprinkling of Telegram if you are into something a little subversive and Signal if you actually care about privacy.

The only time I use text/sms is to recieve codes for things, and I'm doing that less and less.

Lifelong US citizen here - I've barely heard anyone mention it in person my whole life. If it wasn't for reading about it in discussions like this, I would probably never even think about it. iMessage, social media DMs, and regular SMS seem to be the most common in my experience. Signal/Telegram are pretty much only used here by tech people and/or people discussing not-so-wholesome things and I'm always surprised to see people on HN talk about moving their whole family to one of these apps or using them more casually in general.

In my experience the only Americans who use WhatsApp have family outside the US/Canada. There's a very large proportion of the population living entirely inside the Apple ecosystem.

US carriers stopped charging for SMS around 2010 or thereabouts (cannot remember), or they included so much in the plan that it may as well have been free, so most people just stick with the convenience of not having to install another app on their phone. For photos my friends and I just emailed them to each other. I usually tried to move the conversation to Skype/AIM/MSN though after cell devices were more developed. Now its discord and telegram for everything for me with SMS sprinkled in.

No, they don't. Also facebook seems to be still a big thing in the US. Really funny how the culture is different.

The only time I use SMS is for to receive codes for two factor authentication. Nobody ever receives an SMS from me.

Mainly use WhatsApp to chat with European friends or a group chat that includes someone with android. Else it’s all iMessage, Telegram, Signal, and Slack / Discord for more community groups. And the occasional Instagram or Twitter DMs. (And that’s not even mentioning WeChat, Facebook Messenger, GroupMe, …).

Amazing how fragmented the messaging space has become.

Nobody I know (locally) uses whatsapp. I'd be surprised if a majority have even heard of it.

I live in northern Europe and the only people I know use WhatsApp are immigrants and children of immigrants that use it to communicate with people in the old country.

I have a lot of European and Israeli neighborhoods, and unfortunately they are very deep in the WhatsApp ecosystem. It's painful.

I only use whatsapp for contacting friends from outside the country.

When I was a teenager and mobile phones became widely available everyone had Nokia, Siemens or Sony-Ericsson, depending on how well-off the family was, it was either the old or new model. But we customized the phones as much as we could - custom ring melodies, screensavers, custom covers, if the phone didn't allow that then at least some stickers. Everyone wanted to be unique, go against the social norm.

Android phones are arguably equivalent in terms of functionality for what today's teenagers use (whatsapp, tiktok and camera), but offer much wider variety and a chance to stand out.

Why do the current US teenagers follow the herd in this regard?

Messaging network effects, if you're in an iMessage conversation and an Android user joins, suddenly the conversation becomes SMS only with photo and video sending being crippled.

Its the same as a social network, if all your friends use it, you almost have to in order to communicate with them.

Because owning an Android means you‘re poor.

This stuff scares me a bit, both because green bubble culture is creepy, and because I really do not want iOS to become the dominant mobile OS just as Android is becoming one of the most amazing platforms out there.

Would love to hear your thoughts on what makes Android "one of the most amazing platforms out there"?

I have never understood the arguments that Apple doesn't have a monopoly or monopolies and thus should get away with all the anti-trust violations they get away with. They definitely have monopolies when it comes to market power and influence, even if Android phones (which are split across several manufacturers) have a larger worldwide market share.

This is the concept that's about to be tested in court. The majority of the revenue generating segment of the smartphone market is iOS while the majority of the overall smartphone market is Android. I get the sense that Apple did this on purpose but the Unity lawsuit may write a new chapter on what it means to be a monopoly. This Planet Money episode talks about this dilemma: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/18/914563075/apple-v-everybody

You're allowed to make a messaging app that doesn't interop with others.

Is the point you're making that that Apple shouldn't be allowed to release its own messaging app?

What's the anti-trust violation here?

This is surprising but I'm more surprised by the finding that "26% of teens own a VR device"

Is VR really getting that popular?

A lot of kids got oculus quests for christmas/birthday but I suspect many collect dust. Some sort of daily or weekly active user stats for teens using VR would probably be a better indicator.

I own a vr device that collects dust.

Yes. The Quest2 did really well last Christmas. My kids use it daily. Several of their friends have them too.

> Is VR really getting that popular?

I hear VRChat got really popular during the pandemic among teens, but I also find these numbers very surprising.

A recent NYT article mentions that Horizons is awash in teens and pre-teens.

I see a lot of heat over SMS. In Italy almost no one stil use SMSs, they are basically dead. Almost all use Whatsapp, Telegram or both, no one use iMessage, not even iPhone owners, because smartphone market is much more balanced towards Android phones.

I'm an Android lifer and Apple's refusal to open iMessage is why I will not own an iPhone. That said, I'd willingly pay $5-10/mth for iMessage on Android. Apple has a number of services on Android now (including Apple Music & TV), it irritates me to no end they refuse to support this

The biggest concern I have from this is how comfortable the next generations will be in walled gardens where they are unable to look under the curtain let alone tinker.

... this is why Apple should be investigated for Anticompetitive behaviors regarding app store policies and iMessage interoperability.

So I have owned an Android all my life and never daily driven an iPhone. The iPhone (edit forgot the iPhone part) screen seems more responsive and very bright and colorful. To me the freedom of an unlocked phone I can put my own apps on is very important for me for Android. Why should I get an iPhone?

edit: not sure most teens care or are unaware of Android's around 3 years support length for a phone.

Longer support period. Easier to tell if you're getting a "good" phone since there's only a few models.

I use Android phones, but that last points almost dragged me in a few times after getting disappointing phones.

Edit: you asked why _you_ should get an iPhone, not why teens should.

> Why should I get an iPhone?

I am a musician and the iPhone has lower latency. Many music apps perform better on iTunes and some app developers never even bother developing on Android.

> edit: not sure most teens care or are unaware of Android's around 3 years support length for a phone.

I don't think they care either, but in many cases it makes iPhones a wiser purchasing decision, so they should care. If we're decrying the effectiveness of iPhones' marketing and intentionally cultivated and preserved incompatibilities on children, our alternative must be to encourage practical decisions. Sadly, a slightly old iPhone is often the most practical decision, because Android is still a closed platform masquerading as an open one, and they aren't kept updated outside of Google's and the manufacturers' hardware marketing strategy.

Apple is making money from the use of its phones, so (mostly) happily keeps them going far longer.

If flexibility and having an unlocked phone is important to you then you might just be better off with android. I've daily driven both. I kind of like the iPhone hardware a little better but android software a little better. both do what I need.

You don't have to. But this article isn't about you. Kids will, because of peer pressure, and the fact that it just works.

Interestingly, I am a heavy Apple user, and I am trying to convince my teenage daughter and wife to use iPhone and have offered them iPhone and Apple Watch, and they have strongly preferred to stay on Android. I think it's unsurprising most people use / want to use an iPhone in the US, because it has a network effect with iMessage and it's clearly a superior experience for the average person. But, globally that network effect doesn't exist, so it makes sense in a more international sense that many people would prefer being in the Android ecosystem.

The claim doesn't surprise me, but I definitely think it shouldn't be taken as universal.

It is not clearly a better experience. Give me a break. 99% of the time it is a grid of icons that launches apps. The notification area on Android is far superior and is actually quite useful compared to iOS where it is a jumbled mess. Apps on both platforms, more and more, are virtually identical. If you want integration with apple watch, then great use apple but your blanket statement about superior experience is exactly the pernicious "network effect" (fanboi-ism) these kids are being hit with.

Yeah, my mother is basically the only one in my family who uses Android, so when Tim Cook ticked a bunch of people off the other month by suggesting that we should buy our moms iPhones, I suggested it to her. She doesn't really know the difference between Android and iPhone, but she seems ideologically opposed to paying more than a drug dealer would spend on a burner phone because "that's all she needs". It's pretty frustrating because when she has problems, she asks me for help and isn't all that happy when I tell her to get an iPhone.

It was also very frustrating when trying to share photos to put together a slideshow for a funeral. And on that subject, it's her primary camera now and the quality leaves a lot to be desired on that front.

On the other hand, it's kind of amazing how much an $80 Android phone can do, and that it can take passable pictures at all, so I sort of see her point too. And obviously there are quite high end options as well.

It's definitely not universal. The imessage effect has been instrumental to Apple's market share in US so they won't be altering that.

Used Android since like the original HTC phone in my early teens, owned probably 6-7 android phones in my life (majority Google since the good old Nexus days). My first iPhone was the 12 and as of now, I think my kids first phone will be an iPhone. The walled garden is annoying and monopolistic but an iPhone just works. 2 years later, my iPhone is still going strong and I don’t even want to change my phone for the near future. They’re just built better and supported better. My family relentlessly complain about the Pixel 6 heat issues and plans on “upgrading” a year later.

Have been using OnePlus 6 for 4 years now, no issues so far. Maybe it's the Pixel phones then?

I switched to the iPhone and, under some aspects… it’s so much better. I had an iPhone for on call duty previously.

If you see the phone as just a tool, the iphone has no rivals.

It either can or cannot do something. You don’t have to evaluate seven different brands.

The ui is okay, and once you get used to it you’ll 99.9% recognise the ui in the next iphone.

It’s small! The iphone se is beautifully small. Yet fast and snappy.

And the next time I can get the next iphone without thinking too much. Which is huge. Xiaomi today might be good, and xiaomi tomorrow might be trash. Same for samsung. Same for pixel.

No wonder.

I love how the loudest criticism is "Apple is making teenagers feel bad with green bubbles".

I will gladly take that over the next generation being completely plugged into the ad tech surveillance machine.

My kids have iPhones because they inherit ours when we upgrade. I suspect it's the same with many other parents. And: Much easier to provide support, share photos, reimburse them/send money, and do many other things that would be frustrating with Android.

I remember when Steve Jobs apologized to parents for unapproved in-app purchases and promised to do something about it. And they did. That resonated with me. I think the company still cares, as evidenced by its support options and privacy requirements.

When I still bought Android devices they tended to be problematic. Probably HTC and Xiaomi were the best designed, but updates were a pain especially on the Hongmi. LG camera sucked. Google Nexus had screen problems and eventually bricked, with no support options. I think I got my son a "Blu" phone at one point, which just had bad performance. Was happy to give him my iPhone 6 and move up to an 8.

Green bubbles are disgusting, to the point where you won’t be allowed to certain events or parties if you RSVP with a green bubble. You’ll just never get a response back, don’t even bother. It’s a way to gate keep. There is even an androidphobic slur for those who text in green bubbles, that I won’t repeat here. Ask your kids.

Our whole family and extended family only have Android. Our kids all get the free Android phones.

As for me and my house, we shall never own Apple products.

People can get what they like, but I struggle with the cognitive dissonance of "Everyone should just get iPhones, it'd make everything easier" and "Oh no why is <company> acting evil with their monopoly?!". I like choices. I wish Windows Phones could have stuck around longer.

We'll ultimately get what we deserve as consumers. Is it any surprise FB wants to be the Apple of VR? We've shown we like our cozy premium walled gardens and are willing to be abused.

Want more data? I've got a campus with roughly 60k unique devices. 50% are iOS. Another 20% are MacOS. Android is 7%.

What are the rest? Windows laptops?

There is no sane technologically educated person who will buy Apple or Google phone. It is obvious that the smartphones are data gathering and control tools for the surveillance economy. Degoogled smartphone with limited usage is the safest bet for now. Apple computers are still valuable, when configured properly, but I don't have a high hopes for the future. Apple will lock whatever they can to "protect" the bottomline and expand the Imperium.

I am with you, but remember, you are preaching to their employees or at least employee-wannabees in here. :-)

Best things about the iPhone:

- long term support - can expect a new device to get 5-6 years of Apple Updates

- AppleCare

- better build quality than cheap android devices

- Reasonable expectation that required software will support it

- Not having to listen to a teen complain about what their friends have that they don't

- Finally, Updates, APPLE SUPPORTED UPDATES! - I'm really salty that my android phones had to be rooted and have another OS installed just to get basic security updates after 12-18 months.

You forgot three very important points:

- Privacy. Apple didn't built their business on milking people's data unlike google and so many others.

- Security. Among many other factors the walled garden does provide a higher degree of security compared to Android.

- Performance. Not only iPhones completely destroy Android in terms of performance and optimisation but the fact they are so performant make them great long term purchases. Still rocking my iPhone X from 5 years ago and it's still buttery smooth.

Kids aren't stupid, they want something that works and is as fast as they are.

> long term support - can expect a new device to get 5-6 years of Apple Updates

It’s actually even better than that. The iPhone 5s is still receiving security updates (albeit to iOS 12) 9 years later.

You mean updates that intentionally slow your device so that you will want to buy the new model?

I switched from iPhone to Android (Fairphone 4) recently, but my reasons for doing so prove the point, I think. I was willing to give up a slicker UI and a nice camera (and getting-a-bit-too-much-now postprocessing) in order to have more control over my audio files. But this thing wasn't cheap and to 99% of teens I assume it would not be worth it, even disregarding social pressure.

Even if people said that apple lacks innovation after Jobs, what they have done here in market penetration, branding, and ecosystem is brilliant. I don’t even know how they did it, they just keep creating new stuff in the ecosystem that makes it so hard to switch out once you’re in it

The visionary should be rewarded. Maybe that’s Tim? He does a far better job compared to the other ceo of big tech companies..

Kinda makes me glad we have WhatsApp dominance in Europe.

For all it's faults at least we're not trapped in an Apple Ecosystem where all other phones still use SMS!

I haven't sent an SMS in maybe 13 years. It's amazing it's still so widely used in the US because of iMessage lockout.

iMessage doesn’t use SMS when communicating with other iPhones.

I'd like to challenge this narrative somewhat, why do people care about what teens like exactly? I've heard for years (EDIT: decades, as long as I have been alive) teens are a "coveted demographic," but teenagers, especially today hardly have any disposable income. Why is some sense of "popularity" valuable, which is somehow valuable enough to be its own category apart from sales, a quantity that I thought would be much more important.

Wouldn't being popular amongst people who actually buy your things more important? iPhones are definitely popular, but they are profitable not just because they are popular, but that they are popular at the price point they are.

That's kinda surprising given apparently it was only a few months back that iPhone's market share finally surpassed Android in the U.S., and it bodes pretty well for Apple's long term future - are there stats on how often people change between Apple/Android (and is it predominantly in a particular direction)? (FWIW I think I went through two iPhones 15 years ago when they first came out I guess, but found their screens overly prone to getting smashed and switched to Android/Samsung, lots of reasons I doubt I'd ever switch back now, though it's certainly not impossible).

That's scary. That's sucking a huge amount of money out of parents' pockets.

My guess is a lot of their parents are iPhone users who pass their phones on to their children. My wife only recently upgraded her iPhone 8, and only did so because of how noticable better the photos were on my new iPhone. In my experience Android phones don't last that long.

This could be just another index for measuring a country's wealth. Percentage of teens who own an iPhone. I like that. Here in Brazil, the price of some iPhone models is greater than 1 year of the national minimum salary.

I have a different take than most here. Let's face it the devices are pretty good in both platforms. Apple does the basic stuff fast, but doesnt even support the other stuff because it's a prepackaged experience. Androids are very versatile and have some convenient features (secure folder, headphone jack, sometimes better cameras etc). The primary reason for apple is the brand recognition and lifestyle choice. Many people think they d look 'amateurish' holding an android. It s an uber-popular fashion item. And kids are a ton more sensitive to peer pressure

What I don't see discussed in here is why we should care what phone teens, particularly, have. Teen preferences are largely built on what's popular right now; it's not as though I'm still wearing untied high-tops and carrying a boom box. Do we have any evidence that this particular early preference carries on to adult life, when it's they who are making the purchase with money they have earned? Do we think teen technology preferences have influence on other age groups?

In short: What's the point here?

I guess it is something people outsides of American can't reason about. SMS here is like 10cent USD per message (Taiwan). No one is using it outsides of verification codes now. People all use line, fb, wahtsapp or whatever network based IM. Because You can get a infinite data traffic plan with a decent price like 20USD/month.

Besides that. You don't really want to give other your phone number unless you know them well. IM's identity is disposable unlike phone number.

Also of note:

> Weekly usage of VR devices moved to 14% from 17% last Spring; 26% of teens own a VR device (flat vs. Spring 2022)

I find these numbers actually more surprising, but I hear VRChat is really popular.

Is this green bubble a US teens thing? Personally never heard a person in real life complaining about it. Maybe cause people here use WhatsApp, viber, telegram etc

Very much a US thing. Perhaps the idea of green bubbles is specifically a teen thing, but what the green bubbles represent, a worse messaging experience over SMS/MMS, is an entire population thing.

Μένεις στην Ελλάδα; Ποια εφαρμογή χρησιμοποιείται περισσότερο; Viber;

Συγγνώμη για τα κακά ελληνικά μου.

I am always surprised by stories like this. I'm part of several distinct, mostly non-overlapping social circles. The majority of people in all these circles are iPhone users. But none of these circles use iMessage as the chat app.

I'm in NYC, so it's not like I'm in some obscure corner of the planet either.

iPhone Ownership Among U.S. Teens Hits 87% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33169684 - Oct 2022 (70 comments)

Green bubble bullying is worrying.

Interesting to see how widespread this is outside of US. I guess it's heavily correlates with iPhone user share.

In where I'm from most peers adopted Telegram in the past 5 years.

If this statistic is true, it would mean that Google's Android will have a poor future - at least in the USA.

I'd expect a significant portions to switch once they're paying for their own phone instead of being bankrolled by mum & dad.

It's just a line in the article, the data isn't provided. This is the source of the headline quote:

> 87% of teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone; 31% of teens own an Apple Watch

And sorry, but that's just laughably wrong. Even in my teen's upper middle class school of tech scions, the penetration of any kind of phone sits somewhere around 50%. And I don't think I've even seen a smart watch on these kids.

It's an actual survey from a company which does that kind of thing, which I take considerably more seriously than vague anecdotes.

Why is this laughably wrong? Why is this so hard to believe?

Also, why would being a tech scion mean that you wouldn't want to use an iPhone? If anything, I'd argue that being in tech makes you appreciate the benefits of having an iPhone.

I think there is the implicit assumption in your comment that people benefitting from tech are more likely to use tech but I'm not sure that's a safe assumption

My 13 year old daughter has an Apple Watch. It allows her to send and receive texts even though her phone has to be put away, and the teachers haven’t stopped that. Yet.

Tech workers might be stricter with their childrens' phone use given that they know how much tracking and manipulation is possible

I'm pretty sure every kid I know has a phone. Most often than not, it's a hand-me-down from someone else.

If I could install Firefox with ublock origin plugin on iOS, I'd switch today.

I wonder why their sample was heavily weighted in the south

to everyone who thinks that the green bubble/blue bubble thing matters a ton - most teens don't text, they just use snapchat.

Is there no one who feels that kids shouldn’t have iPhones until they are 18 and don’t accidentally put information online that leads predators to them?

As someone who was on the internet by age 12 and was coding by 15 I see this argument and can't help but shake my head.

If you want your kids to grow up with zero street smarts or ability to distinguish threats then sure. By all means keep them locked in their bedrooms till 18 too.

Don't be surprised when they stop talking to you by age 21.

I've been assured that we still can't call it a monopoly until it's at least 120% (accounting for yearly turnover.)

It’s about status more than anything else. A teen‘s greatest fear is that owning an Android makes you un-effable.

Reading through comments like these really makes me appreciate how this entire iPhone culture thing really didn't swing over to where I live.

It really sounds like a nightmare.

If that is true, wouldn't that be a de facto monopoly which Apple could be sued for?

It isn't illegal to have a monopoly.

If iOS was properly supported on Linux, I'd use one.

But it's not.

"26% of teens own a VR device"

Sounds very strange.

Well, religion sells, that much is clear. Who ever said that the younger generation were not religious? They are, they just changed their object of devotion.

Meanwhile my daughters use second-hand Android phones running AOSP-derived distributions, as do I myself. Only my wife - who has a company-issued Samsung Galaxy A40 which they do not want me to mess with - runs a stock distribution but I did manage to tame the beast by disabling snoopy Samsung "services" and installing an ad-blocking local VPN firewall. They haven't complained yet so I guess we're good to go.

For the price of a single second-hand iPhone SE2 (around $200 where I live (Sweden)) I could buy both my daughter's phones as well as my own. Still these Android devices offer far more useable features than that iPhone and they'll last longer as well if my 11 year old Motorola Defy which I use daily is anything to go by [1]. It still gets 3 days on a single charge, running the original battery - which is replaceable if so needed.

Instead of iMessage we use mostly Telegram plus some XMPP as a backup in case Telegram goes bad. My oldest daughter also has Whatsapp installed but hardly ever uses it. Our data is kept on the server-under-the-stairs, out of reach of greedy data hogs like Apple/Google/Microsoft/etc. The Invidious server (also under the stairs of course) keeps Youtube ad-free, our own mail server (under... you guessed it) keeps our mail from being harvested by data parasites, etc.

Just like iPhones often are stepping stones to largely Apple-dominated monocultures so these AOSP-derived Androids can be stepping stones to free software households. I do know which of these I prefer. There is only one system left here running Windows, this being my wife's company-issued laptop.

The moral of this post is that parents do have some influence over their children's choices if they start early enough. By the time they reach their early teens they are far more focused on what their friends do so make sure to inculcate a healthy distrust of Big Data and its marketing practices - green bubbles and all - in them. If it worked for us, it can work for you.

[1] The Defy was marketed as being 'IP67 waterproof and shockproof'. My oldest daughter used to have a Defy as well. She left it in her trouser pocket when she dumped those trousers in the washing and started the cycle. One complete cycle (at 40°C) plus 1200 RPM spin cycle later she found it - it was still working... The damage? I replaced the earpiece, for the rest it just worked. I'm using that device as a remote-controlled media player now. While rather underpowered and short on memory the thing still works fine as a "dangerous work" phone. You won't like browsing the Javascript-encumbred web on it though...

The reasons my kids have iPhones can be summed up as

1) I use iPhones so I get a new one every 2.5-3 years or so.

2) The phones last long enough (performance, battery life, OS support) that when I get a new one, my kids are perfectly happy to take over my old one.

Let’s face it, kids don’t choose phones their parents do. When you become a teenager these days you are probably on your second or third smartphone. At least if you got the first one at age 7-10 somewhere, you probably didn’t decide between Android and iPhone, your parents did. It doesn’t matter so much then whether it’s a status symbol or what color the text bubble is. You chose a platform long ago.

My 16 year old son has an iPhone because Apple has the best parental control integration built-in. Kids can always get around it, which is why I have monitoring the little bastard doesn't know about via my WiFi router, along with automated deactivation of his cellular data connection via a schedule with the carrier (after 10 PM on weekdays).

The "green bubble" crap that I get from my iPhone owning buddies due to my Pixel is most obnoxious because it's entirely Apple's choice to have that.

However, no question that teens are incredibly status conscious. After all, Abercrombie and Gap built massive businesses slapping labels on shitty goods and marking the price up by 1,000%. Nike as well.

Why go to such lengths to monitor your 16yo?

Jesus. I know it's off-topic and things differ across cultures or whatever, but I remember moving out of home to go to university at 16. The idea that there are parents out there doing stuff like monitoring their kids' internet connections at that age is almost inconceivable to me.

It's one thing to have monitoring that your kid knows about, but monitoring your kid doesn't know about is child abuse. 16 year olds are people too, and this is no different from installing spyware on your partner's phone because you suspect them of cheating.

if you think your kid won't outsmart you, think again

As a parent of a toddler wondering why you deactivate th data. To disincentivize sneaking out? Preventing game addiction or too much social media?

1/3 of my kids have iPhone. The use of iPhones amongst them and their peers is directly related to their level of IT/Tech knowhow. Long story short the kids on android are probably gonna wind up building the tech the kids on apple consume. Or atleast that's how it's playing out amongst them atm. iPhone kids legit just take photos and short vidyas mostly of themselves. It's like you can correlate an iPhone with a toxic level of vanity and a lack of technical literacy amongst the teens.

Doesn't match what I see. Tech knowhow is more likely correlated to whether the kid has a laptop or PC to play with rather than what OS is on their phone.

Since we're trading anecdotes, none of the iOS engineers on my team have Android phones, but about half of the Android engineers have iPhones.

But the kids with the iPhones will be the financier controlling the purse strings. See the Commodore vs. IBM clones vs. Mac in the early 1980s. Apple wins because wealthy people use them, it's Apple's advantage.

Android is definitely the road less traveled and I could totally get that kids using them would correlate with a larger mental toolbox.

But in their free time the android people building the tech stacks will be watching the iPhone influencers.

The irony that your own post displays a toxic level of vanity regarding technical competency but projects it onto the children.

What a weird generalization.

Based.

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