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Comment by ghusto | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain? I'm sure you don't mean the phones can't call each other, but I'm struggling to think of what you _could_ mean then. All the messaging apps I can think of are on both Android and iPhone?

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He/she is likely referring to iMessage. If your friends are on iPhone, there is social pressure for you to get an iPhone so everyone can use iMessage. Otherwise, iPhones drop to very basic SMS/MMS support.

This is the one thing that makes me hate Apple with the fire of a thousand suns. I can't send a video message to my iphone friends without it looking like it came from 1995.

Blue bubbles are the most popular NFT

IMO, screw that. WhatsApp and a myriad of other messengers are perfectly free and cross-platform. Europe (or at least certain countries within Europe) seem to have largely escaped the stupid bubble colour classism of the American market. Possibly due to bad MMS support, so people just moved on to Internet messengers as soon as those got off the ground.

Edit: more moderate phrasing

Screw that indeed, but in reality, here in the US/Canada, if you are dealing with a group of people who are 100% iPhone/iMessage, you have a pretty low chance of getting them all to switch to WhatsApp to accommodate you, the one lonely Android user who must be poor or stubborn or something.

Caveat: I successfully did it with one group of friends. Have completely failed in all other attempts.

I had to do some quick research to figure out if you were joking. Normally I'd say "meh, different strokes", but this seems more like everyone _had_ a stroke. Good lord :D

You can’t think of iMessage?

I truly could not have predicted that this is what it was. After someone above pointed it out, I actually searched online to verify they weren't joking.

So uh, you guys _really_ like SMS, huh?

Apparently 1.3B people like it! I have used many messengers over the years, starting with IRC in the 90s, then ICQ, Skype, FB messenger, Discord, Slack, Telegram, and of course countless forums. By 2012 or so everyone had an iPhone, and texting was really popular, so group chat emerged as a preferred method of communication between family and close friends and gradually group chats had formed within my extended family on 3 continents. Honestly I don’t see much difference between all the different messaging apps, so I just use whatever everyone else uses.

This is interesting. I had a dive into all this since I initially posted, and it seems this iMessage phenomena is a U.S.A. thing. iMessage is mostly unused in Europe, iPhone or not.

I don't care much for Whatsapp myself and prefer Signal, but I eventually gave up because life's too short for crusades.

Reading up on the iMessage adoption in the U.S.A. is like reading alternative-history fiction in Europe :P

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