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Comment by maratc | Hacker News Reader

Living in the country where absolutely no one uses iMessage, the whole kerfuffle about the colour of the message bubble leaves me completely flabbergasted.

I mean, probably the curvature of the Earth is involved, but from here this looks like a very small hill to die on.

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iMessage is not about the color of the bubble. While the color is what's most noticeable to the end user, a non-iMessage chat means:

  1. Unable to rename group chats
  2. Photo sharing quality is lowered  
  3. Video sharing quality is abysmal
  4. Messages traverse carrier networks in plain-text
  5. Loss of undo send and delete
  6. Loss of inline replies
  7. Loss of typing indicators and read-receipts (if enabled)

Just to name a few.

I won't doubt the fact that you know that other cross-platform messaging apps exist.

My mom, in her 70s, barely gets iMessage -- half the time I receive "text" messages from her as an email! Throwing in Whatsapp or Telegram would just confuse her.

My grandma in her late 80s managed to learn a non-iMessage messaging app just fine, and she’s the most active one in my family group. If grandmas all over the world can use something else, your mom can, too. I’m sure she wasn’t born with the ability to use iMessage.

I'm just going to say that everyone's parents have different abilities. She can quilt like crazy, but the phone isn't her thing.

I’d add that photo and video sharing might not be free as even today it depends on your carrier plan.

… So it’s an extremely useful signal to tell you to use a different messaging app with this person. Glad we sorted that out!

Me too. But rather than the colour of the bubble, what leaves me flabbergasted is the fact that there is a country where people seem to associate a stigma to owning a phone of a brand perceived as being "less luxurious", and even take some pleasure in inflicting some annoyance on those in the outgroup. And all this because, hear, iMessage is the default app. Not because of some choice, or because alternatives aren't available. No, because default.

It's not the color of the message, for me. If an Apple user sends me a video it comes through as an extremely low resolution and highly compressed video. Look at the unwanted grackles at my mom's bird feeder: https://i.imgur.com/7gBt22i.png

Fantastic, right?

Because it's sent as MMS. Apple implementing RCS next year will mitigate that.

RCS lacks end to end encryption.

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