Let's be clear. Green vs blue is a bit of a red herring.

The real issue is that Apple has to have some fallback protocol for texting with non-iMessage devices, but refusing to upgrade the fallback protocol beyond SMS/MMS makes the texting experience worse for everyone, as described in the article.

(To avoid additional red herrings. No one is thinking here about opening up iMessage itself to non-Apple clients, just upgrading the fallback option. Also, I can't speak for everyone, but among the non-terminally-online Gen Xer and late-Millennial Americans I know, "texting" means using the built-in app on your phone. Switching to another app is a relationship step. Many of them are blithely unaware that they can't "just" text a photo or video to me or other Android users, nor that I can't just sign out of a group chat when I feel like it.)

SMS is also the fallback protocol for iMessage. If I’m in a place with poor signal, even my texts from the Messages app on my iPhone to my spouse’s iPhone go as SMS.

Edit to add: those bubbles are green too. That’s what the bubble colors really mean. Blue and green are not iPhone vs Android, it’s iMessage (end to end encrypted) vs SMS (less secure, less private).

> I'm in my 50s and I have zero problems reading green bubbles

Besides the other issues... as soon as I heard that adolescents and teens (i.e., hyper-self-conscious, wanting group acceptance, figuring out social status) would be appearing differently in chats with schoolmates, based on whether they used Apple or non-Apple... that sure is a way to sell them Apples.

Another comment alluded to this, but small-minded people will always find a discriminant - toys, clothes, shoes, hair, height, weight, university, degree, house, cottage, trips, car, yacht, private jet, donations, endowments, and so on. Explore what your heart says to, make, buy and enjoy the things you love, and don't sweat the 'bullies'.

Some teens buy old and cheap iphones that aren't really useable.

And then they leave them plugged in at home and forward the messages to their Android device.

Just so that they show up as a blue bubble on their friends phones.

Status obsessions of teens should not be a serious consideration in how messaging communications work.

That’s very ableist of you.

About 1 in 12 males are colorblind. I’m in this group.

I find white text on a bright green background very difficult to read.

This comment says almost exactly the same thing without the first sentence. This trend of everyone calling everyone else a something-ist can’t die fast enough.

I know it's awful that I thought of this, but I half-expected your second sentence to call him a label-ist.

You’re right. I should’ve left it off. I was frustrated.

Which is why there are accessibility settings for exactly that.

sure, but why keep an inaccessible default?

Because it doesn’t affect everyone and aesthetics are not equal to accessibility?

I do agree that the green bubbles aren’t great looking but thats what they chose for iOS even prior to iMessage existing.

> Because it doesn’t affect everyone

This isn't a good answer. We can use sensible attractive UI/UX defaults without being exclusive.

> Because it doesn’t affect everyone and aesthetics are not equal to accessibility?

The thing with accessibility is that it does affect everyone.

If you get woken up by a call and open iMessage in the middle of the night, being able to read the message accurately while blinking away eye gunk matters.

Better contrast helps you read your text message if your phone is on a table across from you lying flat.

There's going to be times you're trying to read a message and your phone won't be 100% in front of you at arms length and you are able to take the time to bring the phone into focus with proper lighting around you.

  If you get woken up by a call and open iMessage in the middle of the night,
  being able to read the message accurately while blinking away eye gunk matters.

The only green text bubbles are for text you send via SMS. Incoming text is styled the same regardless of protocol.

I would happily use the eye gunk excuse for everyone contacting me at night. I probably find that word more funny because I just learned it and I am not a native speaker.

I still believe this is an issue. Colorblind or not, everyone probably has had difficulties reading their phone in direct sunlight. But these are seriously not insurmountable technical problems at all and the excuse is pretty weak.

I turned on the "increase contrast" accessibility feature just because it makes the green background color on those messages look nicer. Just do it. It isn't like they check to to see if you are diagnosed with colorblindness or whatever.

I am a colorblind male and I apologize on behalf of colorblind people using the word ableist. The bubble text is fine for me.

It’s the text you send, not incoming, so you don’t need to read it much. There’s also various accessibility features to help with color across the os.

Not only that, but these are complaints coming from non-iPhone users, by definition, which means it is totally up to Android what color their messages are displayed in.

iPhone User texts Android user - the iPhone user sees their outbound message as green on white.

This is not up to Android, it is up to Apple how their UX displays texts to non-Apple users.

Are 1 in 12 colorblind in a way that makes the white on green difficult to read

What if 3 in 12 who aren’t colorblind find it easier to read white on green?

Not everything is worthy of a social justice battle.

On iPhone you can enable one of several system-wide colour modes designed for colour-blind. Give it a try.

So making the bubble blue instead of green without changing the protocol would be already ok for you? How do you cope with this right now, do you and your social group use alternatives to iMessage like signal or telegram?

You read the messages you send?

You don’t?

Not after I send them...

If you read the article, you’d know that there are actually multiple functional issues due to Apple insisting on SMS/MMS.

From the guidelines¹:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

Regardless if they read the article or not, they were addressing one specific complaint which is unrelated to the others.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Google conclusively found there was a statistically most pleasing shade of blue in their 41 Shades of Blue experiment. This type of testing can be and is being leveraged for profit. It's not too difficult to imagine Apple tuning iMessage vs. SMS colors to be perfectly calming/nauseating respectively.

It's also worth noting that the current version of iMessage uses contrast levels that don't follow Apple's own HIG (the early green bubbles did, but the shade of green has gotten lighter and lighter over time)