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.
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"?
[0]: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
No, no it isn't.
The degree that matters is of course debatable, but it is one of their talking points.
Presumably they run security tests on 3rd party Mac browsers, it’s a major security concern.
Oh, wait. Google prevented Microsoft from creating a Youtube app for Windows Phone.
Do you think Google (or any organization) is capable of shame? I could extend your question to "How could Microsoft whine about Google shutting down its Youtube API access, while Microsoft was shaking down Android OEMs with secret patents and forciing them to make Windows phones as part of the (secret) settlement?" or "How can Apple ramp up its ad products when it rails against Google/Facebook ads?". The answer to all of those questions is self-interest.
People don't seem to agree with you. Google screwing up it's own messaging strategy for a decade and then whining about the consequences of their own decisions shows a lot of nerve.
> Google has been unable to field a stable, competitive messaging platform for years and has thoroughly lost the messaging war to products with a long-term strategy. At least some divisions inside the company are waking up to how damaging this is to Google as a company, and now Google's latest strategy is to... beg its competition for mercy? Google—which has launched 13 different messaging apps since iMessage launched in 2011—now says, "It's time for Apple to fix texting."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
Adding RCS compatibility would negatively impact precisely zero iPhone users, and would positively impact literally everyone (including iPhone users!).
RCS may have its warts, but I do not see Apple proposing a better standard? Everyone agrees SMS/MMS is about as bad as it can be... and there's already a lot of industry buy-in outside of Apple for supporting RCS.
Get with the program Apple...
RCS is supported by most carriers, and over 500 device manufacturers. But not Apple.
This is what people in the hate-Apple echo chamber like to chant, but it's wrong.
When Apple started doing it, there was no network effect.
The color choice was made years before everyone started freaking out about green and blue bubbles.
It was done to show that a message went over SMS, and not iMessage at a time when many Americans paid for each SMS sent, but iMessages were data, and thus included in data plans.
Blue=free
Green=10¢
Apple could fix this if they wanted to, but they don't want to. They know it sells phones. It is intentional.
It was to mark the "plebs" so the "plebs" would be blamed for any issues rather than Apple.
Phone plans used to come with a limited number of SMS messages per month (or even none), and the rates per SMS if you went over the limit were beyond extortionate.
>Since BlackBerry messages are sent as data, users do not incur individual charges for each message as they would through regular SMS texting. While phone companies have introduced bulk texting plans, many options still include caps on the number of individual SMS messages that can be sent. BBM has no such limit.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/why-is-bbm-so-suc...
But wasn't cellular data priced similarly extortionately back then?
Before iPhone or Android existed, Blackberry was very popular with teens because you got unlimited messaging on Blackberry Messenger included with the data plan you got with a Blackberry.
Eventually there were cell phone plans where you could add unlimited SMS for an additional fee regardless of what phone you used.
By the time the iPhone rolled around, all the American iPhone plans included unlimited SMS messages without an additional fee.
I guess it depends on your terms. I had--I think--a 2GB per month data plan (which was actually fairly reasonable for mobile at the time) and later went to "unlimited" but I was still paying something like 10 cents per text for a time. I didn't text a lot so I just paid a la carte until I changed plans.
Communications charges have changed a lot over time. I remember when long distance calls were something like $1/minute.
I can remember Verizon being sued because they forced handset manufacturers to disable Bluetooth for file transfers, because Verizon used to charge you money every time you transferred photos to or from your phone.
iMessage was released 11 years ago now. Can’t blame Apple for what not considering what the toddlers of the time would eventually do with the technology.
Apple hasn’t done much of anything to say android texts are bad… they’ve just said they’re not iPhone texts (and iPhone—>iPhone has better texting). Everyone else came along and said android is for poor people, and used those green bubbles as a signal to act on — just the same as using the logo to judge your shoes.
Maybe what Nike is doing is just as bad...
Actually, from an environmental standpoint I would be okay with doing that for food items/detergent/etc. Mandate the same form factor and just wash them out and reuse. But for clothing items it hardly makes sense, as a big part of you buying that is exactly the different look.
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.
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.
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.
Humans never learn.
If you're talking about an unlocked smartphone that you can install apps on, there is absolutely no such thing as a new Android phone for $20 that any American consumer can buy.
The Samsung Galaxy A03s is Samsung's cheapest, it's considered "ultra-budget", and it costs $160. The Moto G Pure, Motorola's cheapest, is also $160.
Hardly anyone buys a phone unlocked in the US. Most buy carrier locked devices and at the low end, it's mostly prepaid. I just bought a Samsung A03 from target that was for prepaid carrier Total Wireless for $10. I didn't activate it, I just use it for testing a mobile app on a lower spec phone.
> The Moto G Pure, Motorola's cheapest, is also $160. Right now, you can get a Moto G Pure for $49 from three different no-contract pre-paid carriers at Wal-Mart.
https://www.amazon.com/TracFone-View-Prepaid-Smartphone-Lock...
Just for the sake of argument, there are brand new android go phones in amazon. So, if you need a phone you can install apps on, $50-$200 being the base price, you can consider $1000 a luxury.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=android+phone&i=mobile&rh=n%3A707...
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.
After having owned a what was already considered 'old' used iPhone for three years, I finally bought a new iPhone, which I expect to use for the next five years.
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.
Personally I don't use Apple because I have far too many things I can't do on it (mostly due to their restrictions in the app store, like using open PGP keys over NFC). But if I did I'd never consider the SE.
I mean, it makes the phone smaller for the same screen size. That's an improvement for me.
Not enough for me to drop $$$ on an iPhone-mini, but I'd be happy if Apple put future SEs into an "iPhone 13 mini" body (presumably with a single lens camera).
On a tablet you can use them to hold the device but a smartphone is small enough to grip by the edges only.
And OLED really is a total must-have for me these days.
It's definitely a great feature if you wear a mask often. I find I only have trouble with it if my finger is wet.
But what’s the problem with FaceID?
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.
I wouldn't call Finding Nemo or it's current equivalent mass market even though I have no doubt 87% of children have seen <<insert cultural movie I probably am missing by a generation or two>>.
What level of market penetration would you expect? I would argue that most popular products still have a target vertical.
"The mass market differs from the niche market in that the former focuses on consumers with a wide variety of backgrounds with no identifiable preferences"
But Apple is very much on the upper mid range to high end side of things.
It's its own entire market. Generally I would suggest looking for bigger companies and ones which have policies to replace batteries if they are below a certain health level.
These phones really are so bad. Give it a go. Usually it's a horrible mess of Chinese tracking code, shitware apps you can't uninstall, and it won't be getting any system updates in a year.
Buy an older flagship second hand phone for $20, that's going to be much better experience than a new $20 one, even if it's 5+ years old and doesn't look good anymore.
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.
The iphone SE is not last year's mode. It's an iPhone 8 body (including camera) with the current CPU. For example, the SEv3 came out this year and has the same CPU as the iPhone 13 which came out at the same time.
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.
They invented a ton of new messaging features that SMS didn't support, and the phone has to make it clear which conversations support those and which don't. So they had blue bubbles replace existing green ones.
Ostracization and bullying is what teens do for a thousand different reasons over a thousand different things. Yes Apple is responsible for creating a walled garden of messaging, just like WhatsApp has over most of the rest of the world, and basically every other rich messaging app is trying to do. It's not like Google Allo was trying to be any less walled garden.
But to say Apple is responsible for ostracization and bullying is to take the notion of responsibility too far. Is Supreme responsible for kids who bully other kids because they aren't wearing Supreme...?
So, maybe instead of focusing on bullying we can just focus on punishing companies that profit from bullying.
This is an extreme take. Yes bullying is is a consequence of society. Don’t be lazy and blame someone else for your societies ills. Especially when the solution is simple: encouraging the use of an alternative. No. RCS isn’t the alternative. WhatsApp, Line, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat, TikTok, Discord etc, etc, etc are all mature, are used widely by the rest of the world (where SMS is practically free to use as well). The easier solution, and much cheaper for everyone is to change behaviour. It’s extremely naïve to think that changing the colour of a bubble will stop this sort of bullying.
I don't assume that fixing a bubble color will fix all bullying but I do stand by your interpretation that I find that changing the color of a bubble will stop all this sort of bullying.
Humanity (specifically, teens) or
Apple ( the largest technology company by revenue (totaling US$365.8 billion in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company by market capitalization[0] )
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 get the message color changed, but for parents to help their kids grow out of these tribalizing behaviors.
I'm 50 and I'm still on my 1st Android phone (which is a piece of crap, but I have an environmental responsibility to use it as long as possible and it still does perfectly good phone things like SMS and voice and DCSS). I've owned maybe four mobile phones in my whole life.
I guess you're creating employment. See: https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-hea...
Other than a few lucky ones, we aren't big fans of contracts, replacing phones every two years, we enjoy our pre-paid variants, and only replacing them when it actually is required.
Even when we use it for more than just SMS and calls.
I know both people that get the latest iPhone every year, and people still on a Nokia 3310(-equivalent), but the latter are in the vast minority in my circle of friends, also in Europe.
Personally, I've been upgrading every 2-3 years (not on a contract), and the phone was never broken.
Gigantic phones are off putting. Every few years Apple tries making a mini and that’s the time to buy.
I’m fairly tall and have size appropriate hands (I think). I struggle to reach the top corners of my 12 mini. It’s very irritating.
And post-paid mobile contracts don't mean that the phone is paid for by the contract.
1) we've used iphone's since the beginning and are pretty loyal, would likely never consider non iPhone
2) we don't tend to switch apps for "inclusivity" as the original comment parent stated. We blatantly exclude people that are not on the Apple product ecosystem by being rather inflexible to even try the universe of platform agnostic options (WhatsApp, etc).
This is my experience in the US. Basically, we're acting like the teenagers except in a not so mean and judgemental way.
Now take a moment to imagine someone tries to tell you that your messaging system makes you not desirable in a group. What do you do as an adult? Spend extra money to comply with their ideas, or tell them to either use alternatives, or get over it? Does the fact you've never used those apps even factor into the decision?
For context, in many places outside of the us the question is simply "which app do you use" and then you use that like an adult that you are.
I can totally see how teens are judging each other on this. They’re judgmental creatures in search of social cues to judge you on. Having android is analogous to wearing cheap Walmart clothes in my day. You’re social clout takes a huge hit.
I get it and have empathy, but no solutions as I really think it’s kids being kids and I don’t think Apple as a business should be regulated towards an open protocol (only actual solution).
I’ll never know what it’s like to be a teen that texts or has a smart phone because I didn’t experience it. But I hear teens don’t care about cars these days and that was a crucial part of being a teen with a thriving social life where/when I grew up. You’d get teased for not having one or having a old/ugly one. You were excluded from social activities if you couldn’t find transportation. You couldn’t take someone out on a date and it actually impacted whether you were even worth dating. And, it was very expensive for a teenager.
The difference with adults is we don’t give each other a hard time about it. Or too much anyways. We will however absolutely refuse to use whatever app you ask us to if we’re am not using it already. We’re also probably not using it already. Most of us bought iPhone at the beginning and have never really considered anything else. That’s why we’ve owned so many of their phones.
I’m not European but I find the idea that I should accept I have to context switch between apps based on who I’m talking to be insane. All my texting is in one app, just like email, phone, maps, etc. I might be simplistic but apps are pretty sticky for me once I choose a default for _activity_. I might be wrong, but if I remember correctly the reason the texting apps exploded over there was because you all had bad or expensive SMS originally. iMessage didn’t exist until 2011/iOS 5 and was likely Apple’s response from competition from rapidly growing companies like WhatsApp.
How is this different from Microsoft, Windows and IE?
> We will however absolutely refuse to use whatever app you ask us to if we’re am not using it already.
First, because there's a first you use every app. Second, because if you do chat with someone without imessage regularly, you'll want to upgrade to something. If you refuse because of tech... you didn't care enough about that person to begin with.
This has been every iPhone user I've ever found. I've been willing to use any messaging system and have tried many. But not a single iPhone user I know uses anything other than iMessage. And they blame me.
Welcome to adulthood. Adults can be just as stupid, hypocritical, uncaring, and ruthless as anyone else.
Fearmongering about China is also less intense here, as if one had to realize that most top android models are not made in China, and one could construct a very effective and truthful fearmongering campaign about US too, since various US laws and 3-letter agencies consider all of us sub-humans and US government is quite often rather unfriendly and spying on us.
At least western part of Europe has average purchase power on par with US average, so phone prices (unsubsidized) are not a factor that much. Even when factoring in subsidizing in US, it doesn't explain whole picture on itself.
And we actually care about this tiny blue planet by our actions, so our actions are as they are (few phone replacements, ie I see most IT colleagues in our bank all making nice 6-figure US-equivalent salaries on pretty old phones, be it apple or android). You really can't impress anybody with your phone if we talk about mature folks, an attempt would cast a rather bad light on your character.
Replace the word "whatsapp" with "iMessage" and you've described my situation. That's why I don't context switch. We're talking like once a year maybe I encounter someone not on Apple that says they're on something else. A similar situation happens with P2P payment apps. Someone may say let me Venmo you, but if you don't have Venmo you're more likely to just say I don't have Venmo and default back to traditional payments. Or counter with, do you have Zelle? (if you have Zelle).
My in-laws were expats and coming home to the US was always a huge culture shock because nobody here used WhatsApp. I know that's not true. There's probably some stats out there that show usage of WhatsApp and Android is very substantial in the US. However, unfortunately, I think that in a way those stats and my experience outline the class divide here. If you can afford it, you have an iPhone.
"Lose" makes it sound like they could be found. Are the features even possible to implement with SMS?
> Google's version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way.
If this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now. Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API and no plans to build one.
If you want to implement RCS, you'll need to run the messages through some kind of service, and who provides that server? It will probably be Google.
So the pitch for Apple to adopt RCS isn't just this public-good nonsense about making texts with Android users better; it's also about running Apple's messages through Google servers. Google profits in both server fees and data acquisition.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...
SMS is a universal standard supported by even the oldest devices that will still connect to current cellular networks.
It's Google that goes on about RCS being an "open standard" when their implementation of RCS is anything but.
It's kind of like going on forever about Android being open source before making sure most of the modern APIs are proprietary closed source code you only get with Google Play.
If I were Apple, I would not budge.
I haven't used iMessage, so I don't know how it behaves, but my own personal RCS experience has not been good. I am on Google Fi and make heavy use of Google Messages and specifically their web app. I have a Pixel 4a 5G - a good mid range phone. Three Messages configurations are available: regular SMS/MMS, RCS (i.e. Enable Chat Features), or SMS/MMS routed through Fi; RCS is not available if you route through Fi!
I have a couple of really long message histories, and with RCS enabled, it got to the point that I could not keep the web app connected with the phone, open chats, or in some cases see/respond to messages; I'd try to send a message and it would sit at 'sending' for 5 minutes or more, making it very difficult to have an actual conversation with someone. Turn RCS off, and the send/receive delay disappears. Route through Fi as well, and the web app works a lot better and it doesn't get stuck opening conversations.
As another commenter pointed out, it's probably better to use an actual chat application instead of Messages for this. But that's not what I use :shrug:. And my experience, on my phone, is that RCS is not usable at all, and I'm just on SMS/MMS as a result.
Signal, WhatsApp, etc. don't come close to what iMessage offers seamlessly. For iPhone/macOS/iPadOS users, SMS is garbage. Yes, it's a closed system; but it works without a cell signal or roaming charges anywhere in the world over WiFi for free.
RCS seems like a half-baked attempt at catching up with features that've existed since 2011 on one platform. Even third-party messaging apps fail miserably compared to iMessage.
In what way? I know WhatsApp compress media files, which is why people use Telegram when high quality matters. Is there anything else? In any case Signal and WhatsApp have UX barely better than SMS, the real comparison should be against something with legitimately better UX. Is iMessage better than Telegram?
It's not useless, but vastly better for short text conversations than anything else. Not surprising, it's SMS.
In the end, I think the social rejection isn’t Apple to blame for. We don’t blame clothing brands for enabling kids to discern who wears ‘the real thing’ and who hasn’t, either.
Or do we want to blame Apple for trying to improve SMS for their users without going through a lengthy standards process? They were a small player at the time in the phone market, so they couldn’t expect an iPhone-only solution to succeed, and writing an app wasn’t really a thing yet, so they couldn’t have gone the route WhatsApp later took, so what could they have done instead?
The colors are UI to indicate to their users who has access to the improvements and who hasn’t. If Apple didn’t indicate in any way that some people have different features available to them, I think people would blame them for that.
Also, US (AFAIK, this is a US thing) kids likely would still learn who could and could not use the features Apple added to SMS.
Mate, iMessage debuted in 2011 - 2 years after Whatsapp appeared on the platform.
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.
Do you want the U.S. government to just strong-arm a private company into adopting a not-very-popular plaintext messaging standard, or do you want them to force the licensing of Google's proprietary extensions that support encryption for 1-to-1 messages as well? (Even with proprietary extensions, group messages are always plaintext.)
Then every day that's not the case after a grace period, or without convincing evidence they're working on it, they can eat fines or sanction from the FCC.
I don't care how they solve this problem, just that they do and that's what effective regulation is about.
Now, admittedly, it isn't impossible to have regulations like this revisited on a schedule to make sure they're still making sense and adjust them, but considering how well that approach has panned out for the USA-PATRIOT Act, I'm not holding my breath on politicians coming up with a reasonable solution here. If your kid complains about the phone they have, I suggest getting them a job application from the nearest retail store. If they're too young for that, perhaps it's a bit soon to have a phone in the first place.
A car needs a seatbelt that passes whatever certification is required by law, but there's nothing stopping you from making it better. There are 5 point harnesses out there which are street legal, but the only people buying them are car modders who want to use their racing car on the street and managed to get the rest of the car approved already. Mainstream manufacturers have also experimented with fancier seat belts, but there was no market demand for them.
Type C is similar - the new law requires a device to have a type C port that supports at least all the basic functions. If a manufacturer wants to include their own improvements, they can either use the Type C port like everyone has been doing for years (Warp/Dash charge, QuickCharge, analog audio, thunderbolt 4...) and/or add a second connector. The only one who hasn't been taking this approach was Apple and they haven't done anything innovative with Lightning since it was introduced.
Is there some sort of lack of innovation allowing your vacuum cleaner to plug into the same system as your PC as well?
Also argument about fast charging is invalid. You are free to have own faster standard, as long as you also support PD over usb-c and that non-issue, as all faster chargers(eg. One Plus), were already working over usb-c.
On the other hand, I’d love to see the government regulate Apple’s right to keep using port interface changes as financing events. Every time they change their chargers we’re forced to pay for the new ones which creates waste and is just plain shameless greed on their part. And of course Right-to-repair + Planned-obsolescence.
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).
Not for long (see this other story currently on the hn front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/)
If you think that something something inclusivity will effect your children’s thinking more than peer pressure, boy do I have news for you.
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!
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.
GGP specified ostracizing by Apple of those "who can't afford to carry around luxury phones." Now you are suggesting that Apple excludes communication from non-Apple customers by using an "intra-device comm protocol," which I believe most refer to as iMessage. I'm pretty sure it was conceived to save the user from paying for SMS and MMS, or at least being a relief to use of those for-pay protocols, and the dreaded "green bubble" merely an indicator that the cell provider may be charging for it.
The idea of competing for space here seems to be very popular, and there are many alternatives, such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Signal, and many others. I just had the strongest sensation of deja vu, no, yes... something... do you at all remember IRC, IRQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, MSN Messenger, Google Talk? I don't recall anyone complaining about iChat or any of the other services mentioned for being exclusive, which they all are.
Are you sure the grievance is legitimate? Where were the complaints before with the legacy chat apps? What makes Apple deserving of special scrutiny while every other message service with similar exclusivity is doing nothing wrong?
I also don't see how Apple is responsible for narcissistic parents raising bullies and shitheads. Innocent kids being ostracized really could be, and I think really is, the responsibility of bad parents.
For myself and my own grievances, I'm not a fan of comm protocols that don't allow an open market of clients and servers to exist and to interoperate. I much prefer using the ones that do, and so I do a lot of my group chatting on Matrix in the social spaces where I can. The "green bubble effect" and who gets to control it adds another to my list of reasons to want the more open systems to be well-made and prosper, although it's not a primary driver.
Do I think they should be or should feel obligated to do so? I'm not sure. I think society is having a debate about whether modern communication networks have "public townsquare"-type characteristics and need to be regulated more in general, and this is probably a question on that spectrum to a degree. Let's say I wouldn't be surprised if one day we come to a conclusion that the answer is yes and a larger functionality scope for what is considered basic interoperability is important, but there are also some good arguments against it.
What guides my thinking here is a bit overboard and flowery again, and surprisingly personal. As a software engineer and teenager myself I cut my teeth on making and maintaining one of the better-known IRC clients at the time; this was my first project that really had other users project part of their lives into it. For me it was quite powerful when I realized that I knew people who had met using my software and later gotten married. It solidified my view of the engineer as a toolmaker for others to live their lives and build civilization. The modern equivalent of the people who conceived of and made the flint tools others would use to start the fires to tell stories around. Comm tools being broadly available and interoperable and their social effects are stuff dear to my heart.
Thank you, that's the walled garden perspective I was missing, same as the complaint of those that want to run macOS on non-Mac hw. Usually the walled garden complaints are from the other side of the wall, Apple device users being prevented from installing what they want unless it is already available from AppStore. I didn't consider the other side of that wall.
For example, speaking personally I have no gripe if Apple doesn't want to write an iMessage app for Android, but I think it would be great if the specs and/or APIs were available so that others could write one, even without reaching for one of the regulation-style arguments mentioned above.
Both imply asking Apple to spend effort. With putting macOS on PCs the effort is obvious. But making it possible for others to write an iMessage client also requires effort: For example designing iMessage's technology in such a way that a malicious client can't compromise the system, keeping the protocol relatively stable and sanely versioned, documentation, and so on. With my engineer's hat on, as an opinion, I think this type of effort would contribute to make iMessage better tech as it's in line with the nature of a strong comm protocol, while macOS doesn't benefit as clearly from being on other computers.
The main counter-argument to it is the notion that walled-garden messengers have innovated faster on UX than the standardized ones and then you're back to unresolved quibbles about what's user value and so on. I don't think we've found the one true way to better-tool-to-more-people yet.
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).
Note that I don't think many of us were using Kakao to talk with native Koreans, which would be a good reason for using it. Honestly, we didn't mix much. Nearly everybody on my contact list was an American.
Kakao is in many ways kind of the worst of chats - phone number-bound, unspec'd, closed, non-federated, unencrypted, known to be under surveillance, ad-infested. But on the other hand around 2010-2015 the UX was quite ahead of many others, and while Telegram & co have since pulled ahead it's still nicer than, say, WhatsApp or Signal.
A lot of people here have iPhones, but it's not because of some stupid blue bubble.
What's funny is that Americans will sometimes make fun of Japan because some people (mainly businesses, maybe some elderly people) still use FAX, but Americans are the ones who are all still using SMS.
I'd consider my ~$130 Oppo to be the upper end of cheap with NFC and snappy performance.
Sure, I wouldn't count a brand new $400 smartphone to be the most budget one, but it is almost half the price of a flagship. And that's not even getting into the used market.
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.
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.
Though let’s add that a smartphone is probably the single most used item a person will own (used more often than your shoe), so it does make sense that people will give out quite a sum for these.
A $430 price tag IS a lot.
I haven't ever paid more than $500 for a phone, and even that much upset me!
I got an 'LG Optimus' phone in 2015 for $125 (after tip and tax, down from the $150 I had in my memory.) I don't have the 2013 receipt for the $40 phone though, that might have been through a WalMart contract.
A new 'Moto G Power' can be had for $150 right now (down from $250) and a new Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro can be had for $220. You can find sub-$50 phones too, especially in the used market.
What? I want to know more about the circumstances that led to you paying a tip while buying a cellphone. What country was this? What state/province? What store?
(I see that your comment mentions the US and Wal-Mart, but I think both of those are about the $40 purchase and I'm curious about the $125 purchase.)
I did not realize I was in the habit of saying "tip and tax" to refer to extra fees.
And at $430 it's still a lot more than 5% in the USA.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/802122/india-net-nationa...
20k-30k for Android phones seems to be the norm there according to the advertisements everywhere.
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.
There is the book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr that covers this stuff and points to research.
There's also the Wall Street Journal article by him called Does the Internet Make You Dumber?.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704025304575284...
20 years ago, you'd get shit for not wearing the cool kind of shoes your peers had.
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.
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.
When I was younger I got teased for not having a Started brand fitted hat, and I wasn't even into team sports.
Just because kids are prone to being led in this way, doesn't mean those leading that behaviour get a pass.
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.
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.
As an adult, some of my friends have asked 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.
I almost always have my phone on silent for that reason. I like to check my phone when I want to, not when it wants me to.
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.
You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly, including elsewhere in this thread. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Dystopia = everyone must buy an iphone as solution to the problem instead of just using an app that's not restricted to iphones
Two options: - everyone installs an app that can deal with multiple vendors (like 90% of the messengers) - everyone that is not having a phone of vendor x gets a new phone from vendor x and throws away the old one (or keeps both lol)
The former is almost for free and the latter costs hundreds of dollars .
It's so much worse that you cannot even make out this difference
The solution is to buy an older iPhone second-hand.
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.
RCS uses TLS, which is about as good as iMessage if you turn on iCloud Backups[0], as they just copy your private keys.
[0]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/security-of-icloud-...
While this may be some technicality in a spec, the reality is that all the people I know using Android are enjoying end-to-end 1:1 encrypted conversations using Google Messages. Group messages were announced to get e2e encryption soon.
It's funny to me seeing this statement, as half of the people out there push it the other way when discussing App Stores. "Well iPhone isn't a monopoly world wide."
So, yes.
What's your point?
12th of November 2022
11th of December 2022
22nd of December 2011
And I mean exact same context, because there are web portal where you will see date formats in multiple formats on the same page!
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.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/04/google-disables-rcs-ads-in...
https://9to5google.com/2022/02/14/google-messages-samsung-ga...
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.
That’s configurable. By default a user can access them from other devices, but that feature can be disabled.
Your turning it off has no effect. Most messages are backed up twice.
It doesn't matter how much better it is, if the only way to use it is via Apple hardware. It's their prerogative to do that, and it makes good business sense assuming it doesn't bring them monopoly problems (and IMO it probably shouldn't due to the aforementioned stats re: worldwide usage at 27%, and even US usage is only at 55%).
But it in no way is a standard. It's just a proprietary piece of software. So literally any other standard proposal is "more of a standard" than iMessage.
I want to against this. Even if the app is well made, messaging platform only for specific company's devices is completely broken idea. Tragedy is that US people adopted completely broken platform.
I text Android users all the time and besides the green bubble I don’t see much difference honestly
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...
The Contrast between Green and Blue is actually roughly identical, it's just that both colors fade upward as time passes. So, the author picked a green bubble from higher up (which had faded), and a blue bubble from the bottom (which was fresh and dark), thereby comparing Apples and Oranges. Both have similar contrast when freshly sent and arrived, and similar faded contrast.
> The Contrast between Green and Blue is actually roughly identical, it's just that both colors fade upward as time passes. So, the author picked a green bubble from higher up (which had faded), and a blue bubble from the bottom (which was fresh and dark), thereby comparing Apples and Oranges. Both have similar contrast when freshly sent and arrived, and similar faded contrast.
You wanna check yourself? Because I pulled screenshots from my phone and tested this myself before I even posted that first comment.
I'll even go back and verify with the best case scenario that you stated of the color the very bottom pixel of a bubble at the very bottom of the screen (not counting the border).
SMS: #64C265 (100, 194, 101) or 2.2:1
iMessage: #377CEE (57, 128, 245) or 3.97:1
Heres the screenshots as well if you want to check: https://imgur.com/a/5nYhBSw
Why not even do the simplest thing of verifying before you try to claim "mIsInFoRmAtIoN".
EDIT: Re-reading this it has hostility in it, which I'm sorry for and apologize for. I am simply tired of people claiming "misinformation" on a topic while not even bothering to check the claim or to even try to backup what they claim themselves. I specifically went out of my way to check this, and include the exact color values. Only to be replied to with "well someone said XYZ" with no links, supporting information, or even an attempt at proving what they claimed.
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).
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.
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.
We could blame Apple for not making an Android iMessage app, though
All while I receive whatsapp/telegram message spam on a fairly regular basis, despite not being active in any groups or channels on those apps (and in general, opening them maybe once or twice a week at most). The only reason I even use those 2 apps is to talk to select few old relatives of mine who are not very tech literate and who just happened to learn how to use those apps +a couple of friends who simply insist on using those apps.
1. It's multi-device at least when we're talking about non-phones; that's one of its better features, being able to use it from your Mac or iPad
2. You can make an iMessage account without having an iPhone; just having an email/Apple ID and some other Apple device to use it from
3. If you had an Android phone, presumably you wouldn't also have an iPhone at the same time? And even if you were using it on an iPhone, it seems like nothing stops you from being logged in on a second iPhone
1. RCS is now available and a standard. iMessage already "degrades" to sending SMS messages to those not on iMessage. There is no reason they can't better support RCS.
2. While MMS groups were missing a ton of features, there are just things now that are much worse as an Android user interacting with an iMessage group than it was previously in an MMS group. I.e. I never used to have issues with dropped images before, but in an iMessage group it's like a crapshoot whether my photos get delivered.
It is a bag of standard parts thrown together by a bunch of telecommunications companies in a desperate attempt to hold on to their 50c per message cash cow.
If you spend more than a minute actually looking into it, you'll realise that Apple would basically have to run it in a virtual machine for security, and then hand over control to a bunch of telcos that can't even all agree on what is and isn't included in RCS.
But in the US (the market being discussed here) basically all US mobile plans include unlimited texting anyway...
Yes, I do, and I use them. But when I'm amongst a group of, say, 9 other iPhone users, who happily all already use iMessage (and already have existing chats among different subgroups of the members), telling everyone they need to switch over to a different, unfamiliar messaging app doesn't go over very well. It's difficult enough to attempt this among adults; it's not surprising that teenagers would laugh in the face of another kid who attempted a "Hey guys, let's all use Signal!!" request
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.
My experience in the UK and France is WhatsApp/telegram have basically 100% penetration and SMS is only used by businesses and 2fa
All ad posters around the school are currently Iphone 14. So are some ultra-premium locations within city. Nobody is doing as big ad campaign here as Apple.
And they know it works, peer pressure is pure emotion-based reaction, and teenagers are not yet experienced and smart enough to fight it.
Only your own outgoing texts are in a colored bubble
It's so you know that the messages you're sending are going over MMS instead of iMessage, so zero features other than sending plain text to individual recipients will work well, if at all. It's like time traveling back to the late '00s with text-chat-groups inexplicably splintering mid-conversation, adding new participants screwing everything up, and potato-quality photo and video attachments that take forever to download and simply fail a good fraction of the time.
My friend group solved this by switching to WhatsApp. But if we'd all been iPhone users I doubt we'd have bothered, because iMessage is at least as good and, if you use some of the more-advanced features, much better, provided your chats are actually going over iMessage and not MMS.
iMessage is basically exactly the same as having a good messaging app just for iPhones plus a necessarily-shitty MMS one, except you don't have to switch between them because they're combined.
I distinctly recall Google trying to do the exact same thing when I was an Android user, must have been over a decade ago: on a major OS update, they replaced the texting app with some unified MMS/other-messaging-service (who could possibly keep track of them all? May have just been gchat, at the time) app. I had to "downgrade" to the old texting app because the new one was so broken that it was unusable. In particular, it lost messages all the time, or would switch mid-conversation between MMS and other-messaging-protocol, screwing everything up. iMessage is nowhere near that bad, at least, even when in "green bubble" mode.
Thanks for the correction! I understood that wrong.
But it still ends up drawing attention to non-iPhone users if they make the iPhone user's message bubbles go green on their ends.
> I distinctly recall Google trying to do the exact same thing when I was an Android user, must have been over a decade ago
I have the same memory.
"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?
It's only messages which you *sent* which appear in green or blue, to let you know whether each message was sent via SMS (which may have incurred a charge from your telco) or iMessage (which is free). At least to a casual glance, there's nothing on received messages to indicate whether they came in via SMS or iMessage.
One trick Apple uses to make you think green bubbles are “gross”
But it's great for people like me, because I'm much less likely to be added to a family group text.
in 2050 kids will storm out because their pocket nuclear fusor isn't the trendiest. 'thanks moooom'
[1] Parental unit is a teacher at the same school? Yeah, your life will be miserable.
[2] Come from a different part of the area? You must be [insert various insults here] for 5 years.
[3] Scholarship kid at a private school? Good luck with that.
(p.s. this is actually a bit better than it used to be, everyone's a lot more comfortable doing a snap gc because it has most of the same features and the UX isn't dogshit like a mixed gc vs imessage.)
One day, someone will figure out how to become a "blue bubble" with an android, and that person will make a lot of money.
There have been a few attempts to make a cross-platform iMessage client (see: https://bluebubbles.app/), and they all require either genuine Mac hardware, or a virtual machine with spoofed serial numbers.
https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/mautrix-imessage
I use matrix bridges for all my chats (to Whatsapp, telegram and signal) so I could add iMessage too. But I don't have anyone in my friends or family that wants to use it.
and the more we push this culture-magnified story about teenagers, the more this will might approach actually being true. An awful lot of teenagers would much rather be uncool than dead, actually like their parents, don't find school terrible and so on. But for some reason, our culture has been spinning a yarn about them for decades now that both stands in opposition to the truth, and has simultaneously reshaped it.
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.
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.
Sounds unbearable. I hope they survive to adulthood as a green bubble.
imessage/sms/texting is king in the US
Its gonna come here too. And probably is here already but I am an out of touch old man. We love to ape america and all the kids wanna be in eupohria on hbo.
Source: I am in my mid-20's.
We are living in Japan and here we only use Discord, WhatsApp, and Line for messaging.
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.