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"?

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

Citation needed. Is this really true? I keep hearing about RCS etc but I also keep hearing it's not actually a good standard. Not even sure it does encryption frankly.

You haven't looked that much into it then; RCS has encryption[0], and works great for me. (I have an iPhone 13 Pro & a Pixel 6 Pro. RCS works as well as iMessage for Android-to-Android devices, for me.)

[0]: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

Is that RCS having encryption or is that Google providing an extension to RCS via their Messages app? And to what degree does RCS with encryption have buy-in from American carriers?

RCS is an open source protocol that can be run by different 'operators'[0]. So it's not so much as an extension, as Google's implementation of the protocol (which is open source and can be added by other operators).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

Sounds like whatever remained from Google Reader’s API.

> RCS is an open source protocol

No, no it isn't.

There is nobody preventing Apple from developing an Android app for iMessage. They already have a bunch of apps on the play store, including one for Apple TV, Beats, and a migration app for iOS. https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Apple

Apple can’t provide the same assurance that an android app is secured.

The degree that matters is of course debatable, but it is one of their talking points.

Apple can't provide assurance that browsers are secured, but they allow for iMessage in browsers.

Last I checked you can’t send an iMessage from a windows browser only read messages you had personally uploaded to iCloud.

Presumably they run security tests on 3rd party Mac browsers, it’s a major security concern.

Nobody really preventing GM from developing OnStar systems for Ford, Toyota, VW, etc. cars, either.

My power tools have proprietary battery's too. I buy the same brand over and over because of owning batteries already. This type of stuff is just business 101 and it’s not exactly meant to be in anyone but the company’s best interest. It can be seen in almost all industries.

Nobody prevented Microsoft from creating a Youtube app for Windows Phone.

Oh, wait. Google prevented Microsoft from creating a Youtube app for Windows Phone.

How is a Microsoft-authored app connecting to Google's YT servers comparable to an Apple-authored app connecting to Apple iMessage servers?

How does Google have the nerve to whine about iMessage after they used Youtube as a weapon to kill Windows Phone?

Nothing to do with nerve, and everything to do with self interest.

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.

> Nothing to do with nerve

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...

I don't think Google would prevent Apple from publishing an app on the play store. There are already many messengers on it.

RCS (as in: the standardized version) isn’t encrypted. Google’s proprietary extensions to RCS provide the encryption layer [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

It's the same old story of perfect being the enemy of good (plus clear ulterior motives for Apple).

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...

Visit matrix.org for a better standard

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

RCS is supported by most carriers, and over 500 device manufacturers. But not Apple.

*Only in the US. It has some adoption outside the US.

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.

They are doing this for the network effect.

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¢

It served as a warning that you were spending money. I suspect that's why it's green.

Before iMessage (yes it existed) all text messages were green. Blue denoted iMessage. There was no evil plan from Apple like bloggers love to conceive for attention - it’s merely what was originally chosen and they wanted to differentiate iMessage when they released it.

You know why they wanted to differentiate iMessage? It caused issues with SMS. They knew it. They wanted an easy out for the incompatibilities. It is a problem with the "plebs" not Apple. The "plebs" were just holding their phones wrong. After all, even iPhone users don't know how to hold their phone. How can "plebs" be expected to know how to hold their phones if iPhone user can't?

Apple could fix this if they wanted to, but they don't want to. They know it sells phones. It is intentional.

No they did it so you knew when it was in and could use the features. There’s no “issue” with SMS.

Tell that to all the people who cannot respond to group messages sent to them from iPhone users.

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

SMS quotas and mobile data are two different “budgets” depending on carrier. It would be a huge omission if they didn’t differentiate between them.

At what time has data ever been cheaper than SMS? That "Blue=free Green=10¢" would likely only have been true for people on really crummy plans sending a message while connected to Wi-Fi. Data has never been "free". They would have had to show iMessage messages as green when sent over the phone network.

It was to mark the "plebs" so the "plebs" would be blamed for any issues rather than Apple.

> At what time has data ever been cheaper than SMS?

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...

> 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.

But wasn't cellular data priced similarly extortionately back then?

It was certainly too expensive, but nowhere near as expensive as paying twenty five cents for an SMS message that maxed out at 140 bytes.

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.

>But wasn't cellular data priced similarly extortionately back then?

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.

> 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.

The carriers used to completely own the entire phone experience. That's what really changed with Android and iOS. Walled gardens notwithstanding, you have access to a far less restricted and curated set of applications.

Yes, but if you had wifi iMessage was essentially “free”. I always though of it as message went over the internet, vs message went over SMS.

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.

I think that data plans used to be expensive (I avoided getting a smartphone until 2014 because of the costs), but once you had a data plan for other reasons (e.g. being able to browse the web) then messaging apps were a cheaper way to send a message on the margin. My cheap phone plan (minutes only) with AT&T back in 2008-2011 charged me $0.25 per SMS sent and received, which added up fast with unsolicited messages, but eventually I found the option to just block all SMS to save money.

Basically, anywhere in EU. SMS is unreasonably expensive/limited, on top of being all around shitty (like, bad encoding, utf8 chars taking up more space, the amount of time I had to remove ős from my texts so that it would fit in a single SMS), and is plain text for your carrier to read.

Apple executives literally said in the leaked email, that they are doing it for the network effect.

The EU's Digital Markets Act might force that.

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

Sure they do; that’s what the big logo is for

They highlight themselves but they don't highlight other shoes in a negative light.

I’m not sure how you can reasonably argue that the chosen shade of green is a negative light on android texts. Any negativity is generated by the social systems interacting with it — the colors, and logos, just give enough information for those social systems to differentiate, and qualify, and judge your usage of, these objects.

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.

Apple knew this would happen and promoted that social behavior on purpose.

> 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...

Well, should we mandate grey boxes for every item out there, with a bland label differentiating them from each other only?

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.

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.

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.

If the situation goes on, the US will go back to the spot when ATT was a monopoly for anything telecomms.

Humans never learn.

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.

Erm. Every iPhone comes with a lightning cable in the box. You can also buy lightning cables from other manufacturers for considerably less than $19. Get you facts right.

What are you talking about? No you can't.

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.

> 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. Or even close to it.

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.

Come on, that’s just not the “price” of a thing by any sane definition, or otherwise I would be very happy how cheap I got my home for..

Ok, I'll be sane. I bought a Samsung A03 at Target, off the shelf, in store for $20. It was on sale from it's regular price of $49.

To their credit, you can get pretty close: a prepaid TracFone will run Android for $30. It's not unlocked, but it's a real Android system with all the usual bells and whistles (and anyways you have to pay for a plan no matter what you buy).

https://www.amazon.com/TracFone-View-Prepaid-Smartphone-Lock...

I am 100% sure parent meant $200, not $20.

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...

Seeing as they were directly comparing a $20 phone with a $19 cable implying they were the same price, it seems to me like they actually meant $20. ;)

On the other-hand, plenty of people will buy a locked phone direct from a carrier. The Moto G you mentioned only costs $35 from tracfone. You can't change carriers, but you still can install arbitrary apps.

And as mentioned, you can buy any top end iphone for likely free with a sufficiently expensive plan, how is that relevant? You do pay for the full price (often multiple times).

The original cables do. You can buy much cheaper cables on Amazon and elsewhere.

Some cheaper Lightning cables don't work properly. Some don't work at all.

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.

The 128GB Samsung S20FE is $475 CAD today

Well you’re paying for the Samsung brand I guess. There are plenty of cheap and usable Android phones.

I own a Moto G Stylus 5G (256 GB) from 2021 that I paid $240 USD ($330 CAD) for on Amazon earlier this year.

> A new

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.

FWIW - my 5-year-old "original" SE, which was Apple's cheapest phone when I bought it, finally stopped supporting the new iOS version early this month.

> 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.

But with Android you get much more features for the money. All Android phones are bezelless for instance, even the cheapest budget phone. The SE still rocks the iPhone 8 design from 2017 with all its drawbacks.

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.

Why is bezelless a “feature” or improvement?

> Why is bezelless a “feature” or improvement?

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).

Because it's optimising the usable surface of the phone of course. The bezels don't serve any purpose other than they were technically necessary during the first years of smartphones.

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.

its the only iphone model with a physical front button. it will be my replacement come december!

> its the only iphone model with a physical front button.

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.

I wish Apple would bring back the fingerprint scan. Once my iPhone 8 plus bricks they won't sell me a new 8. Face scanning is too dystopian and violating for me, but any iPhone after 8 requires it. I tried buying the SE to resist this practice, but it's designed to be intentionally tiny and inconvenient to force us neo-Luddites into the current corpo-dystopian era

You can also, you know… just use a passcode and not set up FaceID…?

But what’s the problem with FaceID?

If the discussion is around phone for kids, I think a second hand SE is still a great choice. Kids don’t really care about the features that you or I would care about.

The screen size/battery size would probably be larger on a price competitive Android phone then the SE, however I doubt you'd get as fast a processor/as many years of software updates either so it really depends what you prefer. I may be biased though having the SE, think I'll only bother to upgrade it when Apple finally switches to USB-C

The SE is so dang small, and I love the 8 Plus's still having a home button and fingerprint sensor. I feel stuck because I don't want having my face scanned (even if Apple says it's not sent to a centralized auth server, it creeps me out).

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.

87% of the children*

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>>.

Why not? A "mass-market" paperback book means unit sales on the order of 100k/year

What level of market penetration would you expect? I would argue that most popular products still have a target vertical.

You don't think finding nemo is mass market?

I would call 'people under 10' to be a targeted market. And it seems Wikipedia agrees:

"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"

"Machrone's Law" as I recall had a $5K price point. And, yes, it held until probably sometime in the 2000s. Yes, PCs were pretty expensive if you consider the PC you "wanted" was probably close to $10K in today's dollars.

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.

You can get older iPhones for almost free. And they work fully with iMessage

Locally? Or is there a reputable place online?

I've bought an used SE 2 from refurbed, but it's not available in the USA. There are competitors which do deliver to the USA, e.g. refurb.me: https://www.refurb.me/refurbished/iphone/iphone-se-2

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.

Best Buy has some: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/apple-pre-owned-iphone-8-64gb-u...

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

You ever tried that? It's a horrible experience. I love Android but you definitely need to spend much more to get something out of it. My advice is to get a second hand Samsung flagship - I have S9+, that's a great phone you can get for $200 - but don't go for anything less, you'll be very sorry if you do.

A $20 Android phone is better than nothing when you're already struggling to pay bills and raise children. That's the reality many people face.

No, it's so bad it's better to have nothing for a while, save some money and then buy a better phone.

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.

It is when you need a phone to run apps to do your job or for simple things like banking. Talked to a pest control guy who works for a large company, and he needs a smartphone to do his job. He is quite literally managed through an app, needs it to check-in to work, for time sheets, find out where the next customer lives etc. Someone like that cannot go without a smartphone, requirements like that are leaking into low-level service and retail jobs, now.

No, it's not. Never buy a new $20 phone - it's subsidized by all that tracking and pre-installed shitware and it won't be getting updates soon, if it ever got even one, and the hardware is going to be absolutely terrible too. Buy a second hand one if $20 is all you can spend.

Your Samsung has more tracking and spyware installed you won't be able to uninstall. Never buy a Samsung and expect privacy.

Samsung has unlockable bootloader and good LineageOS support. Unheard of with these $20 phones. And even without flashing, I'd still rather be tracked by Samsung than whatever they put into these $20 ones.

Only some Samsung's have unlockable bootloaders.

Yeah, the flagships do, that's why I'm recommending them.

You don't care about bloatware when your first worry is whether you can end up homeless or malnourishing your kids at the end of the month.

You do because your phone isn't usable because of it. Hard to do work on a phone that barely runs the SMS app.

“ Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. ”

I bought a few of these for testing purposes. Completely unusable.

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.

The Apple website prices only reflect the top end of the iPhone market. The iPhone SE 2nd generation is still sold new directly from low price/prepaid carriers for under half that price (right now $189 on the Tracfone website for example, probably even cheaper elsewhere). Compare that to new Android phones in the same price range which often are loaded with adware/spyware apps that cannot be uninstalled, and blocked from all security/software updates, the longevity makes an older SE competitive with the cheapest 3rd world country android phones in the long term, and with performance that exceeds even the highest end Android phones because of a better cpu.

> The iphone SE which is basically last years model

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.

Yeah the SE is probably the fastest iphone model there is because the CPU is top notch while the screen resolution is smaller, so rendering is less complex computationally.

I don’t think that any iphone model has trouble with rendering, so it is likely not a bottleneck. Nonetheless, it is an insanely fast phone 2-3 generations ahead of current top android chips.

Is there any point in calculating with worldwide averages? There are people who live on less than a single dollar per day, should we really compare them to first-world citizens who easily spend an order of magnitude more on the way to work?

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.

But Apple isn't doing any of that.

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...?

Or they could just open iMessage to android...

I agree with you but it's not damaging to Apple (much the opposite) so they'll continue to do it.

That is why I'm specifically advocating for us calling them out on it - that makes it damaging to them.

Here’s a crazy idea. Why not fix the problem at the source? Address the entitled behaviour of teenagers.

If you want to fix teenage rebellion and cliquishness I applaud your efforts. I certainly personally suffered from bullying when I was a teenager over my clothes and haircut and pretty much every other facet of my person so if you can come up with a way for no one to ever endure it again I'd celebrate your achievement. Humanity hasn't managed to impart real empathy on teenagers in thousands of years of existence - we have accounts of rebellious teens from Rome so I assume it's not an easy fix.

So, maybe instead of focusing on bullying we can just focus on punishing companies that profit from bullying.

> 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 think adding RCS support is going to instantly solve all the world's ills but Apple is pretty explicit about their reasoning for not supporting RCS: to create a specific and exclusive messenging experience on their phone. This exclusive experience is causing just another thing kids can be assholes about - they are currently and will forever continue to be assholes about a lot of stuff but this particular one is one artificially created by Apple to benefit their profitability. I'm sure in their internal meetings they like to think that exclusivity will only really affect adults and that we're mature enough not to bully each other (which, we mostly are, since the behavior we most bully as adults is bullying itself) but this exclusivity also affects teens that are far less mature. Personally I'd also love it if everyone moved off SMS/RCS in general since it's billed as an extreme luxury by carriers but I don't know if we can make that happen when Messenger comes pre-installed on iOS devices.

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.

What is more difficult to fix?

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] )

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.

Love that you angryly included the source, like the internet is a debate club. You and all the other pitchfork handlers are assuming Apple actually needs to be fixed for this entirely-made-up and self-imposed issue. They don't. It really is that clear.

You mean the behaviour that ancient civilizations already used to complain about? I'd argue changing one UI color would be an easier first step.

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 message color. 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 get the message color changed, 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.

The social rejection is a result of teens being teens, as pointed out. Adults would use another more inclusive tool, like whatsapp, email, discord, rss, etc.

I and most adults I know have never used those apps. We’re also on our ~15th iphone

You've never used email?

Not with my friends. It’s also a protocol which can be used on pretty much all devices with your pick of clients so was a bad example in the list.

15th iPhone?

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...

Most people use their phone for far more than SMS and "phoning" these days. You are an anomaly these days. That's neither good nor bad, it just is.

Most people in Europe only replace their phones when they die, get stolen, or lost.

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.

Still happily using a Nokia which outlasted several iPhones (all of them had terrible microphones in my experience).

Is this based on your personal observations or can you back that up with any meaningful statistic?

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.

I'm on my fifth smartphone (since 2009). But I've always used Android. It could be that iOS users are more inclined to replace perfectly working hardware.

Not all of us.

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.

Agree GP is an anomaly and will say 15 could be an exaggeration a bit. I don’t know really but iPhone has been around a long time now and people seem to replace typically every 1-2 years.

Not in most European or African countries, majority is on pre-paid, and phones only get replaced when there is an actual reason, not that two years have gone by.

~80 % market share for contracts (post-paid) in Germany: https://www.statista.com/topics/7772/mobile-communications-i...

I'm on a post paid contract but i haven't had a phone subsidy in a long time. If you want a "free" iphone/android you can lease the phone (effectively it's a personal loan paid back over 2 years).

I said Europe, not Germany.

~75%

And post-paid mobile contracts don't mean that the phone is paid for by the contract.

Like the others say, I too have a post-paid without a phone. I personally don't know anyone with a bundled phone, because why would you do that? I pay 8€ per month and change the phone whenever I want.

15th phone in total, would be fairly average for someone who has had mobile phones for 30 years. I suspect that's what the GP meant. Smartphone adoption is still not anywhere universal and many, many, are still on their first smart phone since a few years back.

He specifically said 15th iphone. iphones have been around for 15 years.

Yeah that was me, and I am talking iPhone. Don't try to overanalyze the "15". There's nothing scientific about it I just made it up and put the tilde in front. Didn't realize it would be the focus of such debate. It could be 10 or 20. Most people I know were early adopters and have replaced every 1-2 years and have also probably broken a couple along the way requiring early replacement. I'm also not claiming my observation is representative of anything other than that, I'm sure it wouldn't match some larger dataset. It's biased by a ton of factors. I was trying to point out 2 things;

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.

I do, and I am still on my second...

This is a result of adults being teens. Some people get comfortable.

Ok, so you're likely either not bothered by the messaging differences or not don't experience them.

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.

As I said, everyone I know is on apple so no I don’t notice the difference. I have seen a couple occasional when non Apple users are on a group text and it breaks some things.

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.

SMS is basic, lacks features. A company builds messaging software that falls back to SMS when it's not communicating with someone who uses their software. They bundle it in their OS and set it as default. They are so successful that lot of people never even consider using other products, because "everyone" is using it. Users of the software defend these actions and consider it great, often admitting that they haven't even tried alternatives because "everyone" is using it.

How is this different from Microsoft, Windows and IE?

To be best, I don't believe this:

> 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.

> 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.

In europe, most iphone users use alternative message platforms for everything, and nobody in wider groups use apple's one. US is simply in its own PR-massaged albeit huge bubble, nothing more

Why switch context? Everybody that matters to everybody I now is on whatsapp. I actually like this distinction Europe vs US - we don't have any personal ego polishing at stake and chest thumping about how country XYZ is greatest, we take what we consider best for us, facts are enough.

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.

> Why switch context? Everybody that matters to everybody I now is on whatsapp.

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.

You might wanna check out yesterday's discussion about Signal loosing support for SMS and see adults perspective on this very subject.

> SMS conversations in iMessage lose features.

"Lose" makes it sound like they could be found. Are the features even possible to implement with SMS?

Technically yes, Realistically there isn't a need. The iMessage feature set has been mostly matched by RCS on Android. Apple does not want compatible messaging.

Google's version of RCS on Android is a proprietary closed source fork of RCS that Google refuses to provide a public API for.

> 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.

To be fair, I don't think Apple has opened up iMessage either, otherwise this problem would have solved itself already with a third-party app.

Apple has never claimed that iMessage is open.

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.

I don't think it's this simple. RCS is implemented by carriers and is a feature of mobile service like SMS. It has a qualification/accreditation process. iMessage is an internet service.

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.

Respectfully, this comment solidifies why iMessage is superior. Try sending a 4K HDR video, or low-quality video, files, or photos with a resolution greater than a Nokia phone from 10 years ago, or a multitude of other things over SMS.

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.

> Signal, WhatsApp, etc. don't come close to what iMessage offers seamlessly

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?

Oh I agree with you, and that's something I forgot to mention - if you do SMS/MMS routed through Fi, they downscale everything. Forget 4k video - any video you take is getting repackaged as a .3gpp file at very low resolution (144p? idk, it's pretty bad). Audio-only clips are similarly compressed a lot, and very noisy as a result. Images don't seem to be affected, but I haven't tried sending anything big.

It's not useless, but vastly better for short text conversations than anything else. Not surprising, it's SMS.

I read that carriers can't be bothered running RCS servers, so Google provides those for Android devices.

RCS is not SMS. It’s just some unrelated technology making a claim to succession because Google said so.

And the alternative is that they wouldn’t be able to participate at all.

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.

> 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?

Mate, iMessage debuted in 2011 - 2 years after Whatsapp appeared on the platform.

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.

> Why is the answer not to force interoperability?

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.)

To also give up control back to carriers, so that they can sell you packs of RCS messages with your plan.

Force them to implement Matrix

The US Government can declare that the companies involved must come up with a way to provide equivalent functionality when interoperating between platforms, and then the companies can figure out how best they want to do that.

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.

The US government can mandate some amount of compatibility just as the EU recently mandated USB-C

Forcing interoperability sounds like a good idea, until you recognize that it results in a system of compliance that absolutely stands in the way of innovation for years if not decades to come. Look at seatbelts: the technology has come leaps and bounds in recent decades, with 5 point harnesses being common in racecars, however, you'll probably notice that the seat belts in your current car look a lot like the seatbelts in your first car, because of a government enforced standard. This is the issue with the EU's recent adoption of a mandate that all devices use USB-C (never mind if some of the proprietary chargers that were in use were able to provide a faster charging speed) as well.

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.

I don't see how your examples stand in the way of innovation. Both seatbelts and the type c requirement are written as minimum requirements, not as "no more no less". Extensions and improvements are allowed or even common, as long as they preserve the base functionality.

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.

Hell, apple themselves pretty much taken this approach with every other product they have, so it’s not like they didn’t okay over USB-C for years. My guess would be that they deliberately waited out the EU mandate, so any minor public inconvenience that may come from ditching lightning can be forwarded to EU ruling instead of them, they are absolutely okay either way.

Come on, where are all that innovation that happened with lightning or any other cable type during the “unrestricted” decades? It is simply a plain-ass form factor for.. transporting electricity between two ends of a wire, it ain’t getting much better than what we have. Mind you, there is absolutely no mandates on the data part.

Is there some sort of lack of innovation allowing your vacuum cleaner to plug into the same system as your PC as well?

Except there is no meaningful innovation in instant messaging for decades now. This argument is boilerplate of all Apple-related discussions and yet I fail to see what would we actually loose.

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.

Besides, it’s kind of absurd to imagine government regulation of bubble hue.

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.

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).

Get ready to switch, because Signal is dropping SMS support on Android: https://signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/

> but it's still the best SMS app out there

Not for long (see this other story currently on the hn front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/)

> 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.

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

That point is recursive...

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

Still a parenting issue! Just a bit late.

> 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.

> I think people here take issue with the walled garden model of an intra-device comm protocol, not the price point

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.

Let's put it this way: I am largely on board with your line of reasoning, in so much that you're forcing people to make up their mind on what they're really upset about and what the root problems are. :-)

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.

I think you have a nice intentionally harmless approach to this, but I'm still not sure how iMessage is exclusive of other protocols rather than conveniently saving the users from cell providers' charges for SMS and MMS when possible. iMessage still supports SMS and MMS, and it only prioritizes its iMessage protocol when messaging other Apple device users. I don't use iMessage and never have, but my understanding is it communicates to Android users, other smartphones and even dumbphones though the cell providers' SMS and MMS services. Seems like the only ones that should have any complaint here are cell providers for being undermined and cut out of their instant messaging revenues.

My take here is that if iMessage is a Better Tool, I'd be great if it was available on any computer that fulfills the hardware requirements to participate. For example, Apple could release an iMessage app for Android (and if they priced it fairly, this would still be cheaper than an iPhone, yet still turn them a profit).

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.

> if it was available on any computer that fulfills the hardware requirements to participate

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.

Yes, sorta. But I think the case of a chat protocol and "Apple should make macOS available for all PCs" are still a bit different.

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.

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.

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).

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.

I thought this was funny when I went to work in Korea for a year, as an American, with a bunch of other Americans; all of us stationed there in the military. Upon arrival, the other Americans immediately told me: "You need to get Kakao. It's how you text in Korea." I complied, but I often made the point that it was just another mobile app that they could install and use even back in the United States, and something like Hangouts would work just as well in Korea. When I moved back to the United States, I kept using Kakao to stay in touch with some of my old co-workers who were still in Korea, and this blew their minds, including some people who were otherwise quite tech savvy.

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.

I can relate - I also spend 4 years living and working in Korea. And I also still have Kakao group chats filled with just other expats including gyopo, in addition to the ones with native friends. :)

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.

I was using it in 2014-2015, and yeah I thought the UX was fine at that time. I did have the foresight to tie my account to my US Google Voice number (which has long been my primary number), so I didn't lose the account when I returned to the US and lost my KT phone number. I think that's what tripped up the other Americans who thought it was only an option in Korea.

It's similar in Japan. Everyone here uses LINE, and AFAICT, absolutely no one does SMS texting any more. I don't even know the phone numbers of any of my friends here; everyone just exchanges LINE contact info by QR code and that's it. The only time anyone uses a phone number seems to be for non-personal purposes (e.g., calling a business or government office), and the only time SMS seems to get used is for automated messages from official places (like your utility companies).

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.

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

Yes. WhatsApp is a hideous and bloated app and there are far better solutions.

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).

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.

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.

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.

In the current context, "cheap" is used in comparison to base configs of flagship smartphone models, such as Galaxy S22, Pixel 7 Pro, and iPhone 14. All of which tend to go for $700+. And that's not even mentioning the luxury models like foldable Galaxy ZFold4 going for $1.7k+.

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.

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.

The cable is included - https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/specs/

Sorry, I meant a charging adapter.

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.

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

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.

Is it anywhere near a luxury if 88% of teens can afford it? The iphone starts at $430 and tops out much higher than that, so the ASP is considerably higher.

I don't think it's the teens buying it for themselves.

Feel free to interpret it as 87% of teenagers’ parents can afford to buy (often multiple) iphones for their children. The actual market share of apple in the US is also at around 50%, so I wouldn’t call it luxurious.

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.

$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.

My first smartphone, as a highschooler, was $40 (circle 2014). My first "luxury" phone was a $150 Android.

A $430 price tag IS a lot.

In the US?? It was VERY rare to find a phone that cheap in 2014. I had a Nexus 5 in 2014 and it went for $350 ($437 in 2022 dollars). And that was considered a really good deal/budget phone.

Pixel 6a was on sale a couple weeks ago for $350.

I haven't ever paid more than $500 for a phone, and even that much upset me!

Nexus was a mid/high-end model (google branded), budget android phones are usually from chinese manufacturers like ZTE.

In the US!

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.

>tip

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.)

Haha woops, force of habit! I just meant "tax", not "tip and tax".

I did not realize I was in the habit of saying "tip and tax" to refer to extra fees.

And to top it off the $430 was for a backup phone.

Moto G line has models that are $169 new. You can get older used models for $60 and a line of service for $20 a month. I think people vastly overestimate how much money average people actually spend.

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.

If you think a green bubble is the only thing that will mark you for that 5%, that people will judge, you've never been, or known anyone, that was poor.

I neither think so nor said I do - it just happens to be the one we're discussing here, distinctly from the many others.

$430 is a lot to some people.

What about monthly data plans and their recurring costs?

That's another uniquely American atrocity.

Average yearly income in India 1875$ iPhoneSE for kids - 430$ I think it’s unobtainable for most of the people

https://www.statista.com/statistics/802122/india-net-nationa...

They mostly use Android in India. This is about the US.

iPhone SE in India isn't $430, it's $607 at today's exchange rate: https://www.apple.com/in/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-se/4.7-inch-... (still, EMI somewhat easily available)

20k-30k for Android phones seems to be the norm there according to the advertisements everywhere.

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 sell in gross).

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.

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.

I think the difference is that there are fairly conclusive studies showing that social media use, for all ages, can negatively influences happiness. Studies for TV, comics, and games never seemed to be conclusive. They're all very different things. An understanding of one doesn't give an understanding of another. They each deserve their own conclusion. I suspect VR will be the next one in that list.

That's true, but are TVs and comics in your pocket or beside your bed 24/7 like phones? Are they computers that also directly attach you to several friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers instantaneously across several avenues? Do they notify you that you are "missing" something? I don't think there's any example in human history of things that have garnered the daily and sustained use of human attention more than smartphones, tablets, and the Internet.

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...

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.

Actually, it just means that the app you are using sucks

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 Started 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.

So therefore we let tactics like this slide? It is an intentional mechanism to create FOMO and groupthink by a corporation.

Just because kids are prone to being led in this way, doesn't mean those leading that behaviour get a pass.

What tactics are that? Would Nike have allowed the swoosh to be licensed to every other shoe manufacturer in the 90s?

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.

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 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'm ignorant, but what are the features in group chats that Android people don't get? The heart/emoticon bubble things? I used to do group chats with my last Android phone, but now that I have iPhone...I just have too much anxiety to open these chats and respond, because I don't want to hear the notification sound buzz in triplicate over the next hour. I dislike my phone and using it so much that it's making me socially isolated.

Apparently adding a new member to a group text with an android user is a much less pleasant experience than if everyone is on imessage. I'm the android user causing problems so I dont really know the details :P But honestly that the guy singled out the "one android user" who was making his life difficult was disconerting to say the least.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nationalistic flamewar, and any flamewar, is not ok on HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

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.

Flamewar where?

Pejorative putdowns of countries are nationalistic flamebait, regardless of which country you have a problem with.

You should Google flamebait, which is also distinct from flamewar

Would you please just follow the site rules? You obviously broke them, and this petty objection-making is not helpful.

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

iPhone = Dystopia?

No,

Dystopia = everyone must buy an iphone as solution to the problem instead of just using an app that's not restricted to iphones

I guess the difference is the attitude - “I will try to change my preferences to suit others” vs “I will try to change others to suit my preferences”

It isn't.

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

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

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

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.