Android users’ text message bubbles show up green, and you can’t send the “tapback” reactions (or rather, they show up as a “so and so has liked your post” rather than a thumbs up icon). This is annoying for Android users and it’s kind of tedious for iPhone users to have to vet group chats to see if there is a single Android user who might be annoyed. Apparently this is factoring into people’s phone purchasing calculus.

It actually only shows the "so and so has liked your post" on Apple devices unless they've changed it recently. In Google messages you see the reactions from iphone users as they should be shown.

Whoa, that’s great to hear. My Android-user friend said otherwise, but maybe she was misinformed or I misunderstood or something.

Maybe an old version of android but this has what it's look like on Google Messages. Think it changed sometime in the past year. https://i.imgur.com/GYHMkHy.png

Yeah, this was based on a months-old conversation, so I wouldn't be surprised if the feature just hadn't shipped yet or some such.

Tapbacks on text messages work on the iPhone side too. I just had the occasion to try that a few days ago.

It doesn't say "so and so has liked your post" on Iphone when someone has Android in a group chat now?

That's not the permutation I tried, so maybe in group chats it still happens that way. But in a 1:1 chat it worked fine.

All incoming texts, whether sms or iMessage, show up in a gray bubble.

Only your own outgoing texts are in a colored bubble

That's patently incorrect. Incoming texts from my Android-user contacts are green bubbles. Incoming texts from my iPhone-user contacts are blue. Source: I'm looking at my iPhone right now.

I think you should look again. Source: looking at my iPhone right now.

No, your iPhone does not magically work differently than everyone else’s.

In iMessage, which seems to be a thing in the USA (I don't know of any other market where it's a dominant messaging system), non-iPhone users participating via SMS appear to iPhone users with a different (green) background color to their message bubbles.

Your own messages appear in a different color, not theirs. At least not on current iOS.

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.

> Your own messages appear in a different color, not theirs. At least not on current iOS.

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.

Yeah, I had to google it too:

"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 more means the group chat will all switch to using SMS (to include the non iPhone user) which isn’t as feature rich as using iMessage. It’s not a judgement on someone for their phone, it’s more that including their phone makes the group chat function worse.

it's not color it's functionality. a single non-iOS user being added to the group breaks the group texting behavior for the entire group

This sound horrible. What a bullying tactic from Apple.

SMS/MMS is icky. Absolutely shit protocol.

Your quoted source has that backward -- messages you've received always appear in light grey bubbles, regardless of whether they came in via SMS or iMessage.

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.

See today's other story:

One trick Apple uses to make you think green bubbles are “gross”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33176668

The way an SMS message is displayed in iMessage (sent from a non-Apple device, as opposed to a "blue bubble" for iMessage-to-iMessage messages).