It's because SMS is unencrypted, and this is an effort to have secure communication between iOS users and Android users (since iMessage is Apple-device-only). There's also a status factor, where Android users are lowly "green bubbles" in iMessage, which signals decreased security and questionable support for the interactions available to iMessage users.

Of course everyone can switch to Signal and this is a moot point, but millions of Apple users use iMessage and aren't likely to switch.

> Of course everyone can switch to Signal and this is a moot point, but millions of Apple users use iMessage and aren't likely to switch.

Doesn’t this mean that most people simply don’t care?

On the iOS side people don't care, but apparently on the Android side they do?

How many people really care about encrypted text messages? Most of the time, I’m sending my girlfriend pictures of our dogs. If I cared about encryption, we’d download something else (or use gchat or whatever). This just doesn’t seem like it should be that big a deal.

Yeah it seems like it's more about "blue bubble" status than it is about encryption.

This has been discussed ad nauseam. In the US, not being a "blue bubble" can have a very high social cost and get you excluded from groups and communication opportunities. People just want to be able to communicate without ridiculous walled garden vendors throwing stupid road blocks in their way and making things artificially harder to get you to "buy your mom an iphone."

The fact that some people are snobs doesn’t justify the government dictating software specifications to Apple.

It's not just snobbery. There are real and serious usability issues. When doing group communication between an iPhone and a group member who is in Android user. The entire group chat gets downgraded to SMS, which means a lot of messages don't get through the way they were intended, and images and videos are so downgraded as to be unusable. The people that I know personally who are affected by this, it has nothing to do with snobbery and everything to do with pragmatism. People on iPhone will only use iMessage in the United States. It's stupid, it's absurd, it's self-inflicted, but ultimately it is what it is and all the advocacy of moving to something else is not moving the needle.

If Americans are this dumb, I don't see why they need any laws to protect them. Why would I want to be part of any groups that won't have me because I don't use an iPhone?

Thankfully, here outside America, this isn't an issue: absolutely no one uses SMS or cares about this stuff.

> If Americans are this dumb, I don't see why they need any laws to protect them.

They aren't. The bubble color thing is an exaggerated claim and a lot of whining from a bunch of clowns. No one actually cares in the US except for a bunch of children (who are always prone to following trends for the sake of following the trend) and a handful of immature adults. The rest of the country doesn't know or care

That's a very ignorant thing to say. Try to force yourself to live with images and video of quality to SMS so you can actually understand the problem, and let's see how long you think it's just immaturity.

We can disagree about solutions, but strawmanning stuff is dumb, and then dismissing the problem that you strawmanned is even more dumb

What's ignorant about it? MMS sucks, I didn't say otherwise. Android <-> Android MMS also sucks. That is not an iPhone <-> Android specific issue. MMS was an adequate solution in the feature phone days when the phones and displays were mediocre at best. It's been a terrible solution since mobile phones became cameras with a phone.

The strawmanning is done by the people claiming iPhone users are, as a whole, excluding Android users from their communications over it. That's what I'm rebutting, not that MMS sucks. Only children and immature adults do that. The vast majority of people don't care. They either use MMS and accept it sucks or switch to another service, they don't exclude people over it.

That’s a ridiculous reason to demand an open protocol from Apple. I get that it sucks when you’re in high school and kids are massive jerks about social standing, but this can’t be a serious use case post college, right?

Anecdotes about mean girls on Tinder dumping Android users don’t really seem compelling, either.

It is surprisingly a serious use case post college. In my personal life, if someone is going to be so stupid and immature as to not want to communicate with me because I'm an Android user, then good riddance. I don't need people like that in my life.

However, there are a lot of people who are impacted, and it's not always the case of the mean girl on tinder dumping an Android user. I know people who have group chats with family and friends, that will be left out because the iPhone is programmed to downgrade the entire group's chat if a single member is an Android user. This makes it so that messages don't work all the way, quality on images and video is garbage, and other legitimate usability concerns. Are super snooty, it's that it truly is very difficult to communicate from an iPhone to an Android phone.