> Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones

I don't think iMessage is big anywhere outside the US (which appears to account for about 9% of iPhone users). I don't think a majority of global users even knows there are different colors.

Completely not a thing in the UK. The app is a portal for SMS based auth and that's it. Everyone uses WhatsApp or other social network based messengers.

Australia / Asia too, no one cares about iMessage

Same in Germany. Everybody used WhatsApp

I know virtually nobody using iMessage in southern Europe.

I have lived in Brazil, Australia, Spain, and France. iMessage was never a thing in these markets.

RCS messages are also still going to show up in green bubbles as far as I know.

they are. the intentionally-low-contrast tone of green that Apple passive aggressively punishes Android users with.

I mean prior to iMessage existing, all messages sent in the "Text" app were green bubbles.

They weren't bright green with white text lmao https://cdn.redmondpie.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Messag...

End to end encryption is a reasonable justification for a visual indicator.

Originally it was because iMessages were free, while SMS were $0.15-$0.20 each. So glad Apple broke that monopoly, along with many other anti-consumer wireless provider restrictions.

Did Apple really break that monopoly? WhatsApp was released 2009 with the explicit pitch that it was "free SMS". iMessage launched 2011, and with the anti-consumer Apple lock-in, and isn't even much used outside US.

Also free/unlimited SMS was prevalent in many countries before WhatsApp or iMessage. And there were plenty of IMs before that too.

RCS is a new green? If you’re referring to the existing SMS green, that was Apple’s original color for messaging. They adopted blue to represent the transition to iMessage. So you can’t say they picked a poor color on purpose; it was representing their own product originally before they even came up with iMessage.

No, the original green was darker and less hard to read messages on. With iOS 7 they made it super bright.

Good point. The new green was decided after the split with iMessage, so technically Apple could have made it a poor color on purpose.

I still doubt it, especially since it’s the same green for FaceTime, Phone, and the icon that still represents iMessage.

Yeah, it wasn't always a bad green. They absolutely chose a bad color on purpose - arguably the world's best design company accidentally uses a painful high-saturation low-contrast background color that violates their own design guidelines for like 8 years by mistake? Give me a break.

Is having your message be a different colour really a punishment?

America matters more than the rest of the world. Everyone wants to come here, not the other way around.

This is irrelevant to Apple, still 10% of all customers

That 10% of the customers pays a lot more per customer than most do. We are likely responsible for far, FAR more than 10% of the revenue or 10% of the profit of apple.

did you miss the /s from your post?

Anecdotal evidence from Germany: Nobody uses iMessage. Everybody uses WhatsApp. Everbody!

I'm a US iphone user and I had no idea what iMessage colors meant until journalists started making a big deal of it. Not that I doubt the stories about green-shaming, it just never occurred to me.

> Better camera (arguably already achieved)

I feel the later generation of phones went back a bit as they have more aggressive processing. It can work great, but the hit or miss ratio is worse, in particular noise processing can be way off.

That's crazy the budget Pixel a lone gets overall better photos than a top of the line iPhone.

I don't see a need to upgrade my Xs. I can print publishable photos to A2 size, and that's big enough for me.

I’ve searched and searched for a way to turn off the extra processing. The only methods are third party camera apps or doing burst mode for every picture.

I preferred it when they saved the original and processed photos. Now there is no way to turn it off.

Worst part for me is when I get to see a perfect picture that gets processed a blink later and can never be recovered.

> Worst part for me is when I get to see a perfect picture that gets processed a blink later and can never be recovered.

This has happened to me way too many times. I take a picture, it looks great, then shortly after it gets processed so badly it's all blurred up with no return because of some forced long exposure low light compensation feature that cannot be disabled.

If you want to try out the “fix” goto camera settings and turn on “prioritize faster shooting” then in the camera app on the take picture button: tap, hold, drag left. It should stay white and play a shutter sound. There is a chance to do a similar action that just starts a recording but the button goes red for that.

Thank you! This fixes the after-shot blur. Now I just need to find a way to disable HDR/color enhancements without a 3rd party app and I'm perfectly set.

Halide. If you don't mind subscriptions or the lifetime $75 the app I found that did everything I wanted is Halide. The pain of the problem for me didn't cross the threshold for me to buy the app but the trial of it worked. Funny I have several dozen selfies of me testing it out compared to the Camera app with all the options toggled.

Agreed on battery life. It's such a pity that advances in battery tech is never given back to the user.

As for green text, this is purely a US thing. Most of the rest of the world uses Whatsapp.

Most of the rest of the world doesn't give a rat's ass about bubble colour and just use SMS, including for sharing pictures.

I don't have WhatsApp and literally nobody ever asked me to use it, even if I know they have it. they just flat out don't care as long as a message gets across.

I don’t know any part of the world still using SMS. What part of the world is that?

Countries where telecom competition lead to unlimited sms early enough and/or iPhone/iMessage adoption meant people weren’t motivated to install third party apps. The US and to a lesser extend the UK are the only countries I’m aware of this happening? But the UK plans added unlimited sms later and so WhatsApp has >50% market penetration there unlike the US.

(responding to both) France. We've had unlimited SMS plans since what, 2005? It's been a guaranteed solid 10-15+ years nobody thinks that SMS used to be a paid-per-unit (whether you got a package or not) thing.

Sure people use a variety of messenger apps, Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat. Since you don't have a guarantee that any one person is using this or that the default messaging app (Messages on iOS, whatever it is on Android) SMS is the safest bet that always works. That's typically what people use when they get someone 's contact: hand over phone, ask to type number in focused input field, send $firstname SMS; bam, handshake done.

> WhatsApp has >50% market penetration there

Lots of people here have WhatsApp. Doesn't mean it's their go-to, they still don't ditch SMS[0] nor dunk on "green bubbles". And then if both parties have an iPhone it just so happens that they obliviously converse over iMessage as a side effect.

[0] Except for group chats. But then they just create groups in whatever's at hand, which may or may not be WhatsApp. And that's mostly because SMS group messaging is thoroughly broken (as in it works more like email than IRC and people want the latter). But for 1:1? SMS is brutally consistent.

Apps like Whatsapp provide (a) groups, (b) picture messages, (c) end-to-end encryption, (d) very low spam rate and (e) free messaging, even internationally.

So there's often motivation to install your country's dominant messaging app beyond just the cost of SMS.

it’s a very real friction to install a third party app and ensure the people you want to talk to install it too, when all you really want to do is send short texts and images.

A good indicator is how expensive SMS was back when smartphones were brand new.

If they were expensive, users jumped ship right away. If they were nearly free, people just kept using them on brand new devices as there were no compelling enough arguments to switch.

To answer your question more directly, Sweden comes to mind.

I’m not sure where you are, but when I first got a phone in maybe 1998 SMS was completely free. No concept of limits at all. It was only when it became popular that network operators started charging for them. Now nobody uses them for anything except receiving 2FA codes

I use SMS in Canada, so does everybody I know. Businesses also use SMS a lot.

Here in Europe even my grandmother and her neighbours use WhatsApp and MMS for pictures seem to be unsupported for the last decade or so.

My 78 year old mother is now comfortable making and receiving calls on WhatsApp. It’s saved me a fortune in international call charges.

I don't care if you personally use Whatsapp or not, it's beyond the point. Whatsapp is by far the most used messenger app in the world. The US is unique in the developed world for using iMessages or SMS.

Netherlands is unique in the developed world for using iDEAL. Therefore, Apple shouldn't support it or care about integrating it into Apple Pay.

You make it sound like someone was arguing for the green text issue specifically not to be solved, rather than just stating that that's only primarily relevant to US consumers.

>rather than just stating that that's only primarily relevant to US consumers.

Why does that need to be stated?

To inform people who might incorrectly extrapolate from their local situation?

The unreliability of sharing video with android users over mms is what drives my use of Signal. That and it's cross platform.

The AI stuff could be useful if it makes Siri more useful.

Like when I'm listening to a Spotify playlist and I want to like the song or save it to a playlist while driving, it would be amazing if I could just tell Siri to do it for me. As-is, sometimes it tells me it doesn't how to play songs on Spotify.

Or they were showing how you would be able to look for photo by describing it.

> Like when I'm listening to a Spotify playlist and I want to like the song or save it to a playlist while driving, it would be amazing if I could just tell Siri to do it for me

Spotify already supports liking a song via Siri.

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/siri-and-spotify/

Unfortunately adding to a playlist would require Spotify to add that capability. Siri doesn't learn how to navigate third party UI and infer potential actions, the context of what is currently going on and the actions which can be performed need to be codified by the developer.

Siri is a hybrid dictation and command-and-control system (at least today), which is why it sometimes decides the closest action to what you said is something obviously different from what you asked for. Unfortunately this is done via a dynamic vocabulary, so it leads to situations where something you were able to ask for before (like the local weather) suddenly changes behavior because you installed an app with "weather" in its metadata.

This also poses a unique problem for streaming and downloading media services, because the valid targets for the command aren't locally known - it's all the media on Spotify in this case. So "play enter sandman" won't know to infer whether you are asking to play an album in the cloud vs a game which hasn't been installed vs the "Sandman" series on Netflix - it may instead decide the best guess was you meant you wanted to "read" the books you have locally installed.

I have a beta of the new Siri, and it's still less impressive than the the OK Google I gave up half a decade ago.

The capability set is indistinguishable.

Also, AirDrop and mobile hotspot are unreliable, if Apple could make them always work, that‘d be noticeable.

For AirDrop, at least, I've found it to be very reliable, with one caveat that always tripped me up before I realized it: *the recipient's phone needs to be unlocked*. This completely changed the game for me, and now me and my wife use it all the time.

Tapping the top of your phones together is the best way I found.

  Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones

Do you mean green background? Because the non-iMessage bubbles are the white text on a green background for outgoing messages only. Given that the most vocal folks seem to be Android users who care about the background color of someone else's messages I doubt the majority of iPhone users care, would notice, or are even using the Messages app in the first place. Certainly if you're calling it green text you're not paying much attention either.

  Better camera (arguably already achieved)

Apple can still get rid of that hideous camera bump.

How about getting rid of that stupid back button in the top left corner when an app opens another app? It drives me crazy seeing it every time I click a link in a message. It's the most useless thing. There's already a good app switcher. What is the point of the back button?

I would hate that change. I usually hold my phone in my left hand, and can reach the back button with my thumb. Using the swipe gesture at the bottom of the screen to switch apps would require switching to a two-handed grip for that one common action.

It's not ideal; I'd like to see more attention given to multitasking in general, the re-arranging deck of cards system has always been counterintuitive and clumbsy in my opinion.

So is it mainly for lefties? I hold my phone with my right hand and that button is inaccessible. Based on the downvotes, I feel like I must be missing something.

iOS is kinda a mess when it comes to what's easy for people who hold their phones in their left versus right hands. That back button is definitely for left-handers, but then the control center is clearly better for right-handers. The slide-from-screen-edge-to-go-back gesture is only usable in the left hand, and the slide-from-screen-edge-to-go-forward gesture is only usable with the right hand. My conclusion is that iOS is only really designed to be used with both hands gripping the edges of the phone, which meshes with their ever-increasing screen sizes. The new Pro Max is 6.9"!! That's basically a tablet.

you wouldn't hate it since a proper implementation would make it optional

There is no way Apple would make a change like that and have it be optional.

It's worse than useless - I sometimes mistap it and switch the apps

where'd you see no more green text?

iOS 18 (available for all iphones since 2nd gen SE) will support RCS

I don't actually know how this will be implemented into iMessage but it's supposed to bring feature parity between android and apple.

EDIT: looks like still green bubbles https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apples-rcs-texting-starts-i...

Unless the RCS messages are end-to-end encrypted, they should stay green IMHO.

iMessage isn’t meaningfully end to end encrypted either, so it shouldn’t get a different color by that logic.

The automated backups (which are not e2ee) serve as endpoint key escrow (to the middle service), backdooring the e2ee of iMessage.

i am surprised (am i really?) that apple never implemented a toggle to E2EE your icloud backup, just like you can backing up locally through itunes. thankfully you can just completely disable iCloud Backup.

iCloud Backups can be E2EE encrypted if you enable advanced data protection.

RCS brings plenty of new monetization and spam opportunities but doesn't bring feature parity. Or did Google decide to open up their proprietary extensions to non-Google RCS clients?

You know better than I - can I ask what RCS is doing that leads Google to disable it on devices with unlocked bootloaders? Are devices meant to only accept messages that have been signed by a vendor or something? I thought it was just a new messaging standard but I guess there's a lot that goes into the security of it. But why can Signal run e2ee messages on unsavory devices but googles won't let me send a text message unless they've signed the whole stack?

No idea.

There's a massive feature benefit: finally allowing multi-megabyte attachments. Hopefully pictures and videos won't be compressed to fit into 600KB.

This is entirely possible with MMS but for most carriers refusing to adopt 3GPP's current recommendations. This is also entirely possible with other messaging apps available on iOS but for American android users refusing to use other apps.

That's like suggesting it's entirely to run jumbo frames it's just ISPs don't support it.

Like, sure, yeah it's possible but all the stacks in between are too heavily ossified.

> but for American android users refusing to use other apps.

As if it's just those pesky Android users that won't just use another app. Lots of my contacts only want iMessage. Show me the APK signed by Apple, the Google store page managed by them, and I'll install it.

You realize iMessage and RCS are two different things, right?

> but for American android users

You realize it's not me, the Android user, being unwilling to use something other than iMessage/SMS? It is the iPhone users I wish to communicate with that don't want to use Whatsapp/Signal/LINE/Facebook Messenger/Element/Telegram/WeChat/Threema/Viber/GroupMe/Discourd/Teams/Allo/Discord.

Give me an app that actually directly supports iMessage on Android and I'll use it. Not something which is trying to proxy through some other device. Something either made or directly blessed by Apple.

Messages is the app. It currently supports SMS/MMS and iMessage protocols. It will soon also support RCS. So soon all those people who will only use Messages on their phones will be able to send and receive high quality videos and images with me. I'm quite excited for the change.

Suggesting RCS doesn't bring any new features other than advertising and spam is being extremely disingenuous. Larger attachments and other extensions, while not quite feature parity with iMessage, are leagues ahead of what was available by SMS and MMS. Effectively available, not just what was theoretically allowable by a spec but not actually possible due to limitations with service providers.

They are talking about features they'd like to see.

Or a folding phone? That would be huge

Only half as huge :)

>Better camera (arguably already achieved)

For the Pro Model. Yes. Not for the normal iPhone though. 2x Optical Zoom is barely enough. Especially when I default to taking photos with 1.8x which fits my view point a lot better. So when I get 5x optical zoom it is more like 2.5x only.

And if there is one thing I would add to the list is weight. The Pro model is too heavy.