I'd silence the conversation, except that iMessage won't let you have two identical groups with exactly the same members. So both humorous and serious stuff goes into the same group chat, and it's often very time-sensitive if serious. Then three or four people start joking around, reacting to each other, and suddenly while I'm at dinner (or, my favorite, one hour into a three-hour drive) my phone or watch is going off every twenty seconds for five minutes. I can't ignore them, because one of those dings might be from someone else about something that needs an answer right now. I can't risk forgetting to turn notifications back on.
When I still used an Android phone, the max-ten-people SMS rule meant that I was missing important business information - like, for example, I found out that our secretary had cancer when she asked me for restaurant recommendations near MD Anderson Cancer Clinic in Houston. Never occurred to anyone else that I had gotten none of that.
If I were in a group chat with people both joking around and sending messages requiring urgent responses, I'd let them know to either cut the banter and keep the channel clear, or contact me otherwise if they need my urgent reaction. Letting people hold my attention hostage like that would drive me crazy.
How are other people supposed to know that it's not okay for you right now because you are at dinner?
People get lazy and just use the "whole group" message rather than send it to those who are working today. And it's much like my problems with Android vs iOS: there are twelve people in this group, eleven of them have iPhones. They are not all going to install and use a separate messaging app for business than for personal communication, especially as iMessage is nominally E2EE. I could adapt or just be completely marginalized. So now twelve have iPhones.
This does not sound like an impossible stretch, works on more device types, and in the case of Slack or Teams can also be configured for HIPAA compliance (which while you don’t call it out, seems like it may be useful). Tens of millions of people use a chat system for work distinct from their personal friend groups, even if the venn diagram is a circle.
We do not have desks. Nor do we have offices.
I'm an anesthesiologist; I work where the patient and the surgeon are.
I like Apple hardware, but try to avoid its first party apps as much as possible due to that.
I realize that I live in an unusual life vis-a-vis most HN readers. I do not work in tech, and I never have. I'm a physician: specifically, an anesthesiologist. I have always enjoyed tech, and I'm certainly miles ahead of most of my colleagues on that. But. Remote work is not possible. Relocating involves getting a new license to practice medicine (3-8 months), getting accepted by the medical staff of any hospital or surgery center you want to work at (~2 months after license is secure and job contract is signed), and all the usual stuff.
So I cannot not answer any number that isn't outside the US system when I'm on call. I can't silence the phone when I'm on call. I can't ignore messages. But we're a partnership, so there's no HR to file a complaint with when someone banters on a business channel, and I can't order them to do something any more than they could order me.
Not doubting your description of your situation, and it does sound extremely stressful.
There are so many apps/services available for this exact purpose that can alert (with or without sound, per user choice) through iOS's and Android's "do not disturb" mode, can call or text several numbers in sequence (useful in places with weak signal but a landline) and much more.
The multiple-dial might help if we had a fixed location, but we don’t. Getting boosters or microcells in dead spots is just now happening, but the IT department could also enable WiFi calling, which they block.
It’s a long litany of hair-pulling.
> With more complex emoji I have to screenshot the text and then pull up the image to zoom on it to even tell what it is.
...you can make the font bigger. Or get glasses.
> I'd silence the conversation, except that iMessage won't let you have two identical groups with exactly the same members
Create group 1 with coworkers A,B. Create group 2 with coworkers B,C. Add C to group 1, A to group 2. Two different chat groups.
"I won't bother to look up how to do things on my phone" != "my phone sucks."
A makes joke. B and C react "laugh". D replies with sub-joke. E, F, and G react "groan". Produce this little cascade every time a serious topic is brought up and someone makes an offhand joke as a lead-in to a serious topic.
> you can make the font bigger. Or get glasses
I have and use reading glasses. Making the font bigger is an option but I can read text just fine at that size. I can't make out the details of a complex emoji.
> Create group 1 with coworkers A,B. Create group 2 with coworkers B,C. Add C to group 1, A to group 2. Two different chat groups.
A completely non-obvious behavior (you can only create a group after you have sent the first text, see https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/group-conversations-i... for info), and as it's late at night, I can't test it. Trying to search for how to do this turns up mostly threads about how the same group of contacts keeps showing up in different conversation threads.
> "I won't bother to look up how to do things on my phone" != "my phone sucks."
Feel free to tell me what search will show me how to make a "MyCompany - Business" and "MyCompany - Social" group without ever sending a message, and guaranteeing that Business messages always go to Business and Social always go to Social.
iMessages/SMS is not a conversation or an email and the same rules don't apply. You don't have the recipient's attention for any longer than it takes to read the message you've sent. If you want to make a joke then make a point you need to do both in the same message.
You should look at how to zoom on your iPhone - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph3e2e367e/ios
I can’t change the behaviors of others. And, in practice, while email isn’t really considered a conversation, messaging is. Stuff that would be no problem in a physical conversation (three people laugh) is incredibly distracting when every one of them feels compelled to note they found it funny.
Really? That's insane, so that means that 3rd party messaging apps literally have better UX than first party ones, as I have lots of groups with the same members for different things.
iMessage just not supporting android/windows/linux devices already makes it drastically worse than any other popular chat app.
This wouldn’t mean much if iOS was a small percentage of phones. In regions where it is a majority of phones people use those additional features. In places like the US where most people are using iOS, most people don’t even realize those features don’t exist or are semi-broken on other chat apps because they don’t use them. For average people that have been using iMessage for a long time with other iMessage users, using those other chat apps feels like a downgrade.
The only two features I can think of that iMessage has which discord/whatsapp/etc don't are:
1. Automatically can flip to "do not disturb" mode when my phone is in sleep mode, and display that notice to my companion. Other chat apps require manually configuring that I think. I also suspect apple doesn't provide an API to make this easily possible for other apps.
2. iMessage makes it easy to identify the poors, the android users, and ignore them. If I exchange numbers on a dating app and get a green bubble, I can know to immediately ghost them.
Are those the features you were thinking about, or something else?
I’ve never seen anything like this on any other chat app I’ve used. Most objects in iOS can be directly shared or collaborated on over iMessage, and that is a very rich set of objects. People that only use iMessage don’t even realize other chat apps can’t do some of these things.
I find the iMessage implementation very clunky compared to WhatsApp. It’s trying so hard to be “minimal” about delivery status and recipient capabilities that I never quite know whether something worked or not, especially with contacts that have older devices on their iMessage account.
They use iMessage with their family and friends. They use it at work too. Some of their friends, and maybe some of their family, work at the same place. I can try to convince 11 other people who are my business partners to switch to, say, Signal. A special app used only for our group communications. Or I can buy an iPhone. I chose the latter.
It's not my choice. I'm making the best of it that I can. I wish it were not so, but it is.
It's just the US that has picked a universal messenger that doesn't work on android, every other country, the vast majority of the planet, defaults to a cross-platform phone messenger app.
In short, consider moving to europe.
I hope this is sarcasm, and you're not actually that narrow minded.
It is an interesting complete marketing victory in the US by Apple though, that there is a widespread perception that you would only have an Android if you couldn't afford an iPhone. I've had an iPhone for work, it's fine. I much prefer Android and I'll stick to it, and the reasons for that have nothing to do with money. I'm glad I don't love in the US where that would apparently make me a social pariah.
I do not recall this being a problem in the pre-iMessage days, even with flip phones. I was on prepaid T-Mobile and had to pay for every message I received, which is the one place where I thought the US billing system had gone nuts - you could always decline to receive a phone call, knowing the number, but you can't refuse a text. I was surprised that nobody ever abused that, but they never did so on a large scale. At ten cents per text, sent or received, you communicated when you needed to, or when you had something to contribute, but one minute of voice was the same cost. One sent and one received text cost as much as two minutes of talk, which can convey a lot more information.
In Europe, Android is on equal par with Apple. WhatsApp is the default messaging service - it is universally installed among my friends, relatives, colleagues, contractors etc.. No-one cares what model of phone the other person has. Everyone communicates.
They do: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
As another example, it makes it almost impossible to manage multiple numbers for a given contact (e.g. to explicitly text somebody’s work phone), and the sender side is very confusing as well with dual-SIM. Apple’s implementation freely merges threads that I’m trying hard to keep separate and then still falls over with tons of delivery errors in complex situations (usually after swapping SIMs).
It all works reasonably well if you have a single long-lived mobile number and all your contacts have the same, and are using iMessage (or now RCS), since that’s presumably the reality for most Apple engineers.
Anything slightly more unusual and the thing falls apart completely and makes me wish for a Nokia 3310 (or convince my contact to switch to something more reasonable for messaging).
Fine. Is "10-4" or "copy that" or "Roger" acceptable? Because the whole point of that text, in a work context (and this is always a work conversation; I like my partners but I'm not personal friends with them), is to convey "I have received your message". And a reaction generates an SMS that is, until you realize what it is, kind of incomprehensible. "Loved '[my comment]'" makes no sense when you get it as a long comment.
> The reactions may not help you
I have trouble seeing how they help anyone. You made an obvious joke. A guy who laughs at anything reacts "HA-HA!!" or whatever. What is the contribution? The youngest member of my partnership is 40, though we do have a 33-year-old joining in a few months.
This isn't "get off my lawn", much as I do love that. It's "explain to me how it's useful for actual minute-to-minute work". I'm a physician. An anesthesiologist. I never know when the next emergency will arise, but OTOH we don't go for a sterile cockpit approach because there are a lot of conversations that have to do with the running of the day at work that aren't entirely serious (and don't involve patient care, as such; that's why we don't use the sterile cockpit method - it's more about figuring out who can let whom go to lunch, becuase you can't just leave someone under anesthesia to go eat, or how we might be able to let Dr. X operate in about an hour - personnel management is the biggest part of my on-call duties).
You won't be able to alter behavior of everyone around you. So at least the software should render these interactions in the least obnoxious way by being consistent on both side.
You will always be able to ask for textual clarification. But the big win is that you won't be bothered by sub-par quoting repost.
Why would I need textual clarification? It was/is a mediocre joke. I don't need to comment on everything that crosses my path.
That sounds like a problem unique to yourself and I imagine this is not the only such case in which you struggle.
You have a hint above you need to be specific what means what, when we onboard new people we go through these things. This is a problem with ontologies you have to be specific and not allow meanings to drift.
I am not a emoji expert but this has been a way to make our chats a lot more easy to get a grip on.
We do not use Apple so do not get "Loved X" types of messages.
Or, since we're on a technical forum: "Ack" / ACK.
So I had missed the “in a work context”, where I think your point is slightly more valid.
>And a reaction generates an SMS that is, until you realize what it is, kind of incomprehensible. "Loved '[my comment]'" makes no sense when you get it as a long comment.
Only if you don’t both have iPhones, and the necessary information is all at the beginning. You see “Loved” and a few words from the start of the message and you remember what you said and you know which message.
> The reactions may not help you I have trouble seeing how they help anyone. You made an obvious joke. A guy who laughs at anything reacts "HA-HA!!" or whatever. What is the contribution?
So this answer may surprise you, but emoji reacts actually do communicate something unique, and of value. They are more subtle. They also permit the conversation to terminate after the react. In my mind, and the mind of many others, an actual message necessitates a response, and I’d see it as rude to neither respond nor react to a message. Reactions are subtle and out of hand, and you don’t respond _to_ a reaction. Using a react instead of an actual text response has a way of signaling the other user that they don’t need to respond further, that you read their message, how you feel about it, and no further information is necessary. This is incredibly useful and I’d struggle to communicate with any kind of emotional nuance in this day and age without it. More fundamentally, reactions solve the problem of non-verbal communication and body language in text.
>This isn't "get off my lawn", much as I do love that.
It gives “get off my lawn” a bit when you say you don’t see how it would be useful to anyone. I’d never try to convince you that you need to use it, but I do think you should understand the utility for everyone else.
But, I definitely understand that it’s not useful for your professional use case as an anesthesiologist. Also, wow, what a cool job (seriously)!
Liked "I would be surprised if this eliminates green bubbles. iMessage supports many features unavailable over RCS on Android devices. These would still be disabled and Apple needs a way to indicate a degraded feature set to iMessage users."