this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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They will still keep them green. You know how teens react to those bubbles.
I do, and I couldn't care less. I think a visual indicator that tells me "hey, this is an iMessage" or "hey, this is an SMS/RCS message" is a very good thing to have.
You don't care, because you're an adult, what you or I see as a simple visual indicator is yet another thing that HS teens will use to bully and peer pressure with.
But you should care in the sense that Apple is exploiting teens still developing brains and maturity with dark patterns to get them "hooked for life" in a way.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. The problem isn't the fact that the indicator exists. A lot of it is because it's an ugly green bubble, and Apple refuses to change it because bullying kids is great marketing for Apple.
I doubt the bullying would be any different if it was a beautiful red (or whatever is considered a pretty chat bubble) instead.
And even if it was a blue bubble, the bullies would find another reason to bully someone.
I get the peer pressure part and sure Apple might be exploiting that in America, but in the past it was clothing brands or whatever it is now. Making the bubbles the same color (or even bringing iMessage over to Android completely) would get rid of a single symptom, not of the root cause.
Clothing gets you negative comments. iMessage gets people to exclude you from group chats or even text messaging completely. It's become far more socially acceptable to isolate someone because of what they don't own.
Even if this were the same level of bullying, the amount of resources that Apple needs to fix this is negligible compared to clothing companies or whathaveyou. You can't update a shirt. You can easily update the color of a bubble or implement an industry standard. Apple refuses to even try to fix this issue, and in my eyes, they're 100% complicit in enabling bullying.
Clothing (or other things, clothing was just an example) does get you excluded from a group. The only reason a bully would want to "include" the bullied person in their group is so they can bully them more.
I agree that they could open up iMessage to competitors with relative ease and that this would be a good move. Not because it would seriously stop bullying, but because it would make it a little bit easier to find a common messenger to use (we don't really have that problem in my home country, as most people use WhatsApp, which is multi platform).
What I'd hate is if Apple removed all indicators that what I'm sending or what I already sent is an SMS/RCS message instead of an iMessage. It shows me what features work for that particular conversation, and if I'm roaming in a region where sending SMS is not free, I want to know when I'm about to send one.
I agree, for both send and receive since ios can send messages differently (text vs imessage)
That's how I react to those bubbles. It means any image I send is going to be compressed to shit and be utterly unrecognizable. Messages will sent out of order or not at all. Group chats are completely fucked.
I'm sure Apple shares a lot of the blame, but holy shit how is this not solved in 2024. I shouldn't have to resort to spam filled shitware from Meta to get remotely modern messaging cross platform
Hope rcs pans out and soon
Apple doesn't "share a lot of the blame." The blame belongs solely to Apple and their insistence on a closed ecosystem. They intentionally hamstring any cross functionality with competing devices, even features as simple as text messaging. It's important for Apple to foster a cult-like mentality among their consumers.
Apple management has explicitly stated they do not want to support better compatibility between Android and iPhone, their response when asked what parents who buy cheap Androids for their kids should do it was to buy them iPhones. Many of the problems are very easy to fix on Apple's side and keeping them problematic is intentional.
See the last sentence of my original comment.
It's about the social phenomenon around the imessage chat colors, which is intentional on Apple's part. You must have a social in-group and an out-group. To be in the in-group, you must purchase the correct products, subscribe to the correct services.
CONSUME
Dude... Who here is asking for "a magical piece of PCB for free?" I'm assuming that means you think people are asking for free phones?
For one, Google never wanted to implement or run RCS, the carriers were supposed to do that specifically to prevent the fragmentation issue. But they couldn't get off their ass, even after Google spent years pushing them to do so.
For two, even after Google said fuck the carriers I'll do it myself, Apple was invited to participate in its implementation and Apple refused. They could have worked with Google to implement RCS across all devices. They didn't because they want to keep people locked into their ecosystem. They had a great opportunity to ensure all the privacy and encryption features were implemented how they liked.
If that were true, RCS would have been implemented by carriers LONG ago like they were supposed to (the original spec was launched in 2008), well before imessage came out in 2011 and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
But you know who actually does have a TON of sway with Carriers? Apple. You know who probably could have actually gotten them to implement RCS? Apple. Apple could have solved the RCS dilemma even before Google decided to do things themselves.
Apple didn't even need to do much, just drop the mere hint that if carriers didn't start implementing RCS they might stop selling the iPhone through them and they would have bent over backwards to get it done.
They didn't because iMessage is just another tool to keep people locked into their ecosystem, and they've admitted as much. And any excuse of "Oh we wanted to work with the GSM consortium blah blah blah" is just that, an excuse for Apple fanboys like you to latch onto and parrot.
Apple couldn’t get the carriers to do shit. They blocked eSIMs for years on iPhones, meanwhile the iPad eSIM implementation was happily allowed.
Even up to the iPhone launch nobody wanted to collaborate with Apple(especially for the voicemail) except Cingular.
RCS was a dumpster fire for years. Only in the past couple of years has Google stepped up to be the centralized force in making it work as envisioned.
quick edit to say I agree this could’ve been avoided if Apple had made iMessage for Android, but I just wanted to point out the blame is shared by poor implementation across the board.
There is no alternative that they could choose.
RCS is absolute horseshit unless you send it to Google, which is absolutely unacceptable.
There's no shortage of options; the problem is getting the people you're talking to to agree on one you like. I find Signal strikes a good balance between goodness and ease of use, and many people I know who aren't tech or privacy nerds use it.
Google had the chance to make its Hangouts messaging app dominant when it was, briefly the default SMS client on Android devices. They threw that away following pushback from carriers.
I'm glad Google doesn't have the dominant messaging service, but I find it bizarre anybody still uses SMS when there are so many internet-based options. I have six, and if somebody really wants to use another, I'll probably add it.
It's hard to read the text against a green background too. I'm so tired of Apple.
Fun fact: It doesn't even meet Apple's own standard for text contrast!