this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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iMessage is the reason why apple is such a brand-loyal company and it is why they will never make it cross-platform until some government agency drags them across the finish line kicking and screaming. Love it or hate it (as a longtime iPhone user, I personally think the green/blue bubble discrepancy makes it a bad user experience for both iPhone users AND android), this is the most significant component of apple's walled ecosystem that keeps people from straying away from their garden.
I won’t text back if someone has a green bubble. Blue bubbles are just a way of life.
The person who though up of blue and green bubble differentiation should be chief of marketing
Apple had blue bubbles before Android was out the door, and Google thought they'd make their own mark by using green. The rest is history.
Before iMessage, all text bubbles were green. For the original concept of iPhone, anything telephonic (that your carrier could charge you for, since Steve Jobs ensured that iPhones got unlimited data at first) was colored green. That’s why, to this day, the phone app and the messages app are both green, as well as the “you’re on a call” status that appears behind the clock.
Then iMessage came out in iOS 5 and they made it blue, the color of things that used data (like safari, stocks, mail, App Store, weather)
It wasn’t until the redesign of iOS 7 that they cranked up the saturation of all the colors, and the telephony green became like, anxiety-inducing electric green. I feel like that’s when people started hating these green bubbles so much, because iOS 7 actually made them an ugly, radioactive color. Where the blue remained a pleasant, calm ocean blue.
Wait I just looked in my messages and my messages are blue but any inbound ones are grey? That's both messages I know to be SMS and in iMessage group chats (the one I had).
I actually kind of prefer the aesthetic of the green bubbles, despite being conditioned to look at it unfavorable.
The green/blue divide is culturally silly, but useful in certain use cases. Cross-platform group chats can sometimes be wonky, for example.
Exactly. The color doesn’t bother me, but some of the features do. Group chats, read receipts, iMessage games/game pigeon, photo quality are all non-existent or janky between iPhone and Android.
Well, apple has been refusing to fix that on their end. Google has been begging them to, of course for their own self interest but it would be good for us.
The rest of the none american world uses other messaging apps like Whatsapp which have no issues working with different platforms. Apple is just holding Americans by the balls.
Yeah, it isn’t literally about the color of the bubble, it’s about what the bubble represents: a less seamless text conversation with less features.
They don't even have to enable RCS like Google wants; they could release an iMessage app for Android.
They'd control the data from it, they could require an iCloud login, and they'd probably drag a decent chunk of Android users off Google Messages and WhatsApp. Hell, they could even keep non-iOS devices as green bubbles, but fix all of the security and filesize bullshit.
But they've evidently decided it's not as valuable as selling more iPhones by encouraging teen exclusion and bullying.
As someone that switched to Android, I would even take needing to own an Apple device first before you could log into iMessage
Unless it's built into the default app people probably aren't going to use it.
Nothing Phone is debuting iMessage on their android phone soon. Just a matter of time before the apk is out for anyone to download, for who these chat bubble colors matter for.
Are the majority of people really getting iPhones purely because of the blue and green bubble thing? I truly don't give a fuck about that. I have an iPhone because I prefer the way iOS works. I know it in and out. I also think the UI looks nicer.
Nah not true at all. The UK has a similar iPhone to android ratio as the US and everyone uses WhatsApp
A reason? Yeah. The reason? Maybe for extremely frugal people who don't know that their phone can download other apps.