No Stupid Questions

Wait..when people say the blue bubbles they're talking about text? I thought it was the live wallpaper!

Can apple people not change the color of their text chat bubbles? I changed mine so long ago I don't even know what the default is.

I strive for openness and choice. As much as android is less and less that, it's still a shit tonne moreso than iPhone.

Imagine being so materialistic that you reject friends based on what brand phone they use. I wouldn't piss on someone like that if they were on fire.

Which country are we talking about?

I barely know people using iOS, much less being elitist about it.

Not to mention that any problems caused by green bubble lack of compatibility are Apple's fault, not Android's.

Signal is my preferred messenger right now since I convinced my contacts to move to it. Collects the least and it is private.

There is also Session which is a Signal fork that removes phone number linking.

Matrix for a privacy focused federated messaging system is another option.

For stupid or vain people, maybe. And only in countries where people send SMS anyway.

I haven't used SMS actively ever, because as soon as smartphones got popular, everyone moved to Facebook, and then later I got my friends to move to Telegram if they wanted to keep talking to me.

I don’t think I have ever given a shit about the bubble color, and I’m an iPhone user for well over a decade now. I don’t know anyone who actually uses messages for their main communication, they use other apps for that.

I've had an iPhone for a long time and I've never got a person sending me a SMS. All I get are automatic messages about deliveries and stuff. I guess iMessage is more a thing in the USA?

i miss the good old times when i was too young to be literate and could not have possibly read this post

This is mainly an issue in countries that still use SMS as main IM platform.

In most countries (where mobile internet coverage is good) the main IM and VoIP platform is an app like WhatsApp and similars.

(The only thing I hate from WhatsApp is that is from Meta and as any Meta app it abuses background usage. I'd replace it with another app but all my friends, colleagues, even shops use it)

I find it easier to convince Apple users to use another app like Signal to group chat with Android users instead if they really don't want the green bubble.

Alternatively, you can get a secondary iPhone just to use iMessage, but carrying 2 phones does get annoying.

There's a podcast I listen to where the LA comedians routinely use Android as a punchline, while clearly having very little understanding of it. They talk about android users as if they're this bizarre group of social outcasts and libertarians. Tech isn't the topic of the podcast, it's just something I notice any time Android comes up during improv or something. Like this is a well they routinely fall back on. And a lot of guests seem to think something similar.

So I believe there is a weird stigma, but it exists in certain areas more than others. LA is iPhone country, lot of people there see Android as some subpar aberration.

I think this is mostly an issue in the US. The rest of the world uses a variety of messaging apps instead of text messaging. Here in South Africa WhatsApp and Telegram are prevalent.

I came in here expecting to explain why I'll never have an iPhone lol

I had forgotten about the stupid thing where teenagers care about the color of your text bubble

The green color that Apple chose for SMS was picked because of how harsh it is on the eyes. They want you to hate talking to non Apple users.

Deal-breaker in friendship? Hell no. If a friendship is defined by what phone you are using, the world is close to ending I think. Deal-breaker for me personally (as in: I need to use Android device): yes. I'm not making the switch to something Google.

Apparently for some people they see it as a gimped version of IOS somehow. If anything IOS from what I've used before is so much more locked down now than it used to be when I had a 3G. But yeah the stigma is there with some people, but it doesn't really matter at this point. If you want to side load apps, use android because you don't have to go out of your way to get dev permissions, hook it up to the PC to install, and constantly re-approve your side-loaded apps. Seriously that shit gets annoying real fast.

Everyone I know uses WhatsApp, and they're not childish enough for carrying about green or blue bubbles. So weird.

It's a bummer that anyone is made feel this way about the phones they use. I've been an iOS user since my first smartphone and could not give less of a fuck if you are as well or if you use Android. Most of my friends are Android users and our message threads, video messaging, etc is all fine. I feel like I see this thread a lot on every platform and the comments section is just a place for people to vent about how much they hate the other operating system (and most of the time they have never even used the other lol).