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- cross-posted to:
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Google Asks Regulators to Liberate Apple’s Blue Text Bubbles::Yes, even Google appears to be tired of green texts on the iMessage app.
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Why does this matter? As an android user, I don’t really understand iMessage. Are people mad about a text bubble being a different color?
I had to click another link within that article to understand what the hell a green bubble is. Apparently messages from people with Android phones are green in iMessage, whereas messages from other iMessage users are blue. And this is something people care about to the point that kids are bullied over it. How pathetic are people? Humanity was a mistake. Lol.
Not really the case.
Green in iOS messaging means it’s an SMS or an MMS. Technically iPhones send them as well, even when communicating with other iPhones, if there is a problem sending the iMessage version.
The issue isn’t really that the color is different, it’s the handling of the messages. Apple is pretty explicit in their divide. They either send iMessages, or bog standard SMS/MMS. They intentionally don’t play nice with RCS.
This causes a lot of headache between iPhone and android users. Any piece of information you want to send that isn’t pure text or a format/size supported by MMS, just isn’t possible. Things like stickers, replies, or reactions all get “lost in translation” as they either aren’t possible, or get a text version “KairuByte reacted with a heart.”
Apple made this choice as an attempt to force people to choose between the two ecosystems. And its pretty shitty.
Some Apple users regard this as a status symbol, some even excluding android users to avoid the green bubbles. This is probably because they perceive android as inferior since green text bubbles are associated with degraded performance largely imposed by apple when falling back to sms for interoperability (crappy pic quality, spammy notifications). Apple uses this to help keep iphone dominance (at least in the US).
Blue bubble in iMessage means the message is encrypted and fully functional. Green bubble means it’s not encrypted and some features (like sharing videos) wont work properly.
Apple has gained a lot of market share in recent years, and apparently it’s a thing to make fun of that one person in a group text who’s using an android and forcing all the bubbles to be green. Kinda silly, and I’m sure Google’s ultimate goal here is getting access to more user data (over any concerns about “openness” or bullying), but there you go.
And here I come to say, what the fuck is Imessager
Oh, no kidding? Encrypted vs unencrypted too, or is that only it? I had no idea.
Totally agree that google just wants info tho.
Or, you know, we could just forget about iMessage, and instead use Signal (or your favorite end-to-end encrypted messenger app) that works on both iOS and Android with no meaningful differences.
Good luck getting your grandma to install signal, and never touch the default messaging app again.
Grandma will install it herself when she feels left out. She managed to install Facebook, she will manage to install something else.
And what happens in five years, after Google has locked customers into their infrastructure, and they drop RCS, like so many other projects?
RCS is a GSM Association standard.
The Internet was all open standards once too.
And which standards did Google destroy?
Signal uses blue bubbles. No Google/Apple required, go thusly!
