Comment by Polylactic_acid
6 years ago
Its because they use peer pressure to get you to buy an apple device. You can invite an android user to an imessage group but it apparently downgrades the feature set of the group for everyone, they also color messages from android users differently. Its all designed to discourage talking to android users so they eventually buy an iphone.
SMS is colored differently (green) than iMessage (blue), regardless of the device on the receiving end. I'm not sure how they would even know the recipient is on Android.
If I send an iMessage to a friend's iPhone when they do not have service it automatically downgrades to SMS from iMessage. My brother didn't run iMessage for years so group chats that include his iPhone were still SMS based.
In a group chat with non-iMessage users everyone gets downgraded to SMS. I'm not sure how else it would even work?
It doesn't discourage talking to users with an Android or any other phone. I do that all the time, it's all in the same app. If they wanted to put up barriers they could do that but instead it's totally seamless.
> In a group chat with non-iMessage users everyone gets downgraded to SMS. I'm not sure how else it would even work?
I was thinking that there might be a way around it: send iMessages to people who are iMessage capable, and send MMS to people who aren't. The people who have to send MMS will just send their replies to everyone in the group over MMS, and the messages app on the iPhone would just figure out that the messages belong to the correct group.
But then I realized that I don't think there's an analog to the "reply-to" header for MMS. So there might not be a way to send that group message to the single MMS recipient without sending it to all recipients over MMS. In order to get replies to go to the entire group, each group member has to be in the "to" field for the MMS-using phone to know all the group members.
It's a shame, because my understanding is that the MMS protocol is actually pretty similar to email in some ways... and yet they apparently left out "reply-to".
Ok but why go through all of that complication? Right now I just type a bunch of names in a box and send a message, job done.
The only thing we can conclude from this is your brother is a techie.
The Mac client already drags years behind the iOS client, I don’t have a lot of faith in Apple’s ability to maintain a Windows version even if they wanted to.
On the Mac side it might catch up in the next release by throwing out the original version and replacing it with a Catalyst port, but there’s no similar solution to that for Windows.
Nor can I see them de-emphasizing the 3rd party app integrations to make the service available to people who aren’t Apple’s customers on platforms that Apple doesn’t control.
Liked "Its all designed to discourage talking to android users so they eventually buy an iphone."
If you own an Android you will understand the above. Very annoying!
I think its only a US android user issue. Here in Australia there are more android users so everyone uses 3rd party apps that work everywhere.
There are probably clusters of Apple users there as well, usually found in higher echelons of society. That's the market Apple targets anyways.
I mean, that happens to iPhone users too. That's the SMS fallback for iMessage reactions.
I wish I had an option to turn off reactions, or at least turn off notifications for reactions. When my sister gets a few minutes to review the family group chat she goes through and "loves" and "likes" and "laughs at" almost every message. My phone pings for every single one of them.
Yes, everyone knows this but you're not supposed to mention it. If you have green bubbles, you risk being a social pariah. Android use among teenagers, who are most susceptible to peer pressure, is >80%. Also I know several guys who switched to iPhones and suddenly had a much better sex life. It is what it is. Think of Apple buy-in like a tribal tattoo or rite of passage for young people.
If Apple released iMessage for Android or made it compatible with another protocol like RCS/WhatsApp/Signal/etc., then Apple would lose half of its market cap. I'm not exaggerating.
How do they manage the risk that some other chat system establishes itself? Whatsapp and Wechat had a chance because there was no open standard.
I am convinced that history will repeat itself and Apple will become obsolete again because the PC of chat will eat their Mac Chat lunches.
If their market share depends on peer pressure there will be nothing that sustains them once that pressure is gone.
You know iMessage will always be there - at least as long as iPhones are anyway. You also know there's no third party snooping - not the case with other messaging systems. Also there's no cookies or location tracing (like I imaging there are with Facebook messenger etc). Thats how I feel about it - rightly or wrongly, its as reliable and secure as the SMS system, but without the spam.