Comment by lxgr

Agreed.

It reminds me of the "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott) so let's say this was a real psychology experiment. Middle-schoolers and high-schoolers are encouraged to communicate via a chat application with rich multimedia functionality. But any conversation that includes even a single individual who belongs to an arbitrarily-defined "out-group" has its functionality degraded and the application highlights who the out-group member(s) are. After a year you compare the mental, social, physical, and academic well-being of both groups. Would your university's IRB approve such an experiment?

I initially gave Apple the benefit of the doubt that this was simply a technical limitation. And of course kids will always bully each other about something. But at this point it does indeed seem like a billion-dollar company is intentionally amplifying and leveraging this sort of bullying to drive marketshare. If you don't find this immoral then I'm not sure what to say.

> apparently even "green bubble bullying"[1] of kids who have Android devices and thus have their messages appear different

Bullies will bully. Targeting the articles of bullying versus the source is fruitless; the former is unlimited.

On the other hand, I have saved many a dollar by instantly knowing that I just sent a legacy text to somebody I normally iMessage with.

My carrier charges an arm and a leg for international texting, and if distinguishing between texts and iMessages wasn't as easy as it is, I would probably have to pay hundreds in carrier bills at least once.

> Apple is happy compromising the mental health of young people

Dramatic exaggeration and attribution of evil intent is counterproductive and disingenuous.

> In this particular way Apple is happy compromising the mental health of young people to secure a larger market share

Should we also force luxury brands to offer stipends so that teenagers whose parents can't afford them (or simply don't want to participate in that nonsense) don't feel stigmatized?

It would be a completely different story if Apple were to ban third-party messaging apps on their platform, but as restrictive as they are in other areas, they aren't doing that.

It literally only takes a free app download to get a cross-platform messaging experience at least on par with iMessage (and in my personal view superior in many regards).

RCS is Google's idea of a solution – a company not exactly widely known for their excellence in all things instant messaging.

Google Messages, which is fast becoming the default Android messaging app across Android OEMs uses RCS when both participants support it and falls back to SMS when that is not the case.

RCS is an open standard that any carrier/OS/messaging app can support, unlike iMessage, which is exclusive to iPhones.

Android's messaging app does much the same thing.

My preference would be that Apple drop SMS support from Messages all-together and market it as an iOS only communication method. People with iPhones would then have to pick some alternative, perhaps they would use Signal or perhaps something else.

I already have to install a handful of applications to talk to all of my friends and co-workers, at least I wouldn't have to continue to use SMS.