Comment by munk-a
2 years ago
They gotta, gotta, have those blue bubbles. Some teenagers fight to get an overpriced phone solely to avoid the deep deep shame of having a green bubble when chatting.
If apple is forced to shut down iMessage being the exclusive option and have some pure SMS application they might see a sudden noticeable drop in market share.
Teenagers wanting blue bubbles and people looking to uninstall iMessage because it's a threat vector are two completely disjoint sets of people.
Absolutely - but the business interest of wanting to keep teenagers on iPhones absolutely would impede Apple from allowing users to uninstall the application.
Blue bubbles bad syndrome. Gotta bring it up when ever humanly possible.
Nvidia has a very similar green man bad syndrome going on too. As the amount of time a HN discussion on Nvidia increases, the probability of mentioning that Linus said “fuck you nvidia” approaches 1, even though it’s irrelevant to a topic, or that he's a mercurial asshole who's said a whole lot of things.
The casual fanboyism disrupts all discourse on these topics because there’s a large minority of users who have adopted what PG describes as “hater-ism” and allowed it to dominate their thinking on a topic. Negative parasocial attachment is the same process as positive parasocial attachment and just as problematic, but largely never called out.
http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
In short: lotta fanboys on these topics who don't even realize they're fanboys/adopting fanboy frames, because they don't realize that anti-fanboys are still parasocially attached too. And we've casually accepted the low level of discourse on these topics, and it pollutes the whole discussion of a lot of interesting topics because of who's doing them.
Can you explain how disliking Nvidia due to being systematically problematic at some point (maybe still being problematic) is a fanboyism or parasocial attachment?
They knew exactly what they were doing when they chose that nice blue and that cheap looking green.
No they didn't, because the green was first in 2007, when iPhone only supported SMS. It was 4 years later that iMessage launched. The conversation probably went like:
"Okay well, now that we're launching an alternative to SMS, how will we distinguish iMessage messages from regular SMS messages?"
"Hm, well, SMS messages are green, so what if we picked another color?"
"Yeah okay, blue? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
"Sounds good, mock it up and send it to the engineers"
edit: The reason for picking green originally was probably because all the "communication"-related apps had a green color scheme, including Messages. This persists today — the app icons for Phone, Messages, and FaceTime are all green.
Never forget the icon they used for Windows servers: https://i.stack.imgur.com/5rYVr.png
That’s hilarious
They've already announced that they will be adding RCS support.
... And they've already announced[1] that they will be retaining the exclusive blue bubble for iMessage messages for... reasons? The green/blue bubble distinction will continue even when there is no technical difference between messages.
1. https://mashable.com/article/apple-rcs-support
People use “green bubbles” to just mean “no guaranteed delivery or delivery receipts, no read receipts, very low quality image and videos, bad support for reactions, threaded replies, and group chats”.
…the color isn’t the problem. It’s shorthand for the real underlying issues
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Yep, why would they drop it? It’s especially egregious as Apple disregards its own human interface guidelines to make green bubbles excessively low-contrast. Very intentional.
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There is a technical difference though- the current RCS standard doesn’t have end to end encryption.