Comment by baq
2 years ago
Quote from the article:
> The company “undermines” the ability of iPhone users to message with owners of other types of smartphones, like those running the Android operating system, the government said. That divide — epitomized by the green bubbles that show an Android owner’s messages — sent a signal that other smartphones were lower quality than the iPhone, according to the lawsuit.
I read that as 'interop' is a secondary issue, if an issue at all; the actual case is the green/blue segregation. If Apple embedded a fingerprint in every interoperable message and shown blue messages for iMessage-sent content, green background for others, it'd still be a problem even if messages are otherwise identical - unless all the features truly work on both, in which case the color split is purely status signaling.
Strage to see that as an issue; SMS is clearly an inferior protocol compared to iMessage and it's useful to know when messages have been downgraded.
iMessage is the monopoly part. They could make an App or even just an API available on other platforms but don't because they want the lock-in.
> “The #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage ... iMessage amounts to serious lock-in,” was how one unnamed former Apple employee put it in an email in 2016 > “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...
Not getting on board with RCS or any other way to improve SMS/MMS until they were (implicitly) forced was motivated by that desire to lock their users in to a messaging platform that only works on Apple devices.
> Strage to see that as an issue; SMS is clearly an inferior protocol compared to iMessage and it's useful to know when messages have been downgraded.
Except that's not why the blue/green difference was created (at least historically).
It dates back to the time where SMS messages cost money for each one sent (though plans often came with x free messages), so the green message was telling you it was (potentially) costing you money when sending/receiving messages. (US$ = greenbacks -> green = cost)
That's also ahistorical.
The green bubbles came first.
iMessage didn't even exist for the first few years of the iPhone's life. All messages were green. Green could not have been chosen to indicate it cost money, because there was nothing to distinguish it from.
Then, in 2011 (IIRC), iMessage was introduced, and the blue bubbles were to indicate both that it doesn't cost money, and that it supports several other capabilities (which have changed over the years—IIRC, it did not start out with end-to-end encryption, so the people boldly asserting that that's the primary reason for the distinction are also wrong).
The intent of the color doesn't matter. The actual effect of the color is what matters. Hopefully to the courts, anyway.
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I agree. That's why I'm saying interop is not the root of the problem. Segregation of people based on whether they are using iMessage or something else combined with inability to install iMessage on non-Apple devices causes a social problem and a significant smartphone market pressure.
Only because of Apple's refusal to implement RCS for feature parity. They're doing this on purpose, claiming anything else is just wool.
The colors indicate the features available. Even with RCS, there will be a significant list of features available to iMessage users that are not available over RCS. No matter what Apple does there must be some mechanism to visually indicate that standard iMessage features are no longer available. What would be the alternative, pretending that these features exist and then failing silently when one client doesn't support them?
The green/blue bubble thing is irrelevant. It reflects a fundamental reality of the platform technology.
Technology doesn’t matter here. What matters is whether people feel pressured to buy iMessage capable devices by others. In the US the answer is yes. Elsewhere it’s WhatsApp everywhere (with its own homogenous ecosystem issues which should be regulated).
Gruber gives a pretty good breakdown of the blue/green bubble history: https://daringfireball.net/2022/01/seeing_green
Short version: SMS has been green since the first iPhone, blue iMessage was added later. Green was not invented to "punish the poors"
It doesn’t matter. That’s how teens are using it today.
So maybe someone should talk to the teens, rather than wasting taxpayer money trying punish a company for building a better product...
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> Green was not invented to "punish the poors"
No, but blue was only given to the first class citizens.