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Comment by WarmWash

8 days ago

In the US Apple is the

"Use it or your social group will not want to interact with you"

option.

Outside of tech circles (where apparently people easily get their entire family and friend network on signal), people want to use imessage and only want to use imessage. Android phones can't support imessage because they are poor low quality phones that cannot handle imessage. So you need a high quality phone like iphone so you can use imessage and easily communicate with your friends and family.

This strategy of leveraging friends and family to pressure people into getting iPhones was intentional and came out in the Epic trial lawsuit.

I shit you not there is a large percentage of people in the US that think Android phones are not capable of sending pcitures and videos.

> Android phones can't support imessage because they are poor low quality phones that cannot handle imessage.

Android phones can't use iMessage because Apple never opened it up, contrary to what Steve Jobs was hinting at back when it was released.

Nowadays I believe you can get a blue bubble when chatting from an Android with an iPhone user by using RCS / JOYN.

  • You don't get a blue bubble for using RCS. That's still reserved for iMessage exclusively. (At least, on iOS 26 in the US on T-Mobile)

    • Yeah, there's a myth spread on the internet after Apple announced rcs support in iMessage that it was the end of green bubbles for android users. But green bubbles still exist; they never meant the other party is just using sms, they meant the other party isn't using iMessage.

> "Use it or your social group will not want to interact with you"

Maybe your "social group". If your friends refuse to talk to you because of the cell phone brand you use, I have bad news for you: They might not really be great friends.

  • That’s not what this is about. If you have a group chat with one android user, it used to make all aspects of the interactions clunkier. Green bubbles, sending a new text instead of reactions, etc. as such, people would get left off of a list. Those small interactions add up over time.

    • Man, if you seriously would exclude someone from social interactions because of the colour of their speech bubble in group messages, I dread to think how m stressful it would be to interact with people who's entire bodies were different colours.

      Not even joking. 'Its legit stressful if someone's messages use a different colour background' is not logically compatible with being ok having different coloured people in view. I'm not actually calling you a racist, because it would also mean you get distressed if people wear different colour clothes and have avatars that look different, and I think a social group like that would have struggled enough to realise that the solution might not be 'get the Wrongly Coloured Group Text Guy to purchase a different phone rather than, idk, stop spending so much time staring at screens.

      But it was amusing to imagine how wildly conformist one would have to be to actually dislike someone because their phone number doesn't have enough 7's or their name is longer than everyone else's so it looks untidy or whatever.

      1 reply →

  • Yes. Mean girls at school are mean. If everyone has the same color bubble they’ll just find something else to be mean about.

    • This is really reductionist. This isn't a bullying or in-group / out-group thing.

      Someone who is not on iMessage will be excluded from iMessage group chats, just as someone who is not on Snapchat will be excluded from Snapchat group chats, just as someone who is not on Instagram will be excluded from Instagram group chats, someone who is not on WeChat will be excluded from WeChat group chats.

      2 replies →

    • This is correct. Everybody has green bubbles in Europe even on iOS, because everybody is using WhatsApp. But mean people are still mean.

  • I'm not a highschooler, and you don't understand the point.

    If you're not an American younger than 35, this is probably something you don't understand because you didn't experience first-hand.

    It's not a scenario where "your friends refuse to talk to you", it's "there are so many people to talk to, and there is a lot of friction around talking to this one person". You don't get the chance to become their friends in the first place.

    If you can't get on iMessage, you can't be in iMessage group chats.

    Similarly, if you don't have a cell phone, you can't text. If you don't have a landline, people can't call you. If you don't have the internet, you can't get on chatrooms. You wouldn't expect a teenager in the 90s to give up a landline in favor of living exclusively by handwritten letter.

> Android phones can't support imessage because they are poor low quality phones that cannot handle imessage. So you need a high quality phone like iphone so you can use imessage and easily communicate with your friends and family.

You are missing the /s right?

Texting images and videos to iPhone users used to be much worse than it is now, but it's gotten better in the past few years if my (Android) experience with my family (iPhones) is any indication.

The hard to tell part is I'm also crossing carriers to message them, so that might have been the issue as well.

>"Use it or your social group will not want to interact with you"

I see this in middle and lower-middle class people.

But in the upper-middle class, this is a non issue. We know how Apple manipulates people who struggle to spend $50/mo on a phone.

> I shit you not there is a large percentage of people in the US that think Android phones are not capable of sending pcitures and videos.

Source? Would love to read this one lol

  • It was kind of true a very long time ago except in potato quality. And if you were out of data, but was connected on WiFi instead, you actually couldn't. And you still can't text a large video across the Android / iPhone chasm, can you?

    • You can send decently sized videos between Android and iOS assuming RCS is enabled. Attachment sizes can now often be up to 100MB, where as with MMS you'd often be limited to maybe a megabyte or two.

      I'm regularly sending/receiving gifs and decent quality short videos between iOS and Android these days.

i wanted to hate apple so much at the advent of the smartphone era, so when i made the switch from flip to smart, i went with a samsung and gingerbread and it was such a universally awful experience compared to the iphone mobiles my employer issued (before BYOD). i gutted it out through the life of the contract and switched to iphone for my personal as well and have been quite happy up until ios 18. if there is no appreciable change in the next version, i plan to export my curated music library/playlists and walk away from my "sign in with apple id" accounts and set up new ones. liquid glass is just that painful and hostile of a user experience.

  • I agree, Liquid Glass is the reason why I'll stop buying Apple products. In the meantime, my Mac is going to be stuck to Sequoia.