Comment by hylaride 4 days ago
It's been that way for awhile, though they do use instagram and/or tiktok for consumption.
iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.
The kids have been taught the dangers of sharing things on the internet, so the risk is minimized sharing in private chats (though obviously still there).
Whenever I hear this iMessage thing I’m surprised. Is that a US / Canada thing?
Here in Europe, everybody uses WhatsApp and/or similar products for chat and they are all multi platform.
iOS/iPhones are the majority of phones in Canada and the US (~60%). However, if you take the upper half of household incomes that number skyrockets to 80-90%. Comparatively, in the UK it's 50/50. In the rest of europe android mostly has a 60-75% market share (tends to drift more towards android the more eastern you go - signalling wealth has a lot to do with it).
The reasons why are varied (everything from wealth signalling to switching being a pain and iphone mostly had a first mover advantage for quality and availability for the first several years), but it's only in the last two years that I've seen people start to use multi-platform chat apps here. Most of my peer group with other parents all default to imessage group chats for sharing photos, stories of our kids.
I am also starting to notice a loosening on apple's services. Spotify is used by more people than Apple music even amungst the apple households I know.
Kids are ruthless about anti green bubble discrimination and it’s part of the reason for the rise of incels. The overwhelming majority of incels are android users, and the mainstream cultural media likes to make clear that one of the reason for being incels is them using a “poordroid”
https://leafandcore.com/2019/08/24/green-bubbles-are-a-turn-...
https://outsidethebeltway.com/the-dreaded-green-bubble/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-o...
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241473453/why-green-text-bub...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90391587/why-we-dont-want-you-an...
> The overwhelming majority of incels are android users
Seriously ?
I have read your links, it shows that some kids are stupid and discriminate over what phone brand one is using.
First of all, that’s purely a USA issue.
Secondly, it says nothing about incels.
A phone brand doesn’t make you more charismatic, in fact in my experience I have seen more iPhone user being insecure than Android user.
Especially the one who invest heavily into Apple « ecosystem », they are more often than not (in Europe) nerds.
Just to be honest, I write that from my iPhone. Really got no bias.
WhatsApp never caught on in the US since cell phones and SMS were a great deal for keeping in touch. By the time WhatsApp arrived US carriers were not raping their customers for phone calls or SMS messages (in the early days of cell phones they were - be very careful responding as the state of the world has changed many times over the years and so it is quite possible you remember a time where your country was better than the US for reasons that are no longer true!). Note in particular calls and SMS to a different state is included, and typically Canada is included as well. As such we never developed the WhatsApp habbit as it didn't give us anything.
Yes. WhatsApp isn't nearly as popular in the US as in many other countries.
Idk what the stats are on this, but anecdotally, all my friends use FB Messenger if they want cross-platform group chat, but that's slowly changing to some fragmented list of alternatives. And usually it's not for semi-important things like get-together plans.
> iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.
Are kids really that simplistically divided?
100%.
iMessage is THE number one thing selling iphones these days, and has been for a long time.
Maybe in your neck of the woods, I see no evidence for outside of that. iMessage is completely irrelevant where I live. SMS/MMS full stop is irrelevant.
In the US, people overwhelmingly use SMS/MMS/iMessage by default. It works with every phone, it's the one platform that people won't say "I don't have that" to.
But why does it matter if the majority of cellular plans provide unlimited texting?
Its about the extra features iMessage has because of Apple's superset of the underlying SMS/MMS functionality. Its also about having a blue bubble (not-poor) versus a green bubble (poor).
It defies belief how much some demographics care about this stuff, I didn't believe it when I first heard either. Some of it is improving with RCS but its got a ways to go.
It doesn't matter so much for 1:1, but SMS group chat is a mess (or MMS? RCS? idk).
I see this line of thinking online a lot, with people mentioning kids are excluded because they have green bubbles as if it’s some sort of highly superficial exclusion based on only wanting to talk to Apple users.
The main issue is that including a non-iMessage user changes the protocol of the group chat from iMessage to SMS and SMS can basically make group chats unusable.
I also don’t like that kids who don’t have an iPhone can’t participate in iMessage group chats, but when we make out like it’s just kids being cruel and not an actual functional incentive to not include those kids then we are losing sight of where the pressure should be applied.
The pressure should obviously be applied on the underage children with the Apple products, or better yet on Apple. Perhaps the children should be punished and have their iPhones taken away and replaced with budget android phones or flip phones.
This is good in the long run since the behavior they were engaging in puts them at odds with nearly half the population. Not only is it anti-social behavior, it's mind numbingly stupid and likely to backfire in ways that make their lives worse.
~43% of the cell phones out there in the US are Android phones. To follow their conviction against Android at all convincingly and thoroughly, they would be missing out on a lifetime of opportunities and would live a significantly diminished existence.
iPhone is not even close to being a dominant enough platform to be able to enforce this kind of social pressure against anyone but people significantly under the age of 18. Shame them, make sure they feel bad and spoiled (they should feel spoiled for being a child with an iphone), and watch them grow out up to be pro-social adults.
it's just a new version of "preps don't hang out with goths"
It literally works seamlessly though? Just converts to MMS and you don't notice outside the "liked BLABLABLA" sort of messages that trickle in without the imessage emoji system.
I don't think seamless integration with MMS is enough to outweigh being different/not having "the real thing" or the full experience in the eyes of a young teenager. This reads as the HN version of the "but we have iMessage at home" meme (I mean this humourously, not as snark).
iMessage chats also include rich media that is either degraded in MMS (photos, videos unless you have RCS support) or just doesn't exist (like multiplayer games, invites, apple cash, etc).
This may not seem like a big deal to you, but if you remember what it's like to be a kid, you should get it. The smallest friction can be a reason to exclude someone socially.
In theory it's ok. In practice, MMS group chats are broken. It's not even an iPhone thing, as evident in Android-dominated areas still relying on WhatsApp instead.
Internationally maybe, but if someone in the US is using WhatsApp, it's because of the group texting problem. My family included.
Non-iMessage chats are also segregated by color, a visual affordance that identifies you as a member of the non-Apple outgroup. The other.
> iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.
Craig Federighi fought against supporting iMessage on Android and RCS for a long time saying, quote, "It would remove obstacles towards iPhone families being able to give their kids Android phones."