Comment by handfuloflight 4 days ago
> 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?
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.
I've no doubt it may be the case in the US, I did not mean to suggest it's not. It simply doesnt have the same sway everywhere.
I don't know literally a single person who uses SMS/MMS/iMessage where I live. And it's been this way for years. It's easily 99% whatsapp/messenger/discord etc. It's pretty openly joked about that the only thing SMS is still for these days is spam/marketing/political messaging.
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.
Exactly this. Even if RCS does everything iMessage does, you still have a dreaded "green bubble" in iOS messaging which is a huge (anti) social signal to teens.
Does it justify their reason for hating on Android/green bubbles? Of course not, but that's 100% the reality of the situation.
Apple's implementation of RCS is such hot garbage that I disabled it and revert to regular SMS to text with Android people. I'm sure the shoddy RCS support is just a terrible mistake and not by design...
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"
100%.
iMessage is THE number one thing selling iphones these days, and has been for a long time.