theshackleford 4 days ago

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.

  • kube-system 4 days ago

    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.

    • theshackleford 4 days ago

      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.

handfuloflight 4 days ago

But why does it matter if the majority of cellular plans provide unlimited texting?

  • tmpz22 4 days ago

    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.

    • dcchambers 4 days ago

      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.

      • frollogaston 4 days ago

        Teens care about silly things like that, but a real thing I care about as an adult is group chats working properly. Like, I was looking for a realtor last year when buying a house. One of them had Android, and I really thought about it, do I want to take a nonzero chance of that somehow screwing the plans up on closing?

        That's not the main reason I went with another one, but I still paid attention to how many group iMessages we were in with lenders, seller's realtor, or just me + wife + realtor. Things really did come down to the hour during negotiating and closing, so it might've mattered.

        • zifpanachr23 4 days ago

          Worrying about whether or not somebody has an Android is going to be very bad for your mental health given that something like 42% of the US cell phone market is Android. Is it possible that you are living in a bubble of people that are significantly more committed to Apple products than the median person?

          I don't live in such a bubble, and whether or not somebody has Apple or Android is not something I have ever heard an adult bring up as a serious thing. The most I've ever seen is as an observation about why some sort of thing in a group chat didn't work, but then everyone moves on with their day and the chat continues with the types of text and media that do work.

    • baggachipz 4 days ago

      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...

      • pirates 4 days ago

        Would you mind listing a couple issues you’ve seen with it? You’ve got me curious if they affect me and I just don’t notice it what. I don’t have all that many contacts though, so it may be just be a numbers game.

        • baggachipz 4 hours ago

          Finally getting around to this... The problem was always that the messages just would not send. "Message failed to send. Try again?" I'd say that happened 3/4 of the times I tried. It simply wasn't worth it to fight with it.

  • frollogaston 4 days ago

    It doesn't matter so much for 1:1, but SMS group chat is a mess (or MMS? RCS? idk).

te_chris 4 days ago

Only in the US, the rest of us aren’t that petty and just use WhatsApp or signal