I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason.
In my experience, when people find out my texts are green, they oftentimes would rather switch to a different platform altogether like Instagram or just not text at all.
Is this actually a deal-breaker in friendships out there?
SMS is just awful, sending someone an image only for them to get a pixelated mess feels bad. Definitely not any kind of dealbreaker though, and I personally don’t know anyone who could care less about the color of chat bubbles. iMessage is just seamless, works across all my devices and never requires even trivial troubleshooting, which makes it a strong preference.
There is RCS, which supports actually sending decent quality images and stuff, but it only works Android to Android. Android to iOS (although perhaps it’s changed since I last checked) can only do SMS.
And Android to iOS RCS messaging could work if Apple decided to implement RCS on iMessage.
Yeah I would love for apple to implement RCS as a fallback for iMessage, but I think there’s some technological complexity there that a lot of people ignore. You’d basically have iMessage falling back to RCS, which would then fall back to SMS, with different feature sets available for each service. If all android phones supported RCS by default and SMS could be completely replaced, it’d be more straightforward, but they don’t.
Sms is a base messaging service. You could have a Nokia 3310 and if somebody texts you it would go trough without issue. I think you can even send it to a regular corded phone and a robotic voice would read the message out for you. That is the singular strength of that system and as soon as you want more than that you should look into other apps. The fact that iMessage is mixing app functionality with its basic sms functions make it a bad app and it ruins things for everyone else.
I’m an app developer on mobile, and I’ve been using SMS for ~25 years (including on old dumb brick phones). I appreciate your explanation, but my understanding of what SMS is and how it works is reasonably strong.
I’m gonna hard disagree with you there, the fact that iMessage mixes functionality is a huge contributor to the fact that iPhones are destroying android phones in the US.
Sending a text message with images and video is a single use case. The protocol that the message uses is an implementation detail and I think that it’s excellent UX for the user not to have to worry about it.
This is the exact reason that Google Allo was an immediate failure. Replacing hangouts (which could send rich messages or fallback to SMS) with an app with a worse feature set guaranteed that nobody would adopt it. Nobody was going to switch between two apps with the same use case (sending textual messages) based on which apps the person they were talking to has on their phone. I get that that’s a thing in Europe, but that’s out of necessity because european telecoms price SMS messages differently and few Europeans use SMS. If SMS isn’t widely used by your circle, you’re forced to worry about which apps the person you’re talking to has installed.
If I want to send a text message, I open my text messaging app, select a contact and send it. iOS determines the best available protocol for me, an enables the best feature set that both parties support. It’s a seamless and extremely enjoyable user experience.
Me having an app that handles both SMS and iMessage seamlessly ruins absolutely nothing for anybody lol. This complaint is pretty silly and seems like its complaining that others are on a platform with a feature that you’ve chosen not to be on.
Have you seen the meme with the guy in front of a whiteboard?
Haha I guess that depends on which one you mean. Pepe Silvia?