The problem that I have with the way Apple does this has nothing whatsoever to do with me. It’s their device, it is not possible for me to care any less about it.
No, the problem I have is that it becomes a severe bullying / exclusion tactic among kids. Now, kids will always find something to bully other kids about, but this one seems to hurt a lot because of the source of the ire and the inability to do anything about it (short of purchasing an Apple device).
My eldest was excluded from group chats with friends because they “ruined” the quality of pictures and videos by being in the group chat. These are friends mind you, not the sort of bullies the rest of us might’ve had. It’s devastating to kids when their friends exclude them like this. What do you do? You can’t complain about the technology not mattering, you can’t reason with it, you can’t say: “it gets better”.
Kids these days have a very different relationship to technology. That relationship can seem weird or “wrong” to folks who remember a time before these ubiquitous devices. Crap patterns like this creating artificial walled gardens are not “novel” or “creative” ways to increase sales.
Hell, adults and “friends” of mine really seem to care that I have an android. They constantly bring it up as if they think bullying another adult into buying their specific product will somehow work or maybe they think that it bothers me or something. I could not care less. Start a new chat without me and the other android users? Cool, go ahead. Spoiler: they won’t.
Or they have and haven’t told you, as I’ve experienced multiple times now (as an adult in my thirties, no less). It’s why I fell out of my bar trivia group, they slowly forgot to send us Android users (aka my partner and I) texts separately, so we just drifted out of that circle.
It’s comical how petty so many adults get about the bubbles too, and absolutely refuse to consider using anything else. Luckily my partner was on the Pixel train like me before we met, so it’s not an issue there, but suggest Signal, Telegram, or hell, even Facebook Messenger (which they all have as well), and you just get befuddlement in response. Even my mother, who is in her fifties and is a department director at her job, gets perpetual shit from her coworkers re: the staff group chats that just can’t go into Slack for whatever reason, as she’s the lone Android user in that whole bunch. None of these people even grew up with cellphones of any type, and yet they’re just as petty about messaging as any socially-obsessed teen.
Oh well, no skin off my back, and if anything this petty behavior from a subset of iOS users is basically an anti-advertisement to me. The last time I had an iPhone, I deliberately disabled iMessage from the get go to head off this mess (and at the time, turning it off when switching away from iOS was a nightmare too).
Not to make light of your kids situation, but sending pics/videos over mms is horrible they aren’t being metaphorical when they say it ruins the chats. Imagine compressing a video to < 1MB and you would get something unseeable. Now i would recommned they all switch to snapchat, its very popular and wont mess with the group chat no matter the device used :)
All these text and emoji features that are being added into apple but are not compatible with Android: this seems like a problem…
Until you download signal.
It has great features for group messaging, video calling, emojis and is generally feature rich.
And it’s end-to-end encrypted when messaging other signal users.
It’s available on iOS and Android.
The hard part is getting others to join. If all of your fam has iPhones and you are the one Android person, getting them all to join Signal just for you is a tall order.
Yeah I know.
I honestly find it surprising this is such a big problem.
Here, everybody uses Whatsapp (yes I know) with some people also on other messengers like Signal or Threema.The difference is evident: Everyone in your example is used to using a different app. In the USA, iMessage can handle texting as well so it remains the default. It allows you to converse with other iMessage users and with Android users. The default “just works” and since iPhones are very popular here, it is more common to be messaging with other iMessage users than with Android phones. So much so that messaging on iMessage and texting on iMessage are considered one and the same by iPhone users so they don’t differentiate capabilities and just blame Android users for “breaking” their messaging features.
Does it offer SMS?
Because I’m not going to ask someone to download an app so I can talk to them.
So pissed they removed it… grrr, there goes the wife acceptance factor
Exactly, who is using bog-standard texts and phonecalls in this day and age? Do they also use internet explorer because that’s the default too? Even if you’re not on Signal, everyone and their mums has WhatsApp, I don’t see how this is even an issue!
So many people use standard clear text messaging and calling.
When I try to explain encryption, I usually get the line
" I’ve got nothing to hide!"
Is it just me that has literally never heard anyone bring up the colour of bubbles irl? Like I’ve seen people talk about it on the internet from time to time but never in the real world.
It’s more of a thing amongst the newer generations.
I am the newer generations though
In that case, congrats on having a good group of non-petty friends!
The solution is to just use something like Signal.
Unfortunately most of the US user base would rather cling to any sort of elitism than actually search for a solution to an invented problem.
This does seem to be a US centric problem, I don’t know anyone who still uses SMS, everyone seems to use Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal here
I can’t see this actually being a big deal, like at all, lmao. This assumes everyone cares or even knows the implications of a contact poster, and you can even make them for contacts that haven’t made one themselves. If you automatically think “ew Android!” when someone didn’t make a contact poster (when they can literally be on iOS, but not make one), you have issues.
As I understand, most iphone users do have issues. I remember hearing that people with Androids in their selfies are measurably less likely to match on Tinder
The OS wars have always bugged me a little. On one hand you have iOS users acting all high and mighty and considering anything other than iPhone less, on the other there’s some snobby Android users that seem to think everyone that uses an iPhone is an idiot. Guess we can’t help but engage in us-vs-them thinking sometimes. Excluding people based on the tech they use makes absolutely zero sense to me though.
I’ve used both iOS/MacOS and Android/Windows over the years and I can’t really say that one is inherently better than the other. Each platform excels in a different use case however and has different USPs.
Anywho, just my two cents. Cheers!
What. That sounds absolutely ridiculous. What’s wrong with people lol.
Hang on … I set a picture on MY phone and then anyone I call sees MY picture? Oh yeah, can’t see how this’ll go wrong. How long before dick picks are sent, or advertisements, or someone finds a way to use it to hack someones phone.
I can see this could be useful, especially folks with eye sight issues (but how would this affect blind folks?), but it’s just another way to tell someone who is calling. I don’t answer my phone unless they’re in my contact book already.
This seems eh to me, but I’m not an Apple person anyway.
especially folks with eye sight issues
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t some phones already call out the name of the caller for blind people? Heard it on a train once, maybe a feature I can’t seem to find on my phone.
My old feature phone from 2010 had this.
Yep, this is also a common feature for phones for seniors.
This was the first thing I thought too. I got to find that comic about “time-to-penis” stats.
A similar feature already exists on iOS, when having a conversation over iMessage you can optionally share your name/profile picture. The reason this hasn’t been abused with spam or porn is because it’s tied to your identity and Apple ID. I would imagine it will be the same for this new feature.
It’s not much different than a profile picture on most social media networks, is it? You could have done all of this with your Lemmy profile picture as well.
Phones are a bit more ubiquitous for older folks though. Imagine a vulnerability that allows me to post my “pic” as pulling from your phone and it comes up with a picture of your cousin or something. Or if I’m targeting you, you’re an old person that doesn’t understand technology and you see your granddaughter show up in the picture and don’t look at the number or anything. There seems to be a lot of ways this can be abused. I hope I’m wrong and we’ll never see a story about people abusing it, but people pretty much always abuse these things.
Reading through the comments in this thread, I’d just like to mention how amusing it is to see so many people in the fediverse arguing in favor of walled gardens and vendor lock-in. Like, do you even know where you are?
Took some time but got all my contacts to switch over to signal so apple can go screw themeselves
wanting everyone in your own walled garden is standard corporate fuckery, but Apple deliberately making the color contrast lower for green messages is just dark.
https://uxdesign.cc/how-apple-makes-you-think-green-bubbles-gross-e03b52b12fed
Owh dammit what now. I haven’t read it yet but I’m already tired of it
So… here’s a hot take I guess (disclaimer: i am an iphone user): People who are actively complaining about Apple having features that are unique to its platform don’t know how products work. Apple created this technology and design themselves and other companies want to leech off the features. We should want competition like iMessage vs whatever Android uses. For anyone to basically say Google doesn’t have the ability or resources to create an actual competitor is silly. They absolutely can make an alternative, but they choose not to. Google becomes complacent and progress slows or completely stops. I’d rather have a product that is FEATURE-FULL than feature-less. Additionally, this contact feature thing is neat, but I wouldn’t call it a “game-changer” or revolutionary. It’s similar to the super old ability that some cellular providers had/have where you could play a specific song instead of the calling tone.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. 😒
The issue is that if Google does create a competitor, or an open standards competitor is created, like RCS vs iMessage, Apple isn’t going to implement that, or in any way interoperate with it. So even if Google or someone else made a better system that worked beautifully on Android and any hypothetical alternatives, but Apple only implemented their own system and refused to share, things would remain shit. Which is exactly where we are.
Apple doesn’t want to live in a world where multiple brands and types of mobile phones operating systems exist harmoniously. They want to intentionally make life difficult for anyone who didn’t buy an iPhone. In the process they make it intentionally difficult for people who did buy an iPhone, because their communications with non-iPhone friends are hampered.
They’re also egging easily influenced teenagers on to shame other teenagers for having “worse” phones and creating unnecessary divides and unhappiness among friends. All so kids will bully other kids into buying iPhones.
None of these features are difficult to invent or implement. They should all be open standards and iPhone users and Android users should all together be angry at Apple for putting a malicious profit motive above the creation of a smooth and universally interoperable user experience.
The issue is that if Google does create a competitor, or an open standards competitor is created, like RCS vs iMessage, Apple isn’t going to implement that, or in any way interoperate with it. So even if Google or someone else made a better system that worked beautifully on Android and any hypothetical alternatives, but Apple only implemented their own system and refused to share, things would remain shit. Which is exactly where we are.
If Google had a popular competitor to iMessage, Apple users would feel left out, and that’s what would force integration.
All they had to do was add sms to one of their chat apps, and people would have migrated over word of mouth for the extra features slowly overtime.
This is uniquely an issue in the U.S. because there are plenty of popular cross-platform competitors that are widely used in Europe: WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram.
iMessage is unpopular in Europe precisely because it’s not interoperable and your friend group will look at you funny if you want to use some stupid system that only works on iPhones.
Nobody uses SMS for anything here, aside from notifications from businesses and such.
I am in Europe and I use SMS for things like birthday wishes with the people who insist on doing everything in WhatsApp or some other technology I don’t care making an account on. But then I never really understood what people liked about phone only messaging systems in the first place.
All they had to do was add sms to one of their chat apps, and people would have migrated over word of mouth for the extra features slowly overtime.
You just described “Google Hangouts”.
Google could have avoided all this many many years ago, but they fucked up big time. In Europe Whatsapp solved this issue, in China Wechat did, in other parts of the world Telegram or Viber or Messanger or some other app did. The reality is, only the US somehow stuck with SMS for the longest time and then transitioned to iMessage as the main IM app, an app that only exists on one platform.
If anyone doubts how poorly Google have managed messaging, they need only to read this article: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/
It’s decades of Google screwing up and shooting themselves in the foot.
this. I don’t understand why people fail to acknowledge that Google fails to present a competitor to iMessage when they kill every chat/IM app they have after 2-3 years and replace it. I totally agree that the lack of interop with Android sucks, but that’s just the world we live in. Apple makes a far better messenger than any other service for my how I use it. I will say I think the best thing ever was Palm WebOS’s Synergy. Where it pulled all your different accounts stuff into one view (Yahoo, AIM, SMS, etc). It wasn’t a true interoperable service, but it at least made it where you only needed one app for all your accounts.
I think from Google’s perspective they don’t want another chat app. They are fine if apple keeps iMessage. They want apple to use RCS standard as a fallback for iMessage when someone doesn’t use an iPhone. The benefit being rich text messaging for all. It won’t affect apple users except by making the experience better for everyone.
I personally use android and text my 8 friend who use android with RCS. There are some awesome things you can do with it, but for ease of talking with my co-workers and other family, I use bluebubbles to use iMessage on Android. The issue is that not everyone has a Mac to use this. Overall I think apple is going to apple.
Oh no, Apple develops Apple-specific features to add value to their products! Someone alert the Department of Justice! My bubbles will NOT be discriminated against!
The EU is already legislating to solve this. They are forcing open APIs on iMessage with the DMA.
TBH I don’t really want want to anything to do with people that see me as less because I don’t have a fancy calling animation anyway.
Nobody except nerds like us care about RCS.
I never understood the complaint. If iPhone users don’t like the way Apple messaging works with Android contacts, they can just use an alternative like Whatsapp. Right?
I’m my experience, if iPhone users don’t like the way Apple messaging works with Android contacts, they bitch at the person using Android telling them to get an iPhone.
It’s interesting how different the experience is inside the US vs the rest of the world. In Europe, where Android holds a majority, basically everyone is using 3rd party chat apps like WhatsApp, Signal, etc…
That’s not really because of the Apple vs Android ecosystem wars though. My understanding is that most of Europe uses third party apps because, at least until recently, pricing for phone and text plans was exorbitant, when considering that many Europeans are “roaming” and communicating with people in adjacent countries.
It is very interesting, I’m south american in my country in particular, everyone uses 3rd party as well, mostly WhatsApp and Telegram (although they are on the rocks legally right now), no one really natively texts anymore. That’s for company automated texts, like Google verification codes and spam.
It doesn’t even occur to them that they also break features on the Android users’ ends as well, but I only see iPhone users complaining. It really isn’t that big of a deal to share a file over SMS/MMS with a link rather than trying to share the actual file directly. Is that difficult to do on an iPhone?
My dad likes to send me videos. He sent me one yesterday… It seemed like he was at a harbor by the 8 pixels that got through
He also frequently emails me from his phone. I used to ask him to send videos to my email. Even tried to coach him through the process -surely they must have a share button?
I think iPhones are designed around the idea that “either it just works, or you shouldn’t be doing it at all”.
Even my technical friends seem to forget the fact they understand how all of this works the minute they look at their phone - I had to coach one through uploading a larger video to Google drive and sending me the link. My brother in Christ, we use GitHub together. We use Google meets regularly. We used Dropbox in college. Why are you acting like I told you to put it on a flash drive and mail it to me?
Photos you can share using iCloud links, you have to go into the Photos app and share from there instead of adding the photo from Messages, otherwise it looks like it will try to share as MMS (I haven’t tested actually sending it). But that’s similar on Android as well, right? I’ve never used SMS on Android anyway when I could avoid it, always another messenger. One of those other messengers is just built into the iPhone and exclusive to it, for better or worse.
Apparently the EU is trying to make Apple open iMessage up to Android (link). We’ll see what comes of that. More interoperability is always good either way.
I mean the right answer is something like Signal, but you have to really beat on people for that.
It’s mostly an issue that android users in the US don’t use what’s app
Facebook Messenger is more popular than WhatsApp here. So it’s not like there aren’t alternatives.
The point is that it’s not really Android users’ problem. There are options for iPhone users and, yes, if they really want to use the native iPhone messaging app they can complain to Tim Apple. Cc: @FuckFashMods@lib.lgbt
Yeah that’s what I’m saying. Android users themselves don’t care about modern messaging features. Some people do tho.
Are you implying that the RCS that comes with Google Messages is significantly less modern than whatever ships with iPhones?
Edit: Or, are you saying that most Android users wouldn’t care if that was the case?
Or they can bitch at Apple to fix their SMS/MMS problems.
Why would anyone want to sms? Modern messaging is much nicer experience.
Their problem is that iMessage falls back to that instead of them adopting RCS, and treats MMS in particular way worse (terrible image quality, etc)
None of my android friends use RCS
I don’t want to sms, but also a lot of my friends aren’t techies, not to mention my family. Convincing them all to download and use the same messaging app is just not going to happen.
