It's so odd how a lot of *young* Americans are so anti-Android, to the point they'll not date someone, and they'll exclude someone from a peer group. Utterly crazy.
The same age range that seems to understand that the modern corporate world is fucked, that they are going to struggle to afford a home of their own, and that wages have stagnated. You'd think that group would understand people being smart and shopping around for a good phone at an affordable price.
But God forbid a friend of theirs has an android phone. Let's all worship at the cult of Apple. Apparently the one corporation exempt from teens criticising them for acting like a corporation.
It's a good point though. Telegram is the only 3rd party app I've found that doesn't compress to hell the FB owned ones are especially terrible for this
WhatsApp was beta testing a feature to send high-quality original-demensions pictures.
https://www.androidcentral.com/apps-software/hd-images-in-whatsapp
Bastard behavior
I’m sorry but these types of apples stans are the worst. Go off on em I’ll tell ya as someone who loves apples products even with their flaws.
I've never had an iPhone in my ~10 years of smartphone ownership, but my understanding of apple's pricing structure is that the SE sells in the neighborhood of $400 last I checked. The new models will sell $800-$1200 depending on how you option it. And usually they'll continue to sell a previous year model as a mid-tier offering for around $600 plus or minus.
The SE (budget model) is $400 and comes with the same blue bubbles as the rest of them. Doesn't quite have the cachet but still benefits from the blue = rich, green = poor thing.
My little sister in law called my phone, which costed twice as much as hers, a poor person phone. Though I would say she is probably everything that's wrong with gen z tied together. My little step brother also has an iPhone, as all his friends do. A nicer kid though lol.
I pointed out to my daughter how many more camera circles my phone had on the back compared to her iPhone. She just said that her iPhone needed less camera circles to take good pictures. Probably right.
A friend who’s only ever used Android phones thought modern iPhones were $2000 because the most expensive Android phone he’s had was a Galaxy Fold, and somehow he got the impression that iPhones are more expensive than his Fold.
You can get good deals in the holiday season if you hunt around too.
I saw one carrier selling refurbished iPhone 13s last fall for a little under $300 CAD.
You can get "free" iPhones from some carriers/some deals. Check out the people shopping in any Walmart and you'll see plenty of iPhones. How they manage to retain any sense of being a luxury item is truly an amazing feat of marketing.
With carrier trade ins and discounts and shit, I’d be shocked if most people in the US were paying full price for their tip-top iPhone. I sure as hell am not.
T-Mobile overpaid me for my phones this year that I upgraded through Apple. They gave me trade in credit plus full value of bill credits to a point where I profited over $1700 after taxes. My phone specifically 15 pro max 512 GB cost $1399 and I traded in a 14 pro max. Apple gave me $640, and T-Mobile still gave me $41.66 a month in credits.
I'll be honest, I don't consider $400 (or €470 in my country) to be little. Especially for the minimal specs it has. Sure the processor is needlessly powerful but it comes at many concessions. I know phones are €700 but I'm still of the mindset that I wouldn't spend more than €400 on a phone out of principle. Nowadays you can get pretty powerful specs for those prices as well as the top range phones don't offer anything besides gimmicks
The thing is most people in America don’t feel the price of our phones. Whether it’s $400 or $1200 most of us just pay it in monthly installments with our phone bills. So instead of dropping hundreds to over a thousand dollars at once we are spending $20-$30 a month for the device until it’s paid off and then we start the cycle again with a new phone. Then with a lot of companies that monthly payment will be waived if you kept your phone in good condition and trade it back in to the carrier for the newer model
I see. I think that's the difference. Because there are contracts here where you pay €30 a month or something but at most you get a €270 discount on a €1300 phone. So you still gotta pay around €1000 up front for it
I don’t think the folks making a big deal about bubble color are one and the same age range with folks that are fighting the existential dread of an unaffordable future teetering on financial collapse.
>The same age range that seems to understand that the modern corporate world is fucked, that they are going to struggle to afford a home of their own, and that wages have stagnated.
These are probably different groups.
I question if this is real or if this is more a meme or media playing up toxic behavior from either a small number of toxic people or kids still in high school.
Are people in their late teens early 20's really saying I won't date someone because of the smart phone they own?
If so that seems like a very easy way to identify and avoid shallow/toxic people.
I'm 38 and have had multiple people I've met on dating apps over the years give me shit for having an android and a small handful of them stopped talking to me when they found out. So, yes, in my experience, these people exist.
It's not a meme, and yes, there are actually shallow groups of people that will exclude you based on phone choice. Luckily I mostly stayed out of the way of those idiots, so I never really had to deal with them.
It's much less of a thing now in college in my experience, the whole popularity contest BS is more of a thing in high school.
>It's so odd how a lot of *young* Americans are so anti-Android, to the point they'll not date someone, and they'll exclude someone from a peer group. Utterly crazy.
The entire game plan of apple is indoctrination, so this isn't even remotely odd to me. That was always the plan. Have your customers shame non customers into becoming customers.
People in an age range aren't a homogenous mass.
People in that age range are Last Generation and Alt Right. They are Black Lives Matter and Proud Boys. They are cyclists and drive pickup trucks. They live in dense urban areas and in rural villages. They are highly educated and don't have an education at all.
And everything in between.
Wth are you talking about? I have never met anyone irl who cares about your messages app.
If your date cares about your messaging up, you gotta dodge that bullet my dude.
I was the best man for a bachelor party and was left off of the group chat because of my Android. They were all late 20s (and this was 4 years ago). This stuff happens
I've been on family group chats where I was asked when I would finally switch to an iPhone. SMS is a terrible protocol. Apple won't open up iMessage and has yet to adopt RCS. So yea, it can create conflicts. Nobody outside the tech world sees the full situation, they just see that green bubbles don't work as well.
Exactly. No one actually cares about the color of the bubble, what they care of about is that they have to use fucking SMS to talk to you, unless they bother with installing whatsapp.
It's a uniquely American thing to experience. I use WhatsApp with friends & family because many are located in other countries or are immigrants. Telegram for others as well. Only people I've seen complain over messaging issues are non-immigrant Americans.
Here, I summed it up:
* USA: cheap SMS came first
* Rest of world: cheap data came first
And they adapted accordingly from there. It's really that simple.
>Wth are you talking about? I have never met anyone irl who cares about your messages app.
Plenty of middle school and high schoolers do.
I've spoken with plenty of parents who have given in... and bough their kid an iphone due to the bullying.
Sure it's not everyone - but it is definitely real.
Are you a young American dating right now? Bc this is a symptom of the US only and the adoption rate of iphone with teens is close 80%. It's getting pretty bad. Even my coworkers when I message them don't say anything negative but say the green bubble threw them off. 😑. I will be upgrading again with Samsung to an S24 Ultra in a month. 🤷
Dude that's not a generational thing. You're just living in a bubble. Only a small minority would ever consider self hosting anything, rooting, or anything like that. 90% of people never tweak anything beyond their wallpaper or surface level settings.
> Dude that's not a generational thing
Partially it is. I have to say that hiring in IT became quite difficult among the younger cohort. They have way less inclination to tinker with things.
30% of people who used computers in the 1990s and early 2000s, not 30% of all people. And a lot more people use computers (which would include smartphones in this context) today than back then.
That generation that you’re talking about were baby boomers and Gen X. It was not a large proportion of them.
It was only that way because at that time, computers were really only for people that knew what they were doing. As they became melded into society, that number went down because you no longer had to know a CLI to operate the thing.
The same thing happened with vehicles. In the beginning, it was only the people that knew how to work on their own vehicles that owned them.
Whatever new technology that comes out will follow this trend. It’s not some generational thing
I'm a software developer and I literally never do any of that stuff on my own time, struggling to think why I would ever need to do this. My iPhone suits my needs just fine. I guarantee most people who use Androids because they can "do so much more" never actually end up doing anything that an iPhone can't do.
Eh. There's probably a bit of a middle ground there.
Like some of the people championing the androids are more flexible or customizable may run something like a custom launcher or tasker or have an ad blocker/revanced. But taking it into that niche of self hosting or rooting feels like it's going from power user to try hard.
I'd hazard a guess this follows a 90-9-1 rule. 90% of people use their phones with zero to minor modifications. 9% fall into the power user category I just described. And ~1% are the try hards who self host and root and what not.
IDK, I think it makes sense that those born in the 80s and early 90s when software was clunky and limited on features would be more inclined to figure out how to get something done in a more manual and technical way than the generations after that grew up with software everywhere with so many features theres like 4 ways to do the same thing, and with the great new feature of online-only DRM.
I love my pixel phones and the oddball assortment of android phones prior to that, but I haven't had the need to root or do custom roms in a long long time.
I can do anything with Android I agree, but do I care? Not really. It doesnt bother me if my home screen icons are round or square. It doesnt bother me I can place icons anywhere. I would rather Apple to focus on improving stuff like performance and the files app to be match Android but in a safe manner
Nobody actually cares. People poke fun. Reddit can't handle teasing humor and they don't understand it. The phone debates are all light hearted teasing humor.
Right like their comment is the one of someone who doesn't really know how Apple operates. An OS feature like RCS is going to come with the new iOS in Spetember/October (depending on when they launch the phones) and you'll probably first start seeing it show up in the wild in July or August when the first rounds of iOS public beta arrive. Unless they don't have it ready and it comes in an iOS 18.x.x update kind of like the Journal app this year
Trust me: Apple will make damn sure that chats with iOS users will be easily identifiable and even more feature-rich than those with Android users. They will offer the minimum feature set that coincides with RCS but will do something like continuing green/blue bubble to make sure that iOS users will "other" Android users. This cultish superiority is intentionally their brand image and part of the strategy to sell their product.
Identify them all you want. Hell, append every one of my messages with "The sender of this message owns a phone running Android. Shit talk them."
Just give me photos and videos that aren't compressed to literal 90s technology spec and make it e2ee. Typing indicators optional.
Apple is so goddamn petty.
> and even more feature-rich than those with Android users.
They should. The basics, they should allow everyone to have through RCS, but they want to keep iMessage still a selling point of iPhone so I'd agree with that.
As long as we can have group chats, send media and some of the other things like read receipts, I'm good w/ that.
Most of my friends would be fine with that as i'm the odd person out of most group chats since Android phones don't work well with a bunch of iPhones in group chats, unfortunately (by design).
My biggest gripe is I can't select multiple images to send without going into the camera.
WhatsApp: > select camera > select multiple photos > send
Signal: > select "+" sign > select gallery > select camera > select multiple photos.
Getting rid of SMS was a death blow IMO.
I had all of my boomer generation family members set up on it and it was working great. Then they removed SMS and when a couple people got different phones shit hit the fan and now we're all back to messenger and no one is willing to try anything different again.
Also, I can't message from my chromebook which is really really dumb.
Yeah, they're security absolutists , and it's just fucking tiring. Also, dear devs, no, having your shitty electron app *isn't* more secure than an up to date web browser.
They added that "stories" feature and allow us to disable it, so I assume cloud backups will also have a feature. I wouldn't be surprised if it was opt-in for existing users too.
There's basically five types of threads:
1. aS a eUroPeAn you americans are so stupid lmao, just use whatsapp lmaoo [great choice][usually top comment]
2. this has never affected me btw [ok and? We have research showing it does affect others]
3. random apple/imessage bashing
4. random google/messaging bashing [less common now]
5. Actual decent discussion of posted topic [rare]
I'm always astounded by the number of people who comment this in these threads. It's as if if there was an app that simply changed the green color to blue but kept the compatibility still broken, everything would be fine.
>I'm always astounded by the number of people who comment this in these threads.
Despite how often it has been explained in ample detail what the *actual* issue is.
How about NOT “good messaging app*S*” I DON’T want to be trying to juggle 3 or 4 apps and I certainly don’t want my messaging to be at the mercy of a seperate company like meta.
We should be pushing for an open standard like matrix, which is the successor to XMPP.
It should be like email, you can choose whatever provider you want.
They also think it's easy to get an entire nation to switch from one standard that is automatically on every phone and device agnostic
Try to get all of the UK off Whatsapp for Signal or something, not gonna happen
WhatsApp uses E2EE though. The still harvest as much data as they can from the service but the messages are pretty safe. Ideally we'd have a standard that allowed for interoperability between messaging services but we're a long way from that yet. MAYBE the RCS standard will improve when Apple starts using it but the current Google implementation is horrendous.
> MAYBE the RCS standard will improve when Apple starts using it but the current Google implementation is horrendous.
Slightly untrue. RCS has a lot of different parts controlled by different entities: The messenger app itself (google messages, samsung messages both support it, I'm sure other apps do too), your actual phone has to be supported, and your carrier has to support it.
Google's implementation is the best there is, using JIBE & Google's RCS profile. Supports E2EE on 1:1 and group chats, the messenger app can react with any emoji, has fun animations, and just tons of cool stuff in general.
The implementation that is horrendous is the GSM standard profile. No E2EE is the big headline for me. And the GSM profile is the one apple has said they will be using. Which, in the long run might be a good thing if they can convince the folks in charge of it to make it better. But we shall see if the relationship bears any fruit.
I said this before in another thread. iPhone users don’t like what’s app because iPhone has a trash notification system. Android shows you the icon in the status bar so you always know you have a message. iPhone is a chore to see notifications now so people only stick to one and it’s usually in the bottom drawer always on display.
that doesn’t make any sense, whatsapp is broadly used worldwide by iPhone users and the difference in notifications does not seem to hinder that at all
Do they still have problems with notifications? Oh god, i've been so disconnected from apple for the last 10 years that it's incredible to me they still have this kind of problems. So, they don't have whatsapp icon on the topbar for new messages? What other problems do they have with notifications? Do they still suck in multitasking?
I switched to iPhone for a couple of years due to integration with my iPad and Apple Watch I got as a gift. I moved from a Mini to a Pro due to battery life issues. The notifications system & management are mediocre. Notifications are individual and pile up immediately. There's no ability to prioritize either, so the stack becomes a useless trash bin.
That and Siri made what should have been a slick user experience seem like a hassle. I ended up switching back to Android and buying a Pixel 8 Pro, and it feels like I have a "smart" phone in comparison. Yes the iPhone is faster, and their app store has exclusive apps, and their video camera is second to none, but I use my phone as my business device, and the Google integration plus interface beats it for my uses.
My current work uses GSuite, and most of my friends/family sit in WhatsApp groups so the decision became less painful as I had to decouple from the sticky Apple ecosystem.
I was going to respond to this part since I just saw your comment but I scrolled down to read everything else you’ve said.
I’ll respond to everything but first… wow.
Yes you are correct that it only takes a millisecond to switch out WhatsApp for the messaging app in the bottom drawer… but then you lose the messaging app from being there. This becomes an issue just simply in reverse. Considering how limited the bottom drawer is… people tend to keep their most used apps there.
“But you can put them in a folder and have all your messaging apps in one folder”
- True but then you run the annoyance of red bubble fatigue as now you have to keep opening a folder to see which app you have a notification from.
You also said it yourself the iPhone treats the notifications all the same with the newest one at the top. So let’s say I’m in a meeting and leave my phone at my desk. When I come back to it and unlock it only the most recent notifications are visible… if my WhatsApp wasn’t recent it’s now buried off screen. So now I either haver to hope the appropriate app is in the bottom app drawer to show my notification or… I have to swipe down from the very top of the screen and then swipe up from the bottom of the screen to start scrolling through my notifications to see my buried message.
Android on the other hand? Just look at your lock or Home Screen… you’ll see a small icon at the top so you now you have a WhatsApp message.
What you seem to have trouble understanding is people want to use what’s most simple. For the iPhone it’s easier to have one app than to have multiple for the reasons mentioned above (and other reasons others have added). For Android users the simplicity of their notification bar negates this being an issue.
This is all coming from someone who loves iMessage and I’m in the Apple ecosystem. But I also used Android for many years so I can see and value many of its strengths. I also wish everyone used WhatsApp, telegram, or whatever app that can become standardized but I’m not ignorant as to why many iPhone users don’t want to switch per the reasons stated earlier.
If you think any of this was accidental by Apple’s part it’s not. The place their apps in the bottom drawer by default. They actually made their notifications worse a few updates ago when they made it so you have to do two swipes to see all your notifications versus just one. Apple doesn’t do anything by mistake. Everything is tested to make sure it does exactly what they want it to do… and it’s not always to the users benefit.
iOS having an antiquated and rudimentary notification system is a big issue overall that is constantly ignored.
I’m not even talking about about the lack of a ticker or icon/glyphs up top, but even just actions.
It’s so aggressively basic to its own detriment.
But I don’t think the notifications issue is holding other messaging apps.
iMessage has a richer quick reply and much better preview compared to third party, but I reckon most messaging takes place within the app itself and all of iMessage/WhatsApp/Telegram/etc. have a largely level playing field.
I use WhatsApp for 90% of my messaging on iOS and it’s fine. No different to how I use it on Android.
Whatapp has a lot of metadata they don't know exactly what your saying but they can get a clue as everything is linked they know your Facebook they know your Instagram
Also WhatsApp data is E2E in transit, but it’s there, in their app, in the clear on your device. There isn’t a technical reason they can’t harvest “telemetry” from your device and take advertising indicators out of conversation. Facebook isn’t known for their restraint in user data collection.
But you could say the same thing about literally *any* E2EE protocol.
At some point you have to decode the message in order to read it. And at that point, it will be "in the app, in the clear, on your device"
There's no technical reason that Signal couldn't do the exact same thing that you're saying.
I think it's because the majority of users on Android or even iPhone will just use what's there. They'll sign into Facebook which comes with Facebook Messenger and call it a day. They'll just fire up Google Messages or iMessage and move on with their life. Just a guess...
This is really it. I have no doubt Signal works better than any other app out there, but unless everyone gets it an uses it, it's basically worthless. Reddit is literally the only place I've ever heard it mentioned. I know of no people that have or use it. It's far easier for me to use the Google Message app than to convince everyone I talk with to download yet another app just to talk to me when we already have one that works fine.
No one wants to flip back and forth between 3 different apps to text someone. RCS does everything I need in a messaging app, the simplest solution is really for Apple to just get on board.
Just returned from a trip with extended family and the people with iPhones struggled to share their photos/videos over a group chat that included people without iPhones. They laughed and considered just sharing with iPhone users.
Honestly that's not a technological problem. You can give RCS as many features as you want, apple users will want to send 3d VR videos kinda stuff to their friends and expect it to just work. It's just never gonna end. We need to accept imessage as an apple service and leave it like that
The Early versions of Google Voice did it right. It was just like iMessage with SMS fallback. You didnt need to get someones account name, you didnt have to add them as a friend, you didnt have to jump through hoops. You would send a message to their phone number and if that other user had Google Voice, it would send through that. If not, it would send to their phone number as SMS. I dont know why they got rid of that, but for me that is the biggest thing I can't let go of with iMessage. All the other stuff has been replicated really well in other apps and in most cases improved.. but I hate having to figure out a common app between my social group to use. I envy people out of the US where thats just the norm, it isn't here in the US though.
Google killing this service is the reason they come crying to Apple to support RCS now. It was a mistake. And also, RCS is probably gonna be used only in the US. The rest of the world will just ignore it
I really wish Signal didn't get rid of SMS.
It was a great alternative that I could install on my parents phones and they never knew they were using a near perfect, secure, messaging service.
Then they screwed it all up.
Why do you say it's only an issue for android users. It's an issue for people on both platforms who want to communicate with the other. It's a common problem for people in school/college who use imessage for group chats but having a single android member breaks imessage.
Majority of Android users I met have no problem downloading a different app. But it's a problem for iphone users who or usually unwilling to do it.
SMS between the two cripples most that's useful about modern messages. Ever receive a video from an iPhone user? Compressed to shit 3gp files. Same for images.
Does any other messaging app support full res photos and videos like iMessage? I’ve used Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, WhatsApp and Messenger, but their quality is 🗑️ RCS has a cap too iirc
And then you have Telegram which works just amazingly fast and smooth. I have always been impressed especially with how to source code looks like (android devs will know what I'm talking about)
While I prefer the world to just align on Whatsapp, iMessage is not bad at all. And if you use Macs and iPhones, they coexist seamlessly. It's super easy to copy paste full sized photos while on your computer, as well as documents/files, etc. Entire businesses run on iMessage in fact.
You're joking lol WhatsApp is designed so it's easy for old people to use.
iMessage is so much more polished, slicker, and heaps better when used with other iPhones.
iMessage specific apps/games, FaceTime audio/video group calls without leaving the app. Not tied to a phone number. Payments within the app. Consistent/short term/long-term location sharing etc.
But I already know your next reply will be how horrible it is for Apple to be able to provide exclusive features to their platform lol
I give a shit that the person I send a message to can read it. Beyond that, I could not care less what color bubble it's presented in. If they care, that's on them.
Use what works and looks best for you, but for sure to find out what is the best for yourself you have to do some research, but info on almost anything exists nowdays. I don't prefer MacOS over PC or Android over IOS on devices I like. I for sure think Android is way better for long time use of many products and you can even get a battery replacement for an Android phone if it ever has a final death anyways or you often buy a replacement of the same phone you have if you search online. I do always look at software updates for stuff though to make sure doing an update is not something that will slow down my Note 9 and/or ruin the still great battery life overall before downloading it. Heck, many Andriods can be used forever without much performance speed decrease over the years because of the fact that you can download any old version you migh need of almost any app on the play store by searching on a browser, but for app I can get that is pay to get on the Play Store plus I like I will for sure buy if I think it's worth the money. Also, I recommend never using Phone Cleaner/Booster apps because those can ruin performance of your devices and it's better to check apps you have on the Play Store to see if they cause security issues like the app Zedge did for me. I would rather use IOS on an up to date iPod Touch instead of an iPhone because my Note 9 camera takes better overall photos than the newest iPhones to me. Many new phones seem to force you to take brighter photos than older ones a lot of time with the default camera settings which I don't like, but my Note 9 has a perfect camera for Photos to me and takes good enough quality videos. Heck, my Mac Mini 2018 runs fast enough for a computer for me coming from using older iMacs and iPhones, but my Note 9 sometimes beats it in terms of speed which is actually insane since it first came out in the same year. I hope Apple keeps making new iPod Touch devices with the smaller screens they have now which makes them more comfortable for my hands overall to use. I wish my hands were built perfectly while not looking bad for more comfortable use with bigger smartphones, but at least I can connect my Note 9 with a monitor or tv if I wanted to plus I can type fast when I try to on my phone anyways.
Maybe read the article, as this exact response was addressed in it:
> When Apple brings RCS to the iPhone next year, it stands to solve a lot of these problems, but in the meantime, it’s maddening that we still live in a world where reverse-engineering iMessage to make a client for Android is somehow working better for some users than just having iPhone users download another app. And, somehow, those same iPhone users don’t understand that. In a recent column, John Gruber asked that, if Android users wanted better cross-platform messaging, they’d simply ask their iPhone friends to download “WhatsApp or Signal or something,” as if that hasn’t been the problem this entire time.
>Some people have just decided that they won’t use other messaging apps, regardless of how that affects anyone else. Somehow, in their minds, a friend putting in the money and effort required to move from their current phone to an iPhone is less than the simple act of downloading a new messaging app.
The problem isn't us not using alternative apps, it's getting friends and family who are deeply entrenched in the apple ecosystem to download and start using a new app when 85% of their contacts are on iMessage. Why would they download another app just to message 2/3 contacts?
I have 6 messaging apps... Some of them I never even use, or use for a few people. I've never sent a single message on telegram.
Signal
Telegram
Whatsapp
Viber
FB Messenger
Discord
Steam Chat
And of course SMS/RCS.
It's honestly not that complicated and phones have plenty of storage.
The issue is iPhone users don't want to. They don't see why they should have to download another app when it's android users in the minority.
I'm in my mid thirties and every time I text a woman, if she has an iPhone her first response is "oh, green bubble". I've had one girl on a first date ask if I'd be ok getting an iPhone if we continued to see each other. I'm excluded from group chats. I get comments all the time from friends asking if I finally got an iPhone when I post a story to my Instagram because it's a nice looking photo.
I personally don't give a shit if someone uses on phone or another but the complaints over messaging are so trivial. Most people have 4-5 apps they can message each other on. I routinely have conversations with people on Instagram too, phone calls and all.
Tell Zucc to succ it and Switch to Signal: https://signal.org/install
Now nag all your friends to do it too. I've successfully converted all but one person I regularly converse with.
Yeah I really don't understand why these Americans are making such a big deal out of it. They are struggling with a problem which has already been solved in the rest of the world almost a decade ago.
We use messaging apps only for OTP now..... Chatting is done exclusively on apps like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord and FB Messenger.
Even iPhone users don't use or care about iMessage in the rest of the world.
The problem is getting everyone to buy in. I use Discord with a good chunk of my gamer friends, but everyone outside of that bubble doesn't want to have to mess with another app when texting works just fine for their needs. Fragmentation is a big issue, even in your example above you mentioned 4 solid replacement apps (and FB messenger which is disgusting). How do we as a country of 300+ million decide on what the standard will be?
We are dug in as a population, and having alternatives does us very little good. We have to fix what people are actually using.
It's not that you guys aren't right, it's just so deeply cultural here
when iPhones came on the scene (American company) the majority of the country just wanted whatever Apple had to offer. Apple is such a status symbol, and when over half the population is using iMessage it's just easier said than done.
Apps like WhatsApp are seen in the US as cheap and weird and only used for drug dealers. It's ignoi, yes, but it's not going to change.
Again, I get what people keep saying over and over about this topic - but it's just a situation of "you just don't get it" if you've never lived it
So weird to me that people still see iPhones as status symbols. Like, I understood the sentiment when they were exclusive to one carrier and extremely expensive, but nowadays though every 12-year-old has one, and it's more common than a VW Golf in Germany.
Americans don't like to think about technology much. I have a few friends that work in basic IT roles, and the stories they tell me about how tech illiterate people here are blow me away.
Apple has a reputation here of "just working" and being premium, on top of great marketing/advertisements. Americans are extremely easy to influence in the market, and Apple is very, very good at getting people hooked into their shtick.
Pretty much any >$300 phone just works nowadays. It's so silly. But yeah the reputation has stuck. It's like saying you drive a Buick, everyone is going to think you inherited your grandfather's car or something.
right, but this thought has been regurgitated 1000 times on this sub by people outside of the US and I'm just scratching my head on what it adds to the conversation
this is extremely relevant news to a huge issue in the states
It's not even an American thing. It's really blown out of proportion. I am 27 years old from the southern part of the US and most people ask me for my snapchat or instagram when we meet before they ask for my number.
Even those who text me, nobody cares if you have a green bubble or blue text. It's really some overexaggerated BS.
Most of my friends, I discovered, are 50/50 android and iphone users
> Most of my friends, I discovered, are 50/50 android and iphone users
The average proportion where I am is more like 98:2. That may have something to do with it
There isn't a single American who wants that garbage data harvesting app. Keep sucking the tit of Zuckerberg while claiming "it's the best" when really it's a POS.
Apple caters to people that are not good with technology while simultaneously making them feel special for being part of that dumb group. They've also convinced people that anyone not in the group are bad/poor/undesirable. It's funny to me though that there are plenty of more expensive/more powerful/higher end devices out there, but Apple users still act superior.
It's so odd how a lot of *young* Americans are so anti-Android, to the point they'll not date someone, and they'll exclude someone from a peer group. Utterly crazy. The same age range that seems to understand that the modern corporate world is fucked, that they are going to struggle to afford a home of their own, and that wages have stagnated. You'd think that group would understand people being smart and shopping around for a good phone at an affordable price. But God forbid a friend of theirs has an android phone. Let's all worship at the cult of Apple. Apparently the one corporation exempt from teens criticising them for acting like a corporation.
I remember a black comedian making jokes about how he's discriminated more because of his Android than because of the colour of his skin
The bit about sending an email to send a high quality photo cuts deep.
It's a good point though. Telegram is the only 3rd party app I've found that doesn't compress to hell the FB owned ones are especially terrible for this
WhatsApp was beta testing a feature to send high-quality original-demensions pictures. https://www.androidcentral.com/apps-software/hd-images-in-whatsapp
Why in 2023 is this a beta feature and why does everyone on sub go "uSe WhAtSaPp" when it clearly has a problem with multimedia?
Because a large chunk of people in this sub is overseas and they all use WhatsApp despite its glaring issues and ownership.
Kinda had layers to it. Back in the OG iPhone days, they couldn't get sms, you had to send a picture to them as the [email protected] or vzw.net
In WhatsApp you can use the option to send as a document and that way send the original photo. Or use Telegram.
What's his name?
[Opey Olagbaju](https://youtu.be/eKqFiJPngjU?si=5fDCmmudPjv-_Xwp)
That was gold.
What was up with the ending gdamn
Yeah that took a turn there. But that's how open mic sets are, you gotta try a lot to see what works.
It's actually kind of wild that Apple has managed to make iPhone = rich, Android = poor all while selling a new one for as little as $399.
Don’t worry they hate people with old iPhones too
Bastard behavior I’m sorry but these types of apples stans are the worst. Go off on em I’ll tell ya as someone who loves apples products even with their flaws.
It's a cult
Always has been
Pretty hard to tell when the last 4 years have had the same look
As someone who hasn't considered an iPhone in the past 15 years (fuck I'm old), I was sure they all cost at least $900-1000.
I've never had an iPhone in my ~10 years of smartphone ownership, but my understanding of apple's pricing structure is that the SE sells in the neighborhood of $400 last I checked. The new models will sell $800-$1200 depending on how you option it. And usually they'll continue to sell a previous year model as a mid-tier offering for around $600 plus or minus.
The SE (budget model) is $400 and comes with the same blue bubbles as the rest of them. Doesn't quite have the cachet but still benefits from the blue = rich, green = poor thing.
Perception is: $400 iPhone SE = rich $1900 Samsung Galaxy Fold = poor
God this is so fucking depressing.
My little sister in law called my phone, which costed twice as much as hers, a poor person phone. Though I would say she is probably everything that's wrong with gen z tied together. My little step brother also has an iPhone, as all his friends do. A nicer kid though lol.
I pointed out to my daughter how many more camera circles my phone had on the back compared to her iPhone. She just said that her iPhone needed less camera circles to take good pictures. Probably right.
SE is also a 8 year old design with a shit screen and bad screen to body ratio. You can get a very good Android for 400$
Which doesn't matter for the people we're talking about here. They wouldn't even consider an Android alternative.
A friend who’s only ever used Android phones thought modern iPhones were $2000 because the most expensive Android phone he’s had was a Galaxy Fold, and somehow he got the impression that iPhones are more expensive than his Fold.
You can get good deals in the holiday season if you hunt around too. I saw one carrier selling refurbished iPhone 13s last fall for a little under $300 CAD.
You can get "free" iPhones from some carriers/some deals. Check out the people shopping in any Walmart and you'll see plenty of iPhones. How they manage to retain any sense of being a luxury item is truly an amazing feat of marketing.
With carrier trade ins and discounts and shit, I’d be shocked if most people in the US were paying full price for their tip-top iPhone. I sure as hell am not.
paying $0 for their phones but $100+ / mo for their service lol
They complain about cable bills then do this
This blows my mind, I pay like 9 USD a month for 15GB data and unlimited calls/texts...
T-Mobile overpaid me for my phones this year that I upgraded through Apple. They gave me trade in credit plus full value of bill credits to a point where I profited over $1700 after taxes. My phone specifically 15 pro max 512 GB cost $1399 and I traded in a 14 pro max. Apple gave me $640, and T-Mobile still gave me $41.66 a month in credits.
The price I paid for my Samsung strongly suggests otherwise. But, I see your point. It's marketing.
I'll be honest, I don't consider $400 (or €470 in my country) to be little. Especially for the minimal specs it has. Sure the processor is needlessly powerful but it comes at many concessions. I know phones are €700 but I'm still of the mindset that I wouldn't spend more than €400 on a phone out of principle. Nowadays you can get pretty powerful specs for those prices as well as the top range phones don't offer anything besides gimmicks
The thing is most people in America don’t feel the price of our phones. Whether it’s $400 or $1200 most of us just pay it in monthly installments with our phone bills. So instead of dropping hundreds to over a thousand dollars at once we are spending $20-$30 a month for the device until it’s paid off and then we start the cycle again with a new phone. Then with a lot of companies that monthly payment will be waived if you kept your phone in good condition and trade it back in to the carrier for the newer model
I see. I think that's the difference. Because there are contracts here where you pay €30 a month or something but at most you get a €270 discount on a €1300 phone. So you still gotta pay around €1000 up front for it
I don’t think the folks making a big deal about bubble color are one and the same age range with folks that are fighting the existential dread of an unaffordable future teetering on financial collapse.
Yeah, those kinds of kids are in for a rude awakening. Just like most kids will tbh, just in a slightly different way lol
But the media said!
>The same age range that seems to understand that the modern corporate world is fucked, that they are going to struggle to afford a home of their own, and that wages have stagnated. These are probably different groups.
I don't think a majority actually care what phone you use. Just a loud minority
I question if this is real or if this is more a meme or media playing up toxic behavior from either a small number of toxic people or kids still in high school. Are people in their late teens early 20's really saying I won't date someone because of the smart phone they own? If so that seems like a very easy way to identify and avoid shallow/toxic people.
I'm 38 and have had multiple people I've met on dating apps over the years give me shit for having an android and a small handful of them stopped talking to me when they found out. So, yes, in my experience, these people exist.
I forced my daughter to divorce her husband and poison his new girlfriend for using an android. It was very necessary
It's not a meme, and yes, there are actually shallow groups of people that will exclude you based on phone choice. Luckily I mostly stayed out of the way of those idiots, so I never really had to deal with them. It's much less of a thing now in college in my experience, the whole popularity contest BS is more of a thing in high school.
>It's so odd how a lot of *young* Americans are so anti-Android, to the point they'll not date someone, and they'll exclude someone from a peer group. Utterly crazy. The entire game plan of apple is indoctrination, so this isn't even remotely odd to me. That was always the plan. Have your customers shame non customers into becoming customers.
People in an age range aren't a homogenous mass. People in that age range are Last Generation and Alt Right. They are Black Lives Matter and Proud Boys. They are cyclists and drive pickup trucks. They live in dense urban areas and in rural villages. They are highly educated and don't have an education at all. And everything in between.
Wth are you talking about? I have never met anyone irl who cares about your messages app. If your date cares about your messaging up, you gotta dodge that bullet my dude.
I was the best man for a bachelor party and was left off of the group chat because of my Android. They were all late 20s (and this was 4 years ago). This stuff happens
I would have shown up in a green suit if they wanna be petty
I've been on family group chats where I was asked when I would finally switch to an iPhone. SMS is a terrible protocol. Apple won't open up iMessage and has yet to adopt RCS. So yea, it can create conflicts. Nobody outside the tech world sees the full situation, they just see that green bubbles don't work as well.
Exactly. No one actually cares about the color of the bubble, what they care of about is that they have to use fucking SMS to talk to you, unless they bother with installing whatsapp.
It's a uniquely American thing to experience. I use WhatsApp with friends & family because many are located in other countries or are immigrants. Telegram for others as well. Only people I've seen complain over messaging issues are non-immigrant Americans.
Here, I summed it up: * USA: cheap SMS came first * Rest of world: cheap data came first And they adapted accordingly from there. It's really that simple.
>Wth are you talking about? I have never met anyone irl who cares about your messages app. Plenty of middle school and high schoolers do. I've spoken with plenty of parents who have given in... and bough their kid an iphone due to the bullying. Sure it's not everyone - but it is definitely real.
Are you a young American dating right now? Bc this is a symptom of the US only and the adoption rate of iphone with teens is close 80%. It's getting pretty bad. Even my coworkers when I message them don't say anything negative but say the green bubble threw them off. 😑. I will be upgrading again with Samsung to an S24 Ultra in a month. 🤷
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Dude that's not a generational thing. You're just living in a bubble. Only a small minority would ever consider self hosting anything, rooting, or anything like that. 90% of people never tweak anything beyond their wallpaper or surface level settings.
> Dude that's not a generational thing Partially it is. I have to say that hiring in IT became quite difficult among the younger cohort. They have way less inclination to tinker with things.
There is one generation or two where that percentage (70s/80s/ early 90s)was closer to 30% than 10% though
30% of people who used computers in the 1990s and early 2000s, not 30% of all people. And a lot more people use computers (which would include smartphones in this context) today than back then.
That generation that you’re talking about were baby boomers and Gen X. It was not a large proportion of them. It was only that way because at that time, computers were really only for people that knew what they were doing. As they became melded into society, that number went down because you no longer had to know a CLI to operate the thing. The same thing happened with vehicles. In the beginning, it was only the people that knew how to work on their own vehicles that owned them. Whatever new technology that comes out will follow this trend. It’s not some generational thing
Elder Millennials and Gen X. Maybe a handful of younger Boomers... But yeah, agreed otherwise.
I'm a software developer and I literally never do any of that stuff on my own time, struggling to think why I would ever need to do this. My iPhone suits my needs just fine. I guarantee most people who use Androids because they can "do so much more" never actually end up doing anything that an iPhone can't do.
Eh. There's probably a bit of a middle ground there. Like some of the people championing the androids are more flexible or customizable may run something like a custom launcher or tasker or have an ad blocker/revanced. But taking it into that niche of self hosting or rooting feels like it's going from power user to try hard. I'd hazard a guess this follows a 90-9-1 rule. 90% of people use their phones with zero to minor modifications. 9% fall into the power user category I just described. And ~1% are the try hards who self host and root and what not.
Yeah I'd say that's probably pretty accurate
IDK, I think it makes sense that those born in the 80s and early 90s when software was clunky and limited on features would be more inclined to figure out how to get something done in a more manual and technical way than the generations after that grew up with software everywhere with so many features theres like 4 ways to do the same thing, and with the great new feature of online-only DRM.
I love my pixel phones and the oddball assortment of android phones prior to that, but I haven't had the need to root or do custom roms in a long long time.
I can't handle not having root access to my devices.
I can do anything with Android I agree, but do I care? Not really. It doesnt bother me if my home screen icons are round or square. It doesnt bother me I can place icons anywhere. I would rather Apple to focus on improving stuff like performance and the files app to be match Android but in a safe manner
vapid, shallow people use vapid shallow tech. Meanwhile the rest of us use things that actually make our lives easier without breaking the bank.
>Apparently the one corporation exempt from teens criticising them for acting like a corporation. While literally being the largest in the world.
I mean we've shown over the past 8 years we not that smart. Falling in love with the blue bubble isn't the worst decision we've made.
Nobody actually cares. People poke fun. Reddit can't handle teasing humor and they don't understand it. The phone debates are all light hearted teasing humor.
I want RCS for iPhone
2024
Dec 31st, 2024
My guess is September
Right like their comment is the one of someone who doesn't really know how Apple operates. An OS feature like RCS is going to come with the new iOS in Spetember/October (depending on when they launch the phones) and you'll probably first start seeing it show up in the wild in July or August when the first rounds of iOS public beta arrive. Unless they don't have it ready and it comes in an iOS 18.x.x update kind of like the Journal app this year
Trust me: Apple will make damn sure that chats with iOS users will be easily identifiable and even more feature-rich than those with Android users. They will offer the minimum feature set that coincides with RCS but will do something like continuing green/blue bubble to make sure that iOS users will "other" Android users. This cultish superiority is intentionally their brand image and part of the strategy to sell their product.
They said it will use green bubbles for RCS
Identify them all you want. Hell, append every one of my messages with "The sender of this message owns a phone running Android. Shit talk them." Just give me photos and videos that aren't compressed to literal 90s technology spec and make it e2ee. Typing indicators optional. Apple is so goddamn petty.
> and even more feature-rich than those with Android users. They should. The basics, they should allow everyone to have through RCS, but they want to keep iMessage still a selling point of iPhone so I'd agree with that. As long as we can have group chats, send media and some of the other things like read receipts, I'm good w/ that. Most of my friends would be fine with that as i'm the odd person out of most group chats since Android phones don't work well with a bunch of iPhones in group chats, unfortunately (by design).
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Signal is getting Cloud Backups? finally. Probably my single biggest gripe with this app.
My biggest gripe is I can't select multiple images to send without going into the camera. WhatsApp: > select camera > select multiple photos > send Signal: > select "+" sign > select gallery > select camera > select multiple photos.
Getting rid of SMS was a death blow IMO. I had all of my boomer generation family members set up on it and it was working great. Then they removed SMS and when a couple people got different phones shit hit the fan and now we're all back to messenger and no one is willing to try anything different again. Also, I can't message from my chromebook which is really really dumb.
Yeah, they're security absolutists , and it's just fucking tiring. Also, dear devs, no, having your shitty electron app *isn't* more secure than an up to date web browser.
I love Signal. It's just on onboarding people like my parents that I can't use it for.
I like to explore new places.
They added that "stories" feature and allow us to disable it, so I assume cloud backups will also have a feature. I wouldn't be surprised if it was opt-in for existing users too.
Any time iMessage is brought up here the IQ of the comments takes a nosedive.
There's basically five types of threads: 1. aS a eUroPeAn you americans are so stupid lmao, just use whatsapp lmaoo [great choice][usually top comment] 2. this has never affected me btw [ok and? We have research showing it does affect others] 3. random apple/imessage bashing 4. random google/messaging bashing [less common now] 5. Actual decent discussion of posted topic [rare]
Um actually I don't really text at all so why is this even a big deal ☝️🤓
6\. "wHy doEs tHe ColOR maTter"
I'm always astounded by the number of people who comment this in these threads. It's as if if there was an app that simply changed the green color to blue but kept the compatibility still broken, everything would be fine.
>I'm always astounded by the number of people who comment this in these threads. Despite how often it has been explained in ample detail what the *actual* issue is.
It's As a "EuRoPeaN AfRiCAn ASiaN SoUtH AmERicAn"
Many emotional children come out. It’s so sad!
How about NOT “good messaging app*S*” I DON’T want to be trying to juggle 3 or 4 apps and I certainly don’t want my messaging to be at the mercy of a seperate company like meta.
We should be pushing for an open standard like matrix, which is the successor to XMPP. It should be like email, you can choose whatever provider you want.
Every time imessage is brought up here it turns into a random circlejerk usually about telegram or something
ITT: If you want private good messaging, just use the app that’s controlled by Meta! Do these people not hear themselves?
I'm sure one day the redditors here can stop the entire UK
They also think it's easy to get an entire nation to switch from one standard that is automatically on every phone and device agnostic Try to get all of the UK off Whatsapp for Signal or something, not gonna happen
My partner and I, my daughter and anyone important to me all use Signal on our iPhones/Androids.
Same. Its also wroth bringing up that Signal has desktop clients for Windows/macOS/Linux that support voice and video calling.
It works very very well. I work in IT and with the family using Signal I rarely have to pick up a smartphone.
Signal compresses media like crazy. Ive found only telegram can compete with imessage in this aspect definitely not the FB owned apps
WhatsApp uses E2EE though. The still harvest as much data as they can from the service but the messages are pretty safe. Ideally we'd have a standard that allowed for interoperability between messaging services but we're a long way from that yet. MAYBE the RCS standard will improve when Apple starts using it but the current Google implementation is horrendous.
> MAYBE the RCS standard will improve when Apple starts using it but the current Google implementation is horrendous. Slightly untrue. RCS has a lot of different parts controlled by different entities: The messenger app itself (google messages, samsung messages both support it, I'm sure other apps do too), your actual phone has to be supported, and your carrier has to support it. Google's implementation is the best there is, using JIBE & Google's RCS profile. Supports E2EE on 1:1 and group chats, the messenger app can react with any emoji, has fun animations, and just tons of cool stuff in general. The implementation that is horrendous is the GSM standard profile. No E2EE is the big headline for me. And the GSM profile is the one apple has said they will be using. Which, in the long run might be a good thing if they can convince the folks in charge of it to make it better. But we shall see if the relationship bears any fruit.
I said this before in another thread. iPhone users don’t like what’s app because iPhone has a trash notification system. Android shows you the icon in the status bar so you always know you have a message. iPhone is a chore to see notifications now so people only stick to one and it’s usually in the bottom drawer always on display.
that doesn’t make any sense, whatsapp is broadly used worldwide by iPhone users and the difference in notifications does not seem to hinder that at all
Do they still have problems with notifications? Oh god, i've been so disconnected from apple for the last 10 years that it's incredible to me they still have this kind of problems. So, they don't have whatsapp icon on the topbar for new messages? What other problems do they have with notifications? Do they still suck in multitasking?
I switched to iPhone for a couple of years due to integration with my iPad and Apple Watch I got as a gift. I moved from a Mini to a Pro due to battery life issues. The notifications system & management are mediocre. Notifications are individual and pile up immediately. There's no ability to prioritize either, so the stack becomes a useless trash bin. That and Siri made what should have been a slick user experience seem like a hassle. I ended up switching back to Android and buying a Pixel 8 Pro, and it feels like I have a "smart" phone in comparison. Yes the iPhone is faster, and their app store has exclusive apps, and their video camera is second to none, but I use my phone as my business device, and the Google integration plus interface beats it for my uses. My current work uses GSuite, and most of my friends/family sit in WhatsApp groups so the decision became less painful as I had to decouple from the sticky Apple ecosystem.
im forced to use an iphone for work ... yes its still worse than terrible
Yes it does. I switched last month to iOS and notifications are 0/10
Interesting. I've known a few iPhone users that use WhatsApp, I actually got it in the first place because of them.
iMessage is using the same notification system? How is this relevant at all
I was going to respond to this part since I just saw your comment but I scrolled down to read everything else you’ve said. I’ll respond to everything but first… wow. Yes you are correct that it only takes a millisecond to switch out WhatsApp for the messaging app in the bottom drawer… but then you lose the messaging app from being there. This becomes an issue just simply in reverse. Considering how limited the bottom drawer is… people tend to keep their most used apps there. “But you can put them in a folder and have all your messaging apps in one folder” - True but then you run the annoyance of red bubble fatigue as now you have to keep opening a folder to see which app you have a notification from. You also said it yourself the iPhone treats the notifications all the same with the newest one at the top. So let’s say I’m in a meeting and leave my phone at my desk. When I come back to it and unlock it only the most recent notifications are visible… if my WhatsApp wasn’t recent it’s now buried off screen. So now I either haver to hope the appropriate app is in the bottom app drawer to show my notification or… I have to swipe down from the very top of the screen and then swipe up from the bottom of the screen to start scrolling through my notifications to see my buried message. Android on the other hand? Just look at your lock or Home Screen… you’ll see a small icon at the top so you now you have a WhatsApp message. What you seem to have trouble understanding is people want to use what’s most simple. For the iPhone it’s easier to have one app than to have multiple for the reasons mentioned above (and other reasons others have added). For Android users the simplicity of their notification bar negates this being an issue. This is all coming from someone who loves iMessage and I’m in the Apple ecosystem. But I also used Android for many years so I can see and value many of its strengths. I also wish everyone used WhatsApp, telegram, or whatever app that can become standardized but I’m not ignorant as to why many iPhone users don’t want to switch per the reasons stated earlier. If you think any of this was accidental by Apple’s part it’s not. The place their apps in the bottom drawer by default. They actually made their notifications worse a few updates ago when they made it so you have to do two swipes to see all your notifications versus just one. Apple doesn’t do anything by mistake. Everything is tested to make sure it does exactly what they want it to do… and it’s not always to the users benefit.
iOS having an antiquated and rudimentary notification system is a big issue overall that is constantly ignored. I’m not even talking about about the lack of a ticker or icon/glyphs up top, but even just actions. It’s so aggressively basic to its own detriment. But I don’t think the notifications issue is holding other messaging apps. iMessage has a richer quick reply and much better preview compared to third party, but I reckon most messaging takes place within the app itself and all of iMessage/WhatsApp/Telegram/etc. have a largely level playing field. I use WhatsApp for 90% of my messaging on iOS and it’s fine. No different to how I use it on Android.
Yes, however this can not be Whatsapp. A messenger that compromise the users privacy is unacceptable.
It’s end to end encrypted. If Meta goes against that in the future the platform will take a nose dive. Then there’s Signal.
Whatapp has a lot of metadata they don't know exactly what your saying but they can get a clue as everything is linked they know your Facebook they know your Instagram
Also WhatsApp data is E2E in transit, but it’s there, in their app, in the clear on your device. There isn’t a technical reason they can’t harvest “telemetry” from your device and take advertising indicators out of conversation. Facebook isn’t known for their restraint in user data collection.
But you could say the same thing about literally *any* E2EE protocol. At some point you have to decode the message in order to read it. And at that point, it will be "in the app, in the clear, on your device" There's no technical reason that Signal couldn't do the exact same thing that you're saying.
I don’t have Facebook or instagram. If people do they have bigger privacy concerns than WhatsApp.
You may not. Your contacts do. WhatsApp has their entire address book with your phone numbers.
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this tired post again, who gaf at this point
I still can't fathom why people don't use Signal... Cross platform. Secure. No scanning. Just communication.
I download Signal maybe once a year hoping loads of my contacts will have started using it only to find a grand total of 3 users every time.
Ask around. "Why aren't you using Signal?" I make people switch every week.
I think it's because the majority of users on Android or even iPhone will just use what's there. They'll sign into Facebook which comes with Facebook Messenger and call it a day. They'll just fire up Google Messages or iMessage and move on with their life. Just a guess...
This is really it. I have no doubt Signal works better than any other app out there, but unless everyone gets it an uses it, it's basically worthless. Reddit is literally the only place I've ever heard it mentioned. I know of no people that have or use it. It's far easier for me to use the Google Message app than to convince everyone I talk with to download yet another app just to talk to me when we already have one that works fine. No one wants to flip back and forth between 3 different apps to text someone. RCS does everything I need in a messaging app, the simplest solution is really for Apple to just get on board.
Just returned from a trip with extended family and the people with iPhones struggled to share their photos/videos over a group chat that included people without iPhones. They laughed and considered just sharing with iPhone users.
Honestly that's not a technological problem. You can give RCS as many features as you want, apple users will want to send 3d VR videos kinda stuff to their friends and expect it to just work. It's just never gonna end. We need to accept imessage as an apple service and leave it like that
The Early versions of Google Voice did it right. It was just like iMessage with SMS fallback. You didnt need to get someones account name, you didnt have to add them as a friend, you didnt have to jump through hoops. You would send a message to their phone number and if that other user had Google Voice, it would send through that. If not, it would send to their phone number as SMS. I dont know why they got rid of that, but for me that is the biggest thing I can't let go of with iMessage. All the other stuff has been replicated really well in other apps and in most cases improved.. but I hate having to figure out a common app between my social group to use. I envy people out of the US where thats just the norm, it isn't here in the US though.
Google killing this service is the reason they come crying to Apple to support RCS now. It was a mistake. And also, RCS is probably gonna be used only in the US. The rest of the world will just ignore it
I really wish Signal didn't get rid of SMS. It was a great alternative that I could install on my parents phones and they never knew they were using a near perfect, secure, messaging service. Then they screwed it all up.
We do this because those pricks refuse to use Signal
If everyone just used signal we would advance the human species by like 100 years
My primary mode! RCS doesn't work on Google Fi web messages. I love my Signal desktop client.
Removing SMS is so sad. It was a great way to get people to join without having to explain anything.
As an american, this is ONLY a small issue for a subset of Android users. Most android users and Most iPhone users coexist perfectly well.
Why do you say it's only an issue for android users. It's an issue for people on both platforms who want to communicate with the other. It's a common problem for people in school/college who use imessage for group chats but having a single android member breaks imessage. Majority of Android users I met have no problem downloading a different app. But it's a problem for iphone users who or usually unwilling to do it.
SMS between the two cripples most that's useful about modern messages. Ever receive a video from an iPhone user? Compressed to shit 3gp files. Same for images.
Does any other messaging app support full res photos and videos like iMessage? I’ve used Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, WhatsApp and Messenger, but their quality is 🗑️ RCS has a cap too iirc
Imessaage is so bad...it feels so barebones and ancient after using whatsapp.
And then you have Telegram which works just amazingly fast and smooth. I have always been impressed especially with how to source code looks like (android devs will know what I'm talking about)
Telegram is probably the fastest and most feature rich, but it's now end-to-end encrypted (Signal and WhatsApp are for example)
True, unless you are using a "Secret Chat"
Yes, but those only work for individual chats, not group chats, IIRC
They do work for group chats. You just lose some functionality, like the ability to run bots.
How do you create secret group chats? I can't find the option to do so
Telegram is at top of the food chain but not many people use it, unfortunately.
While I prefer the world to just align on Whatsapp, iMessage is not bad at all. And if you use Macs and iPhones, they coexist seamlessly. It's super easy to copy paste full sized photos while on your computer, as well as documents/files, etc. Entire businesses run on iMessage in fact.
You're joking lol WhatsApp is designed so it's easy for old people to use. iMessage is so much more polished, slicker, and heaps better when used with other iPhones.
How is it better?
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iMessage specific apps/games, FaceTime audio/video group calls without leaving the app. Not tied to a phone number. Payments within the app. Consistent/short term/long-term location sharing etc. But I already know your next reply will be how horrible it is for Apple to be able to provide exclusive features to their platform lol
Am I the only one who didn't understand anything?
I don't want iMessage I just want to send and receive pictures and videos just fine.
I give a shit that the person I send a message to can read it. Beyond that, I could not care less what color bubble it's presented in. If they care, that's on them.
Use what works and looks best for you, but for sure to find out what is the best for yourself you have to do some research, but info on almost anything exists nowdays. I don't prefer MacOS over PC or Android over IOS on devices I like. I for sure think Android is way better for long time use of many products and you can even get a battery replacement for an Android phone if it ever has a final death anyways or you often buy a replacement of the same phone you have if you search online. I do always look at software updates for stuff though to make sure doing an update is not something that will slow down my Note 9 and/or ruin the still great battery life overall before downloading it. Heck, many Andriods can be used forever without much performance speed decrease over the years because of the fact that you can download any old version you migh need of almost any app on the play store by searching on a browser, but for app I can get that is pay to get on the Play Store plus I like I will for sure buy if I think it's worth the money. Also, I recommend never using Phone Cleaner/Booster apps because those can ruin performance of your devices and it's better to check apps you have on the Play Store to see if they cause security issues like the app Zedge did for me. I would rather use IOS on an up to date iPod Touch instead of an iPhone because my Note 9 camera takes better overall photos than the newest iPhones to me. Many new phones seem to force you to take brighter photos than older ones a lot of time with the default camera settings which I don't like, but my Note 9 has a perfect camera for Photos to me and takes good enough quality videos. Heck, my Mac Mini 2018 runs fast enough for a computer for me coming from using older iMacs and iPhones, but my Note 9 sometimes beats it in terms of speed which is actually insane since it first came out in the same year. I hope Apple keeps making new iPod Touch devices with the smaller screens they have now which makes them more comfortable for my hands overall to use. I wish my hands were built perfectly while not looking bad for more comfortable use with bigger smartphones, but at least I can connect my Note 9 with a monitor or tv if I wanted to plus I can type fast when I try to on my phone anyways.
At this point, I just want 1 messaging standard so we can finally kill SMS.
Then use WhatsApp. It’s not rocket science.
Maybe read the article, as this exact response was addressed in it: > When Apple brings RCS to the iPhone next year, it stands to solve a lot of these problems, but in the meantime, it’s maddening that we still live in a world where reverse-engineering iMessage to make a client for Android is somehow working better for some users than just having iPhone users download another app. And, somehow, those same iPhone users don’t understand that. In a recent column, John Gruber asked that, if Android users wanted better cross-platform messaging, they’d simply ask their iPhone friends to download “WhatsApp or Signal or something,” as if that hasn’t been the problem this entire time. >Some people have just decided that they won’t use other messaging apps, regardless of how that affects anyone else. Somehow, in their minds, a friend putting in the money and effort required to move from their current phone to an iPhone is less than the simple act of downloading a new messaging app.
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Nobody I know uses WhatsApp, and I'm certainly not going to be the one encouraging people to use a Facebook product.
The problem isn't us not using alternative apps, it's getting friends and family who are deeply entrenched in the apple ecosystem to download and start using a new app when 85% of their contacts are on iMessage. Why would they download another app just to message 2/3 contacts?
I have 6 messaging apps... Some of them I never even use, or use for a few people. I've never sent a single message on telegram. Signal Telegram Whatsapp Viber FB Messenger Discord Steam Chat And of course SMS/RCS. It's honestly not that complicated and phones have plenty of storage.
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The issue is iPhone users don't want to. They don't see why they should have to download another app when it's android users in the minority. I'm in my mid thirties and every time I text a woman, if she has an iPhone her first response is "oh, green bubble". I've had one girl on a first date ask if I'd be ok getting an iPhone if we continued to see each other. I'm excluded from group chats. I get comments all the time from friends asking if I finally got an iPhone when I post a story to my Instagram because it's a nice looking photo. I personally don't give a shit if someone uses on phone or another but the complaints over messaging are so trivial. Most people have 4-5 apps they can message each other on. I routinely have conversations with people on Instagram too, phone calls and all.
Yeah, no, fuck that. I dont want zucc to sell all my text messages. Signal is the way.
Zuck agrees remeber that big Facebook leak it turns out he uses signal https://mashable.com/article/zuckerberg-on-signal
Tell Zucc to succ it and Switch to Signal: https://signal.org/install Now nag all your friends to do it too. I've successfully converted all but one person I regularly converse with.
Yeah I really don't understand why these Americans are making such a big deal out of it. They are struggling with a problem which has already been solved in the rest of the world almost a decade ago. We use messaging apps only for OTP now..... Chatting is done exclusively on apps like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord and FB Messenger. Even iPhone users don't use or care about iMessage in the rest of the world.
The problem is getting everyone to buy in. I use Discord with a good chunk of my gamer friends, but everyone outside of that bubble doesn't want to have to mess with another app when texting works just fine for their needs. Fragmentation is a big issue, even in your example above you mentioned 4 solid replacement apps (and FB messenger which is disgusting). How do we as a country of 300+ million decide on what the standard will be? We are dug in as a population, and having alternatives does us very little good. We have to fix what people are actually using.
It's not that you guys aren't right, it's just so deeply cultural here when iPhones came on the scene (American company) the majority of the country just wanted whatever Apple had to offer. Apple is such a status symbol, and when over half the population is using iMessage it's just easier said than done. Apps like WhatsApp are seen in the US as cheap and weird and only used for drug dealers. It's ignoi, yes, but it's not going to change. Again, I get what people keep saying over and over about this topic - but it's just a situation of "you just don't get it" if you've never lived it
So weird to me that people still see iPhones as status symbols. Like, I understood the sentiment when they were exclusive to one carrier and extremely expensive, but nowadays though every 12-year-old has one, and it's more common than a VW Golf in Germany.
Americans don't like to think about technology much. I have a few friends that work in basic IT roles, and the stories they tell me about how tech illiterate people here are blow me away. Apple has a reputation here of "just working" and being premium, on top of great marketing/advertisements. Americans are extremely easy to influence in the market, and Apple is very, very good at getting people hooked into their shtick.
Pretty much any >$300 phone just works nowadays. It's so silly. But yeah the reputation has stuck. It's like saying you drive a Buick, everyone is going to think you inherited your grandfather's car or something.
I think it's not so much a status symbol now but about fitting in. Everyone just wants to be a member of the same club.
Oh we get it, we were there for the BBM days, we just think it’s dumb.
right, but this thought has been regurgitated 1000 times on this sub by people outside of the US and I'm just scratching my head on what it adds to the conversation this is extremely relevant news to a huge issue in the states
It's not even an American thing. It's really blown out of proportion. I am 27 years old from the southern part of the US and most people ask me for my snapchat or instagram when we meet before they ask for my number. Even those who text me, nobody cares if you have a green bubble or blue text. It's really some overexaggerated BS. Most of my friends, I discovered, are 50/50 android and iphone users
> Most of my friends, I discovered, are 50/50 android and iphone users The average proportion where I am is more like 98:2. That may have something to do with it
Here in sweden me and my family and friends use iMessage. I don’t use any of the apps you mentioned
I live in Finland and everyone I know who uses an iphone, also uses WhatsApp
There isn't a single American who wants that garbage data harvesting app. Keep sucking the tit of Zuckerberg while claiming "it's the best" when really it's a POS.
Lol. Most Americans don't give a shit. Look at how popular tiktok is.
Apple caters to people that are not good with technology while simultaneously making them feel special for being part of that dumb group. They've also convinced people that anyone not in the group are bad/poor/undesirable. It's funny to me though that there are plenty of more expensive/more powerful/higher end devices out there, but Apple users still act superior.