I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason.
In my experience, when people find out my texts are green, they oftentimes would rather switch to a different platform altogether like Instagram or just not text at all.
Is this actually a deal-breaker in friendships out there?
This is so American…
“Let me send an SMS, while I ride my horse to go to my bank and do other things that people used to do in 1870.”
“Oh, their SMS color is different! I dislike people with a different color than me.”
It’s more, “oh, that video clip looks like shit, and every time anyone on this chat likes something, everyone gets spammed a repetitive long-form explanation, and we can’t add Jimmy to the chat because it’s SMS now and AT&T limits it to 10 people, and …”
In the bad old days, SMS was incredibly limited. Apple came out with iMessage, which was both a full IP messaging client with rich features, but seamlessly fell back to SMS, and that was amazing, because a lot of the people you wanted to talk to only had SMS. Google briefly had a similar thing, but whoever ran that product lost the weekly pistols at dawn match that Google uses to set corporate strategy, and hangouts lost SMS integration, which meant you needed two message apps — one for IP messages that was good and a separate one for SMS that sucked. And they were completely separate — no shared threads or history or anything. And then hangouts was killed anyway to make room for chat, or meet, or duo, or allo, or jello, or J-Lo, or Oreos, or who the fuck knows anymore-oh. And so for several years, if you wanted the only thing anyone in the US ever wanted from a messaging app, you had to get an iPhone, because Google kept killing their apps every year like, “hey guys, our new app still can’t talk to your mom, but we integrated the “hot dog or not” feature from Silicon Valley into it, and isn’t that amazing?”
Now, it doesn’t matter, because no one is limited to SMS anymore. Everyone could be on whatever IP platform. But Google still picked a fucking standard built by the phone company with crappy baggage attached like requiring a phone number to use it, and anyway, they’re so late that everyone already picked iMessage. Even if RCS was as good, no one wants to change a bunch of stuff to be no better than when they started, and RCS also still isn’t as good.
Americans are sometimes really superficial, unknowingly or taught since child. You can see something very similar in HK. The City is known for people being really superficial due to culture and the economic pressure on them. Marrying or dating purely rich money and status is pretty main stream
Green is what means it’s an SMS. Whereas blue is the much more modern iMessage platform.
That’s the point, SMS sucks
I was about to say. Over here 90% of text communications are over WhatsApp. That’s a huge problem for a variety of reasons, but everyone is green bubble.
It’s weird to say but I’d much rather us keep doing this stupid SMS thing before jumping into bed with anything Meta.
Now matrix or signal or something? Sign me up.
Same, I don’t think I ever sent an SMS since I got a smartphone. I also agree that relying on WhatsApp for communication isn’t the best, which is why I’m trying to gradually push myself out of there to move towards a more privacy focused messaging apps, knowing full well that I may be cutting off myself from a lot of people.
In the US SMS is still the standard, it’s infuriating. Phones are starting to switch to RCS. I’ve tried a bunch of times to convert my core group of friends to Signal and it’s like talking to a brick wall.
Does your friend group have no group chat? SMS does not have a group chat feature I think, right?
Usually group chats and media sharing are the features that bring people over to messengers.
Sms group chats just sends an mms.
I mean considering that iPhones have ~50% market share in the US. You can just as much say iMessage is the standard.
Factor in the other messenger services and SMS is probably a pretty small slice of the current text messaging landscape