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?

  • jemorgan@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m an app developer on mobile, and I’ve been using SMS for ~25 years (including on old dumb brick phones). I appreciate your explanation, but my understanding of what SMS is and how it works is reasonably strong.

    I’m gonna hard disagree with you there, the fact that iMessage mixes functionality is a huge contributor to the fact that iPhones are destroying android phones in the US.

    Sending a text message with images and video is a single use case. The protocol that the message uses is an implementation detail and I think that it’s excellent UX for the user not to have to worry about it.

    This is the exact reason that Google Allo was an immediate failure. Replacing hangouts (which could send rich messages or fallback to SMS) with an app with a worse feature set guaranteed that nobody would adopt it. Nobody was going to switch between two apps with the same use case (sending textual messages) based on which apps the person they were talking to has on their phone. I get that that’s a thing in Europe, but that’s out of necessity because european telecoms price SMS messages differently and few Europeans use SMS. If SMS isn’t widely used by your circle, you’re forced to worry about which apps the person you’re talking to has installed.

    If I want to send a text message, I open my text messaging app, select a contact and send it. iOS determines the best available protocol for me, an enables the best feature set that both parties support. It’s a seamless and extremely enjoyable user experience.

    Ruins things for everyone else

    Me having an app that handles both SMS and iMessage seamlessly ruins absolutely nothing for anybody lol. This complaint is pretty silly and seems like its complaining that others are on a platform with a feature that you’ve chosen not to be on.