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.
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 :)
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.
Yep, this is also a common feature for phones for seniors.
My old feature phone from 2010 had this.
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.
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
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.
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.Yeah I know.
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!"
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!
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The problem with Signal is there is no way to backup your messages on iOS. I’m a very pro-privacy and used Signal for a while but stopped. Being able to have backups of my conversations with loved ones is more important than having the utmost privacy to me.
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The inability to backup your own data is a feature now? That’s some Stockholm Syndrome bullshit.
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Who said the backup needs to be insecure?
You can literally encrypt the backup itself and use a pass phrase for unlocks. WhatsApp already does just that. Also WhatsApp uses Signals encryption and last time it was audited it passed with flying colours.
It’s possible they can push an update that would do client side scanning of messages while typed or that have been sent but this would be trivial to find out about and has never been reported on.
Backups can and should be encrypted.
I would agree, IF Signal also wouldn’t allow backups on Android and wouldn’t store images on desktop completely unencrypted… At this point it’s just hypocrisy
IMO it’s a user’s choice whether or not to backup their data. Wire handled this quite well where you could backup your chat history etc but you were required to set an encryption password for the backup.
For reference, Signal is my main chat platform and my main point of contact. Having 2GB of chat histories that could just be lost at any moment is quite unnerving and a major reason for me to look at other platforms…
Yep, got 4 GB of history myself. When my wife updated her phone we made a mistake and had to transfer Signal twice, I didn’t even notice that the first transfer wiped her whole history. What a stupid feature it’s like the Signal devs treat us like children. Unfortunately I haven’t found a replacement that is as popular and I’m happy with yet.
Unfortunately this is what makes iPhones “iPhones”
They bring out features that generally make the phone part of the smartphone better to use.
RCS is still a mess on androids. And calling on iPhones is about to feel very modern while android phones will still be calling people the same way people did 20 years ago.
Who the fuck is using their phone to call people? ;)
Tbh Only spammers and scammers lol
Not true, I also get calls from my real estate agency and my car’s retailer, two of the most honest jobs there can be.
And my mom
When you say RCS is a mess on Android, what do you mean? I personally have not had issues.
It’s been fine for me too. But I would guess they mean carriers being slow to adopt it.
I have 2 friends with different samsungs and both my parents with newer samsungs. Neither one of them have RCS. Idk if you have to enable it or anything.
Is there even a difference between how iPhone and android calling ‘feels’? They’re both the exact same as 20 years ago lmao its a phone call, it’s been replaced by like a thousand apps by now
Most iphone users facetime, and if its another iphone it’ll be clearer than an android.
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 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.
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…
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.
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.
Oh yeah true forgot about that part. Pricing for phone and text plans within a country weren’t the issue but across country was (and still is) is super costly and in Europe especially close to borders it’s quite common to have friends and family that lives in another country, so having a cheap/free way to message them is also what gave rise to 3rd party messaging apps ^^
I mean the right answer is something like Signal, but you have to really beat on people for that.
I tried for years. I’m over it.
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?
RCS is less “modern” or at least feature full compared to iMessage or at least was last I checked which was last year at some point. Group chats weren’t encrypted is a big one and it doesn’t interact with other apps the way iMessage can with apple wallet etc
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)
They could still keep iMessage, but just automatically fall back to RCS instead of SMS/MMS. God forbid!
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.
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.
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!
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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
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
What. That sounds absolutely ridiculous. What’s wrong with people lol.
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!
No way would i use an iphone. I outgrew its capabilities in 2010, spent 3 years not updating until i could get an untethered jailbreak and finally gave it up in 2013. I have helped people with iphones and ipads since then and nothing has convinced me to go back.
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.
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.
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.
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?
