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?
If you live anywhere outside of the US, the question is irrelevant, because everyone uses whatsapp etc.
Within the US, if you are over the age of 30, it probably doesn’t matter.
if you are under the age of 30 AND in the US, I mean, if someone does judge you for it, you at least have a great way to filter shitty people out of your life lol.
If you think you’re better than me because you have an iPhone and I run an Android, I don’t want to talk to you anyway.
People are so fucking petty and elitist over the dumbest fucking things.
If they don’t want to text you because you don’t have an iPhone they’re not friends you want to have.
Seen this sentiment that green bubbles = bad a few times online but never it’s never come up for me. I assume this is a teen - early adult specific issue where the idea is mostly to be part of the group
It’s been happening in high schools, to the point teens are bullied and pushed out of peer groups if they have Androids. It’s frankly disgusting that apple willingly creates this division to profit off teenagers bullying each other, and they don’t get called out for it enough.
But in the larger picture, it’s definitely going to be more common among the young, because iPhones themselves are ubiquitous among the younger. It’s something the tech space is slowly starting realize: Apple has almost total market dominance among the rising demographic, and this has led to increasing tech illiteracy due to the way Apple designs its software, and inability/refusal to learn anything else. That is a huge problem for the tech industry when the only thing they can do to find customers is dumb their software down to appeal to people that don’t know how to use anything other than iOS
Perhaps in the US but it’s not so pronounced elsewhere. I think I only know one person with an iPhone.
It’s still about 30% here in Germany. It is rising though. And I think this is because of “clever” marketing. The highschools here in Germany started forcing parents to buy Ipads for their children a couple of years ago. Children with low income parents get it from the city for free. Nominally it is, because it is “easier to maintain”, but I honestly really doubt this.
These schools are using iPads in place of computer labs. I’m old enough to have actually managed a computer lab, and I can tell you that a fleet of managed iPads is way easier to maintain than a computer lab.
Yeah easier to maintain lmao. You mean to spy on their students.
But you don’t understand! The USA is the entire world! Everybody else in the world is just like Americans or wants to be!🙄
I know five people with iPhones here. I interact with almost three orders of magnitude more people than five…
You interact with 5000 people?
About that, yes. Not in-depth and not each day, obviously, but I have quite a sizable crowd I deal with on a regular basis. Comes from having a lot of former students I keep in touch with.
If you think that the reason Apple makes the bubbles different colors is “to profit of teen bullying” then I think perhaps you might want to go back to reddit or Twitter.
What a ridiculous statement.
Everyone 30 and under at my office prefers Macs, to the point of bringing in their own machines to do 90% of their work and falling back to the Windows laptops issued by IT for the remainder.
…I feel like bringing personal machines to work in order to do work is causing chaos with IT and network security
BYOD has been a huge shift in corporate IT over the last 10-15 years; mostly because if people bring their own gear, you don’t have to lease it.
How do you think Citrix is still in business?
They could be accessing virtual workspaces using a company VPN client. Or perhaps logging into a Citrix Receiver Workspace. Could probably access a VDI environment as well. 2FA with a work cell etc
Lots of ways for personal devices to be used in the work setting. Would I recommend it or do it myself? Nah. But it can be done.
To be fair, as a work machine, I far prefer macs. And there’s a reason why Windows has been implementing steadily more and more MacOS features into their OS over time.
For a personal machine I’d rather Windows.
100%
I’m a software developer. MacOS is my choice for corporate dev (cause Linux isn’t an option) because it’s Unix based and has a working command line. Windows causes so many problems around dependency installs and frameworks.
Windows is still on my home machines, but they’re edging closer to going linux too.
This is hilarious to me because I’m the exact opposite.
Windows for work (and gaming) MacOS or iPadOS for personal use for me.
If anybody wants to judge me based on the brand of electronics I use, my favorite band or the brand of clothes I wear, I have no interest in interacting with them lol. This whole consumerist worship-culture is just toxic.
The worst thing you can do as a consumer is be (blindly) loyal to a brand.
E.g. I like Columbia jackets, footwear, outdoor wear, etc. If however their quality goes down, or there is another comparable product that happens to be on sale (and assuming I like the look/style) I wouldn’t NOT get it because it isn’t a Colombia product.
Also Columbia owns brands like Prana and Mountain Hardware, so if you want higher quality stuff that’s still basically Columbia, you have plenty of options.
The same is true of many other companies.
I am an Android user but this comment should be taken very lightly. As this is not the cause the truth is that Apple is at fault here for still using SMS as the default messaging protocol. However, with that being said, SMS breaks messages on iPhone and the devices have been geared towards iPhone users in away that makes it seem like Android is the issue with image quality and texting. The marketing is excellent on Apple’s end towards the competition and it is working.
However, that doesn’t mean iPhone isn’t the problem. I have a sibling who got bullied for having an iPhone. Apple’s answer to these problems is just, “get an iPhone.” This is equivalent to, “can’t figure it out? Just Google it.” The problem with this mentality is it gives more power to monopolizing platforms. Apple is a growing giant and if they had their way you would just have an iPhone and if Apple has expressed anything in the past 8 years it’s that they aren’t exactly the innovators with mobile devices anymore. To me the problem is on an iPhone nothing would change.
A little irrelevant rant but my point is that the average iPhone consumer has been given a marketing ploy so it is a deal breaker because they think it is an issue and in all fairness it is one but only Google is trying to fix. Issue is that Google should have tried to fix it years ago. You can’t blame iPhone users for wanting to use other platforms to message you if your message is compressed heavily by Apple’s shitty and stupid fucking decision to keep using SMS to control the market. The care about user experience is overshadowed by the desire to use that as a means to make money off of a user that doesn’t understand messaging protocols. Fuck Apple.
Keep using SMS? What are Apple’s other alternatives, exactly? RCS is still a mess, the only way it has e2ee is if you use Google’s messaging app, and there’s no way you will see Apple adopting Google’s standard without having a say in it, and rightfully so - Google locks tons of proprietary features out of their APIs - EXIF data for Photos, Categories in Gmail, etc.
I think this is actually more of a comment on Google’s lack of direction with messaging - how many different messaging apps have they sunset by now? Half dozen or so? Messaging has always been a cluster on Android. WhatsApp is supposedly e2ee, but they have backdoor bugs being patched on a nearly basis - ask Jeff Bezos how his dick pics got hacked.
I mean you can install Google messaging apps on iOS (not that I would want to use them…). But try that the other way around. Apples option to not using SMS would simply be to provide iMessage for Android. Problem solved. They would very likely become the main messaging platform by doing so. Currently the majority of the market is likely split between WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat.
But obviously they fear that this would hurt iPhone sales. At the same time this also leads to iMessage being irrelevant in the majority of markets where iPhone isn’t as dominating as in the US.
Problem are the Android users as well that refuse to adopt messaging apps just as much.
Standard protocol on Android is SMS as well. RCS behaves differently from carrier to carrier and many Android phones still don’t support it by default.
Even if RCS worked perfectly fine, if Apple doesn’t want to use it, than RCS is just as worthless as iMessage, when it comes to cross-platform communication.
If they don’t want to text you because they care what your device is, they’re not friends you want to have.
(this goes both ways. Lots of apple hate in this thread but, wtf, just get on with life folks. if you give a shit what hardware I run, or think i care about your choices, we’re probably not going to be friends).
Maybe the post has been edited between when you posted and now, but that’s not what OP is saying.
He’s saying that people don’t want to use SMS. They want to message him via some other platform.
Honestly, I’m the same way. I don’t like SMS and talk to my friends on Android via WhatsApp.
Especially for group chats of any kind, SMS is garbage compared WhatsApp, Signal, or Threema.
Let me guess, you are from the United States? Every time I heard about this is only from the US, never see anyone outside giving a single fuck about that.
Also, do you really wanna be friend with someone that choose friendship by the phone their friend uses? WtfIt’s bewildering to me how this continues to be an issue only in the US, the rest of the world figured out this problem around 2010, and I’m not kidding. It’s like you guys are still arguing about Beta vs VHS in 2023
I’m an Android user and I have no idea what any of this means.
I love the blue bubble thing being a … thing.
It makes identifying people who are a waste of time really easy. Making a big deal out of the colour of a text message bubble? Smell ya later loser, you ain’t worth investing any time in.
Move on lads. If someone’s shallow enough to care about the brand of phone you use they can go sniff farts for all I care. I ain’t following them in their campaign to give the worlds richest company more money. It reminds me of that fundraiser to make one of those reality TV dickheads a billionaire by donating them cash. Like how does transferring some of your small amount of wealth to their giant pool of wealth somehow boost your own… anything?? Probably the second stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.
I like android better because it has way less limitations than apple. It also seems more flexible as far as apps and customization is concerned.
You can have a preference, even a strong one. You can also discuss it with people. But shutting people out because of their phone? That’s a major personality red flag anyway.
Best answer
It really is. If someone is willing to be weird about your phone choice, I question the other stuff they might be weird about. Major red flag.
Are you from the US? In Germany we use WhatsApp Threema or Telegram for messaging, nobody cares about some bubble colour.
My best friend has an iPhone. I’m a Samsung girl. Any time her phone doesn’t let her do something I poke fun at the iPhone, but in reality they are just different versions of the same thing. The only real reason I have to complain is the price tag. I’m not paying double for an item that does the same thing as the cheaper version. That’s just stupid financially. It’s not a better product because it costs more. I can live without whatever it offers that android doesn’t.
so the whole world uses mostly whatsapp or some other messaging app. nobody not in the US gives a damn about the color of the bubble or even knows whats the device on the other side. we all use whatsapp its much better in any way possible (except that it belongs to facebook, that is bad… anyway we were there before it belonged to facebook, so…)
I don’t know what you mean by blue or green bubbles (I use Android, Chomp for SMS, Discord to IM, WhatsApp for the stragglers) but I’ve never met anybody so shallow that they’d give up a friendship over what brand of phone you use. That’s the kinda thing a very childish 13 year old might do.
I think you might need to re-evaluate who you think your friends are, if they’d rather cut off contact with you than receive a slightly different looking text message. That’s incredibly, INCREDIBLY weird.
I don’t even hate Apple that much, but what I hate is that every time I find out somebody I know uses Apple product I say to myself in quiet “Oh gosh…”, because very often the reason they use Apple whatever is to feel better than somebody.
And I hate people like these. Not every Apple enjoyer is like that, and there are legitimate reasons to go Apple, like wanting that ecosystem, good camera, using something that just works or go with Apple Silicon revolution. And no, Apple is not really private.
But in most cases their reasons are either a fucking IM bubbles (because I don’t want to spend 5 seconds to install an app that works anywhere) or it just “doesn’t lag” (which any phone over $200 doesn’t) which is obviously a fucking bullshit to cover the actual answer which is “I wanted to feel better by having shit that every fancy person uses”.
But the funniest people are the ones trying to explain these “amazing features” to me, totally ignoring the points that IM sucks on Android because Apple pushes their own standard and refuses to use open ones, that no sideloading and Apple controlling whole app ecosystem is the best thing ever and that Android is slow, because it [put any argument Apple fanboy without the basic OS concepts understanding would make] and not because you used $100 phone and switched to a motherfucking $600 phone. Wow, who would’ve thought?
good camera
yeah but… apple dont make the best cameras, according to MKBHD’s “blind camera test” voted by thousands of random regular people
Anyways. yes. i have heard a few people in my class scoff among each other talking about how they hate it when they see “green texts” in their phone, and such.
meanwhile i love the freedom from my android phone, with ad-free spotify and youtube. and i couldn’t care less about the color of a text bubble.
It’s the same shit that’s been going on for decades. It used to be Apple vs Commodore vs IBM. Then after Commodore imploded it was Mac vs PC. Then refined into RISC vs Intel for the techies and MacOS vs Windows for the rest.
In their defense, why should they have to care whose fault it is that messaging sucks on Android? They just want a pleasant experience, and iMessage has been the best experience for Apple users for like 15 years. It’s also as much Google’s fault as Apple’s, if we want to get nitpicky about it. I wouldn’t spend a lot of money implementing the protocol Google wants either, because Google will abandon it and back three competing new ones before your next good bowel movement.
Do you live in the US? Maybe not, but iPhones have something like a 50% market share here, and in some regional cases a lot higher. For example, in southern California where I live, iPhones are easily in the majority of people’s hands. The point is that this feeling is probably more a ‘your problem’ issue, and it’s hard to make a case that people use these phones as a way to feel exclusive if the market share is so high. There may be some issues of exclusion amongst teenagers etc., but teenagers are going to teenager. I’m just talking about the US though. In some emerging markets there may be a case made for the iPhone to be seen as ‘luxury,’ but this hasn’t been the case in the US for a while. iPhones are seen as an ordinary, almost default phone.
Nah if i see you got 1000 dollar phone, i assume you’re an elitist asshole, or bad with money.
Lots of iPhones cost way less than $1k, and there’s plenty of Android flagships that cost over $1k, and they’re all decent phones. Sure, go ahead and judge people for spending money on a device they use every day.
And what I said about the ‘default’ phone is true, and that’s for normal middle class families. Far from the elite. I’m just reporting the facts, it’s maybe people have a different frame of reference depending on where they live.
It is odd that someone would choose a friendship because of a phone.
Honestly, it’s kind of a nice filter to have an Android then, if that’s the case.
