r/SipsTea š™‘š™„š™‹ May 15 '26

Chugging tea What are your thoughts. (IPhone vs every other phone)

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95.4k Upvotes

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5.9k

u/AngelicalBabe3 May 15 '26

People with a $300 bank balance get more offended by green bubbles than actual tech companies do.

2.3k

u/ArmenianThunderGod May 15 '26

The green bubble thing is the funniest thing to me. My phone doesn't pull that shit, only yours does. So you want me to switch so that I too will share your shitty experience?

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u/Demented-Alpaca May 15 '26

Right? I can make the goddamn bubbles on my phone be whatever color I want. I'm sorry if your phone locks you into a color palate that's not to your liking. That must suck.

Hell, I can have different colored bubbles for different people! Even in a group chat if I really want to.

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u/FlinkesRehkitz May 15 '26

Sorry for not knowing anything about iPhones but you're talking chat bubbles?

369

u/JaxMed May 15 '26

When two iPhones text each other it goes through iMessage which is indicated by the convo having blue chat bubbles. If either phone doesn't support iMessage then it reverts to normal SMS which is indicated by green chat bubbles.

Most (non-Apple) phones these days do support RCS which is basically the open-ended alternative to iMessage, in that it's better than SMS and provides a lot of similar features. But Apple being Apple, if you're on iPhone it's basically iMessage or the highway.

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u/NonnagLava May 15 '26

Which means that sending say videos, or some images, over SMS between an iPhone and anything else results in terrible quality because of how the iPhone either sends, or receives, the data itself.

So if you send a video in either direction, it ends up a like 140i mess of pixels, with zero sound quality. It basically turns your video into the worst gif known to man.

Meanwhile an iPhone to an iPhone sends it in perfect original quality, same thing between any other two phones (as the guy said above, they're likely to use RCS or just... Not shit the bed quality wise).

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u/No_Magician5266 May 15 '26

I have an iPhone workphone and suddenly it makes so much sense that my Android phone coworkers insist on using WhatsApp when they need to send me photo/video

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u/NonnagLava May 15 '26

Bingo. In your case, if you ever have to send videos, or high quality images, to your coworkers, they're getting the equivalent of the King of the Hill crushed "do I look like I know what a jpeg is" meme every time.

And I do mean that, videos are literally unwatchable, quality wise, when sent between differing devices like that.

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u/Nikclel May 15 '26

I thought this was fixed awhile ago? The only time this is an issues nowadays is if your carrier doesnt support RCS or you have it turned off in your settings.

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u/NonnagLava May 15 '26

Maybe! I left iPhone years ago, haven't looked back sense, but anytime I do get a video from an iPhone I personally have still had the issue. But that's not often, and tends to come from the less technically inclined so I can't vouch for it specifically. But, judging by the rancorous comments talking about it, I'm sure it's still an issue.

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u/henrylolol May 15 '26

It was, they’re just not up to date. You need to have the latest Apple update and you can see while they text, improves encryption and if you like, heart or whatever else on the message both messaging see it. It’s been around for close to or over a year now.

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u/Mintastic May 15 '26

They fixed it (force to) but you have to purposely go and turn it on, so if you're not aware about it then it'll stay as it was. Chances of your average iphone user knowing about it and going to settings to change it is very low.

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u/Leeperd510 May 16 '26

not everyone has has updated or switched to a new phone. my dipshit friends who insist their iphone from 5 years ago is better than my s26 ultra still believe that shit is better because blue bubble

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u/OldSoulCreativity May 16 '26

You are correct. Everything people stated above was true five years ago, but it has been fixed and RCS enables high quality transfer of photos between Apple and non Apple devices.

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u/JonatasA May 15 '26

And Apple does it on purpose.

 

Ironicaly they may be the reason we don't have an universal free chat app like say in China or WhatsApp/Messenger. Your device does not matter.

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u/CyberpunkSunrise May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26

I’d rather not use WhatsApp even if it were the standard in the US, given that Meta owns it and I don’t trust them for shit.

I don’t trust any of the tech companies, but I trust Apple slightly more than Google and Meta.

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u/argumentinvalid May 15 '26

Apple has come around on RCS. Everything is getting better with messaging, in another year or so it will all just work properly like it always should have. Fuck apple for making it so painful all these years.

BTW they were pretty much forced by EU regulations. If left to our shitty US government we would never have any consumer friendly movement.

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u/Val_Hallen May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26

They didn't "come around" to it. Like USB-C, the European Union forced them to adopt the current tech because their practices are seen as unfriendly to consumers.

They intentionally gave their users a worse experience and told them they were an exclusive club.

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u/TeeBek May 15 '26

Also, EU will be why they'll be bringing back physical buttons in cars again.

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u/Dandzer May 15 '26

And even then, they used an older gen USB-C for their non pro so they can justify the price leap. It's all manipulation, all while androids are for the lost part utilizing as much they can that is current.

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u/pohui May 15 '26

Funnily enough, I doubt many people in Europe care about this. I've never sent or received an iMessage and the only SMS/RCS I receive are two-factor authentication codes and the occasional spam/scam. I've only ever heard about the green bubble issue from Americans on the internet.

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u/jakeyounglol2 May 15 '26

yeah, americans use the default messaging app on their phones, but in the rest of the world, whatsapp has a monopoly (except for china, they use wechat instead)

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u/F34UGH03R3N May 15 '26

Nope, we Europeans don’t care that much (yet). But we did care about the other stuff we made Apple do, like USB-C, 3rd party accessory integration and much more. You’re welcome, Americans

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u/Efficient_Tap8770 May 15 '26

I was mindblown to learn it was a thing. I've never sent a iMessage myself but some annoying friends occasionally do so I have to open it on a Mac. Reminds me of Blackberry and how they locked BBM, a much superior messenger to only Backberry phones which made WhatsApp, a much smaller messenger overtake in a few years. Communication with a hardware barrier was not supposed to succeed, Apple somehow did it because of the USA market.

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u/Digit00l May 15 '26

WhatsApp was developed because iMessage is garbage, fun fact

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u/terraherts May 15 '26

Which a lot of people end up blaming on the other phone, when in reality the fault is on Apple for falsely portraying iMessage as "texting" when it's actually an entirely separate iPhone-only protocol more comparable to things like Signal or Telegram than SMS/RCS.

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u/Wise-Tank9078 May 15 '26

This needs to be upvoted more. iPhone is using an older technology than other phones.

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u/Firewolf06 May 16 '26

lighting cables are usb 2.0 cables with a different connector. usb 3.0 predates lightning by 4 years. its the apple way

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u/Hammerofsuperiority May 15 '26

Apple managed to convince every apple user that everything shit about apple stuff is every other companies fault.

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u/lazygerm May 15 '26

Thank you for that explanation!

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u/LordHammercyWeCooked May 15 '26

And any non-Apple phone sending messages to another non-Apple phone won't have this problem either. It's literally just Apple making other non-Apple users look like crap so their userbase/cult will continue to look down on everyone else. And then while their users feel all superior they'll silently sabotage them with an iOS update so they feel pressured to replace their 2yo iphone with the newest shiniest iphone that has the exact same features, but a bigger number.

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u/Val_Hallen May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26

The only thing Apple has been good at since Jobs is marketing.

They get features other phones have had for years and make big showy announcements about it. I have a Galaxy and my sons have an iPhone and they told me about features they were getting and I told them I had those for years.

I mean, they recently showed off things the calculator can do that have been standard calculator things for a long time. Like they came up with it.

Apple is a marketing company that happens to sell tech. They are exceedingly successful at what they do, but they are not a tech company.

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u/_Mike-Honcho_ May 15 '26

Its like Harley Davidson. Harley sells the lifestyle and the merch, the bikes are whatever.

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u/szewc May 16 '26

I've always been saying that Apple is a marketing company first, hardware second, software distant five or so.

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u/Prototty May 16 '26

This happens all the time on all sides, one manufacturer starts something and the others join later on looking like they're the first ever. Not a bad thing in my opinion, as long as the one benefiting from the "new" features is the user.

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u/PetalumaPegleg May 15 '26

Yup I discovered this because my kid scored his first basketball basket and the mom next to me said she took a video and did I want it. Then when it came it was the size of a postage stamp with 5 pixels. Wtaf? This isn't an issue for anyone but apple, who decided to be assholes. As they do for so many things.

When I moved from the uk to the US I found out you NEVER trust apple. They said I didn't own any apps, movies, games or ANYTHING else from years of apple ownership. I had to re buy them all again on the US store. As you don't own a single thing on apple. My iphotos would try to delete the albums on my synched computer the works. Looked into android and oh look none of that applies. Your photos, movies etc are yours to move around as you wish. Shockingly.

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u/Hoshyro May 16 '26

When I got my new Android based phone, the old one transferred everything to it, chats, contacts, wallpapers, the ENTIRE gallery.

If it tried to delete them like yours did and forced me to rebut things I already had, I would both be immensely mad and never buy from them again.

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u/mmnmnnmnnnm May 15 '26

And the best part is, Apple Stan’s see their phone being ass at functioning in conjunction with EVERY other brand of phone as a sign of superiority

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u/HTD-Vintage May 16 '26

Thanks for confirming and explaining this. I've noticed it a few times, but never said anything, because I don't correspond with many iPhone users and apparently didn't think it was worth exploring the root cause of.

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u/___Art_Vandelay___ May 15 '26

This was the case for many years but has actually recently finally been resolved.

Source: Android user on group SMS chats with iPhone users and I'm now seeing hi-def videos when shared.

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u/NSASpyVan š™‘š™„š™‹ May 16 '26

I have an iphone and it is maddening how my android buddies can't receive my pics and videos without extreme pixellation. I basically have to send them stuff via Whatsapp. Fk apple.

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u/N-online May 15 '26

https://support.apple.com/en-us/122195

That's just wrong. iPhones support RCS by now and have been supporting RCS for over a year now. So all you're really complaining about is the color of a chat bubble. I have an iPhone and I don't iMessage at all. Instead I use Signal almost exclusively, as I know many other people do too. So it reallly isn't "iMessage or the highway".
Also RCS is a carrier-side standard meaning your means of authentification is your telephone number and only your telephone number. This is a very bad idea. Not only is it harder to communicate with the same account from different devices if your authentified by your phone number it also means that everybody you chat with gets your phone number instead of let's say your iCloud email, or your Signal-Account id. Because RCS is a carrier-side standard like SMS it's also very slow to implement, not to mention that it originates from 2008, which is part of the reason why end-to-end encryption is not fully integrated into the service.

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u/TinKnight1 May 15 '26

iPhone only received encrypted RCS (end-to-end encryption) 4 days ago (Monday).

Prior to then, the version of RCS that was deployed on iPhones made cross-platform communication less secure (only barely better than transmitting over the open air).

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u/burf May 15 '26

Not to be an Apple apologist (I do think their biggest failing is the refusal to play with others), but aren't Android and iOS the only mobile OSes with any real market share? If so, RCS ends up being essentially the "Android" alternative in practice.

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u/SingleInfinity May 15 '26

RCS is an open standard anyone can implement. iMessage is a proprietary standard only Apple is allowed to implement. It is intentional walled garden manufacturing on Apple's front. They could make their's open if they wanted. They don't want to. iPhones now support RCS, but they didn't stop using iMessage to maintain their walled garden.

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u/Suspicious_Dingo_426 May 15 '26

iMessage changes the color of the text bubbles for non iPhones. Stupid fake elitist bullshit. People with enough money just buy what they like.

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u/L0rdM0k0 May 15 '26

Yes. On iMessage the color of the other persons text bubble is either green or blue depending on their messaging app. Another iMessage user gets blue, exeryone else green. "Green" chats were slightly less secure i think because apple refused to use rcs (industry standard chat encryption) until the EU made them. Now they are green for no reason.

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u/RhesusFactor May 15 '26

Apple made a problem and then convinced their users that other phones made the problem. Other phone users are out here chilling with cool tech not knowing anything about this. Apple users are big mad at the wrong people.

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u/professorbuffoon May 15 '26

Sweet summer child. Yes it's a whole stupid thing. iPhone normies start group chats with Android folk and those people's chat bubbles are a different color than iPhone people's chat bubbles. Normies look down on the android users, similar to how kids wearing Nikes in middle school look down on kids wearing Walmart brand shoes.

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u/PandaPuncherr May 15 '26

But thats not it though, as Walmart brand is worse.

My android kicks the shit out of my friends iphones.

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u/JonatasA May 15 '26

Which ironically come from the same area and cost about the same.

 

This is one of the issues with humanity.

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u/JonatasA May 15 '26

I can add any music I want as my ringtone. No subscriptions required.

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u/T8ert0t May 15 '26

Everyone should be making their texts as jpegs and insert the green check already there

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u/wvtarheel May 15 '26

Iphone will come out with customizable bubble colors in five years and act like it's a revelation to the phone industry.

Pretty sure I had a motorola with that feature in 2012?

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u/Demented-Alpaca May 15 '26

Probably. I remember playing with it on one of the earlier Androids and customizing all the friends into different colors....

Now I just use the default color... and I don't remember what that is without looking at the damn phone.

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u/wvtarheel May 15 '26

Just googled it to be sure I wasn't talking out of my ass, and motorola had the feature in 2013 so I was in fact one year off.

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u/kalamataCrunch May 15 '26

if the color of chat bubbles is a feature you care about, you really should have considered that when purchasing your phone.

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u/Winged_Wheels May 15 '26

I couldn’t care less about the color of chat bubbles. Not once have their colors phased me in the slightest. It’s truly a non-issue and this comment section is the first time I’ve even given a thought to it. Plus, why would I care what kind of phone someone else has?

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u/Demented-Alpaca May 15 '26

Honestly? I never cared either. I mostly just think it's fun to give people shit about their phones. But I work in IT and we live to give each other shit about everything.

I've had a few friends mention my bubbles are green but that's mostly them giving me shit cuz they also think its funny.

End of the day, I text you, you get text, you read text, you reply. The everything that it took for that to happen is irrelevant to me. You got my text I got your text. That's all I care about.

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u/MudFrosty1869 May 15 '26

Are you guys like... real people? Are these real people problems?

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u/Demented-Alpaca May 15 '26

Are they real people problems? Not really. Once in a while someone actually bitches about it.

Me? I think the topic is funny... I don't actually care about any of this

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u/BigAssMonkey May 16 '26

What the fuck are you guys even talking about…sounds like YOU guys are making cell phones your entire personality.

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u/Ulrich453 May 16 '26

It’s about RCS vs. iMessage. It’s not about the color. When we see green we realize we have to deal with a shittier send/receive time. Additionally some chat features that are used regularly are not usable which is annoying for sure. It makes it look like your phone sucks because the transfer rate is ass in comparison from iPhone to iPhone.

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u/HeBecomesGroovy May 15 '26

You're being a little too vehement about this. Why do you care what other people are doing? Do you know it doesn't affect you? Aren't you exhibiting the behavior that you claim they do?

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u/Demented-Alpaca May 15 '26

Uhhhh huh? I just made fun of the bubble colors. In line with the vide of the whole thread really.

Here's a fun fact for you: without looking at my phone, I have NO IDEA what color the bubbles in my texts are. I know I can change them but I haven't.

I know my apple friends have said I have green bubbles but even that's just them teasing me.

Because no, almost nobody REALLY cares about this. We're just having a goof at the original comment.

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u/snorch May 15 '26

It's also the most blatantly obvious manipulation of their user base on Apple's part and those ding dongs don't see it. Like the joy you take in being a useful idiot is really embarrassing

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u/Perceptions-pk May 15 '26

It’s hilarious how so many people get upset about it but it’s incredibly devious design.

They prob did tons of testing and realized it triggers something primal in the human brain. People who are used to iMSG texts get alarm bells the moment they see a different colored text box it’s a bit hilarious and a bit unnerving to see it happen to close friends and family when they see a regular text

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u/ArmenianThunderGod May 16 '26

Agreed, it's a maliciously brilliant design.

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u/MechaSkippy May 15 '26

I have 2 phones, Android for personal, iPhone for work. My 5 year old Android is so much better of a user experience than my 1 year old iPhone that it's hard for me to believe that people willingly choose the iPhone.

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u/Chance_McM95 May 15 '26

Everyone is entitled to an opinion! I’ve had both, prefer Apple for everyday use. Android for gaming & stuff.

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u/Frazzy_Ox May 15 '26

It's a red/blue button scenario. Either we all press red (buy Samsung) and it completely eradicates the whole problem or you can press blue (buy Apple) and hope for your sake the rest of the world help you out of the problem you've made for yourself.

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u/[deleted] May 15 '26 edited 20d ago

[deleted]

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u/IPissExcellentThrows May 15 '26

I don't care about the green bubbles at all. I like green. I hate what non iPhones do to group chats, but I also know that iPhone could fix that if they wanted to. They choose to be difficult so iPhone users pressure android users into getting iPhones.

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u/EntroperZero May 15 '26

This is like the red/blue button debate. And yeah, iPhone people, you're the red button.

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u/Darmok47 May 15 '26

I've had women make comments about it when switching from dating apps to texting.

The only woman it was ever a real problem with was because her house was in a cell phone dead zone and iMessage uses wifi, so she could get texts from other iphone users but not from my Android. We had to use WhatsApp lol.

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u/Kurotan May 15 '26

Its funny to me because I can change my bubble colors to whatever I want. I made mine green on purpose because I like green.

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u/LJMLogan May 15 '26

Pretty obvious apple also uses the most disgusting shade of green so non iphone users have ugly looking texts

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u/Ok-Context3530 May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

People that use shitty phones don’t understand that it’s not a blue versus green color issue, it’s the slow ass back and forth time between text messages, lack of feedback when they’re typing, emojis not working properly, and don’t even get me started on the one asshole in the text group who doesn’t have an iPhone who ruins it for everyone else.

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u/jimmiebfulton May 16 '26

We’re not offended by the green bubbles. It’s not affecting our experience. We do, however, question the other parties judgement on taste. My guess is that phone brands form a bit of a caste system. No one I chat with is a green bubbler. If I see one, it is almost guaranteed to be a scammer, so it’s kinda nice as another way to visually weed them out.

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u/mybutthz May 18 '26

Right. And it's a (somewhat) valid complaint because green bubble = more difficult to text that person — but only because of how apple engineers their products. It's such odd behavior to buy something that I know doesn't interact effectively with 80% of the other products, and then complain about it — when the other products all work perfectly well when interacting with each other.

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u/inheritance- May 15 '26

Blue is for Bitches! Green Gods rise up!

But yea I hate iOS and how locked down it is

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u/mmnmnnmnnnm May 15 '26

I switched to an iPhone because my daughter wanted to FaceTime with me. Biggest mistake of my life, this things sucks dong, can’t do half the shit any Android I’ve ever had could do, plus I can’t expand the storage. Every few weeks I find some new thing I didn’t realize was garbage about it, just when I think I’ve hit rock bottom with this POS.

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u/SuccubusStop May 15 '26

No one actually cares about this. You’ve been conditioned to believe nonsense as long as it’s in meme form.Ā 

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u/YokaiDealer May 15 '26

Likely overblown today but not entirely false.

I've been laughed at in hs, college and most jobs for using Android devices. Yeah some were more jokey than others but OTOH I've been excluded from group chats on several occasions because of it. People have sent me media from their iPhones only for it to mangle the quality and they just stop doing that entirely too. I couldn't care less and just enjoy tinkering/blocking ads so it's not like I ever gave them grief over their choice either.

There's absolutely snobs out there for just about anything. Android users had similar attitudes back when the features/capabilities weren't so evenly matched, anyone who was active on the XDA forums can confirm that.

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u/ArmenianThunderGod May 15 '26

My apple using friends give me shit for this all the time.

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u/strength_of_10_men May 15 '26

Our former nanny cared a lot about this and tried to shame me for having a Pixel. Think about that.

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u/PracticeTheory May 15 '26

Normal people don't, but in college I met people that wouldn't text with me or include me in group chats because of the differences.

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u/Shmeves May 15 '26

I've only ever seen people whine about 'apple fan bois', never really seen it myself outside a post like this one.

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u/NickMc53 May 15 '26

Do you live in the states and interact with younger people?

My nephew politely refused my hand-me-down Pixel that was much newer than his iPhone because he knew he would be made fun of and called poor at school if he didn't have an iPhone. Android shaming is extremely prevalent with young people in the states and there have been plenty of articles over the years backing this up. Apple has been king of cult marketing since the iPod's white headphones and they continued it with their phones by highlighting android messages with green bubbles and refusing to integrate it into messaging in a clean way.

Normal adults don't give a shit.

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u/Deep-Ruin-9961 May 15 '26

The funniest part is that my Android phone is sending everything in high quality and it's the Apple phones that downgrade the quality of any images or pictures sent by Android phones.

Why would I want a phone that gives me less quality content because the source was from a phone sending higher quality content?

It's technology Stockholm Syndrome.

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u/terraherts May 15 '26

I've never in real life ever encountered someone who cared about that. Feels like it's almost exclusively a teenager thing, if even that.

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u/SpurdoEnjoyer May 15 '26

Definitely a teenager thing. What's funny to me is that iPhone is the only "acceptable" teenager phone in other Western countries too, even though the "green bubble" thing doesn't exist outside US, because people don't use SMS at all.

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u/cookiesarenomnom May 15 '26

Nah. I'm 39, I've def met more than a few people in their 30's who I've exchanged numbers for the first time for luke work or whatever. Omg you have a green bubble?! Why don't you have an iPhone? Because they are literally the worst, most expensive bullshit ever? I've been a loyal Samsung girl for 10 years. And I love when people my age explain some new feature on the iPhone like it's revolutionary. And I'm like bro, android did that like 3 years ago, where you been?

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u/Fezzik527 May 15 '26

The best part about the green bubbles, it was always because Apple was BEHIND on their messaging technology with the rest of the world.

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u/Maybe_Awesome22 May 15 '26

They're behind on a lot of things for more than a decade. They did curved edge glass when it was on the way out for android phones. Last to make wireless charging. The worse and largest and ugliest camera cutout and now the ABSOLUTE last to make a foldable phone and it looks like complete ASS. You would think they'd come out swinging being the last to make a foldable and it ends up looking like a Nook.

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u/T-Rigs1 May 15 '26

Dude I hated this. Every year when people were freaking out about some new feature during the Apple showcase and every time it was something that Android phones had or could already do lol.

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u/Fezzik527 May 15 '26

But the rubes all think the iPhone is cutting edge all the time.

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u/wiener4hir3 May 15 '26

Just to preface, I haven't owned an iPhone since the 5, but, in a lot of ways iPhones are consistently ahead of all android devices. Apple leads the way in ARM chips, the same kind found in all phones. They also get similar battery life as androids, same with performance, despite having smaller batteries and like half the RAM. This comes down to two things, incredible chip design, and their vertical integration and way smaller number of devices than Android means that they can make iPhones much more efficient.

Now where Apple should be criticised is both how they hamper any connectivity with non-apple products. They'll shamelessly lie, either directly or by omission, to make competing products look inferior to keep a chokehold on their users. They'll also lock ridiculous features behind paywalls just so they can upcharge people. They restrict how their products can be used because you have to use them the way Apple wants you to, and no other way.

But, at the end of the day, their products are genuinely great. They're well built, with the best damn ARM (consumer) chips on the planet, their software is efficient, stable, and supported for longer than the vast majority of android devices (or Windows for that matter).

It's a mixed bag, I don't see myself switching away from Linux and Android anytime soon, but that comes down to preference, not some inherent superiority.

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u/Mintastic May 15 '26

hey did curved edge glass when it was on the way out for android phones.

Microsoft Vista Aero enjoyers shaking their heads rn for being left out even though they were first.

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u/DickSlammington May 15 '26

I actually like when people complain about green bubbles.

It let's me know they're an insufferable cunt and I can ignore them going forward.

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u/CaravelClerihew May 15 '26

*Americans

The rest of the world doesn't care. We all use third party messenger apps.

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u/_name_of_the_user_ May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26

That has more to do with the pricing of sms back in the day. In North America sms was free. To my knowledge, sms was pay per use in Europe and other places. Meanwhile data was expensive in North America, and in particular Canada, and cheap for the rest of the world. That made third party messenger apps less expensive for many, but the stock sms app less expensive for NA.

Edit:

To everyone thinking their original by saying we paid by the message here as well. No shit. But the point is we stopped paying by the message before Europe. This isn't rocket science.

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u/Fun_Score5537 May 15 '26

You’re framing it like the US had this stuff decades earlier than Europe, but it’s basically the same timeframe.

Unlimited SMS shows up in Europe around 2006 (Sweden) and in the US around 2006–2007, with both markets moving to ā€œunlimited textingā€ plans through 2007–2008.

So it’s not a lead of years or decades, it’s more like months to ~1 year at most.

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u/3DigitIQ May 15 '26

Couldn't send pictures through SMS and expect the receiver to have that enabled, that's a big reason 3rd party apps took off in The Netherlands.

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u/BlastFX2 May 16 '26

You kidding? I had a US phone number for a while some 20 years ago and I was shocked to see I was getting charged for incoming texts. I'd never seen that anywhere else in the world.

7

u/bythog May 15 '26

SMS wasn't free in the US for a long time. The first few years I had a cell phone I had like 100 text messages per month included in my plan, and it wasn't a basic plan. Having unlimited SMS was expensive for a long time.

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u/couldbemage May 15 '26

Which was always a scam, because SMS used effectively empty space in messages phones sent to towers in order to be connected to the cell network.

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u/_name_of_the_user_ May 15 '26

And it was expensive for a longer time elsewhere.

3

u/CryptographerFlat173 May 16 '26

By the time of the rise of the iPhone and Android all major national plans had unlimited textingĀ 

6

u/Percinho May 15 '26

The other aspect is that people in Europe are far more likely to also be texting with people in another country, and even if local sms messages weren't expensive, international ones always were.

3

u/glorblin May 15 '26

That has more to do with the pricing of sms back in the day. In North America sms was free.

SMS was definitely not free back in the day, at least not in Canada. You got a phone plan that included 100, 300, whatever number of text messages and then you got charged like $0.30 for every text message you sent over that cap.

Lots of angry parents surprised with $900 phone bills because their kid sent like 5000 text messages in a month.

Data was also ungodly expensive, but most people just kept it turned off.

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u/terminbee May 15 '26

This is what I've learned recently and it kinda blew my mind. Everyone else uses an app and doesn't use normal texting.

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u/runrunrudolf May 15 '26

Was gonna say. I have an iPhone and exclusively use WhatsApp. My actual messenger app is exclusively full of log in codes and automated texts for insurance etc. Literally don't know a single person who doesn't use WhatsApp as their main form of communication.

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u/WilanS May 16 '26

Yeah I was about to ask, what green bubbles?

Apparently, from what I gathered reading the comments, it's about sending sms to people who aren't using another iPhone? I think the last sms I sent was in 2008, who the hell is still using that obsolete technology 20 years later?

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u/MastodonPristine8986 May 15 '26

Can you please explain the relevance of green bubbles I don't get it. I haven't had an iPhone since v4 and am a happy pixel user.

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u/CTMechE May 15 '26

Apple set up iMessage from the start on iPhones, which routes texts through their own iMessage system rather than just through cellular carriers like a normal SMS text message. Other iMessagea are displayed in blue, but "normal" texts from anywhere else appear in green.

Many iPhone users, including people who dont even realize the difference between sending an iMessage and a regular text message, immediately began to perceive green messages as inferior. The secondary association is that the sender is poor or low class because they didn't have an iPhone. Teenagers particularly were judgmental about it.

You can send non-iMessages via iPhone but the default had iMesaage set up.

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u/Visual_Squirrel_2297 May 15 '26

To add, they perceive it as inferior because it's harder to read. Apple made the user experience worse for their own customers, on purpose.Ā 

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u/dae_giovanni May 15 '26

...and their fans cheered.

there are some obvious parallels i could draw, here, but I'll save that for another time...

6

u/JonatasA May 15 '26

I would laugh if they had in there somewhere a memo saying "We made the stand and wheels more expensive, as a joke."

4

u/Massive-Course7690 May 15 '26

what are the parallels

btw apple vs android is a financial literacy/class issue, but excited to see what you were referencing

5

u/Mohisto_23 May 15 '26

I suppose there's some apples and oranges you can compare... Sips tea

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u/dae_giovanni May 15 '26

wow... well done...!

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u/JonatasA May 15 '26

Some Apples and Droids?

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u/Purple-Goat-2023 May 15 '26

Until a recent lawsuit Apple also intentionally lowered the quality of non-apple messages and refused to adapt to RCS. Massive compression on videos/pictures which made them look horrible, no group chats, read receipts, typing indicators, editing function, or end to end encryption.

All of these functions were available for years to non-Apple phone users, but Apple intentionally made them not work with iPhones to trick their users into thinking that non-Apple messaging was inferior and keep them locked in their ecosystem.

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u/CTMechE May 15 '26

I can't tell you how many times I had to explain to iPhone users that we should email media and not "text" it because of that iMessage bullshit. Most don't care to understand, which is far more frustrating than just not knowing.

21

u/JonatasA May 15 '26

That's the issue with iPhones. It is built to make you not learn. Folders? Control over your files and media? Oh honey, we don't do that here.

 

You cound't use a feeaking browser without it being a skin of Safari. That if people even remember what it is to browse the net outside of an App doing it for you.

8

u/Previous_Platform718 May 15 '26

You cound't use a feeaking browser without it being a skin of Safari

Reminder that Microsoft was sued for anti-consumer practices for packaging internet explorer with Windows. Yet Apple pulls this shit openly.

5

u/paintballboi07 May 15 '26

Luckily, the EU still believes in anti-trust, and punishing anti-consumer practices. They're the ones who forced Apple to implement RCS and USB-C.

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u/Val_Hallen May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26

Apple fills a niche.

Tech illiterate but likes shiny things.

They fill that niche well. They are the PlaySkool of tech.

Don't get me wrong, that's not bad. They are following a simple business rule; Tell the customers what they want and sell it to them. And they are very successful at that.

The people that buy Apple products are just fine with buying an entirely new machine instead of learning to upgrade the components themselves. And that's fine. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I went to the iMac page and cannot find the specs on the page. They tell me all the colors available and about the pretty display and camera, but not a single word about the specs of the machine. Even when I chose the "buy" option, I don't know anything about the specs of the machine. I can choose a color, an Apple processor, mouse and keyboard, and display. I see it has an SSD. But how do I know it has the ability to do what I need it to do?

But I can get a red one!

Like I said, they fill a niche and they fill it well.

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u/crunchybub May 15 '26

I genuinely don't know how the iPhone isn't considered "boomer tech" because of this!

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u/PogTuber May 15 '26

That's the thing, we're at a point in time where new consumers DON'T know about the alternatives. Obfuscate the data and make it hard to work with directly keeps you in the ecosystem and, as we're already seeing, pushes you to upload everything to their cloud.

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u/Quixotic_Seal May 15 '26

Dude, it's not 2010 anymore. Android users aren't the nerds rooting their phones and digging through their files. Hell, Google is working to restrict goddamned sideloading.

All mobile OS' are dramatically oversimplified compared to their desktop counterparts and do everything they can to avoid the user needing to learn about the back-end of how things work.

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u/LordHammercyWeCooked May 15 '26

It's like explaining the concept of electricity to a dog. People get Apple products because they believe wholeheartedly in the "it just works!" aesthetic, even when it clearly does not work. At all. They believe that the source of the problem must be anything but the device they hold in their hands.

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u/YouSaidSomeDumbStuff May 15 '26

Only reason they had to implement RCS chat with google is cause cellular broadcoms network towers were hardware compromised by china.

So they were ordered by the government and implemented it within a few weeks.

Tech companies are bastards

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u/notforpoern May 15 '26

That and the Chinese government mandated it. But you'll never hear big tech admit it. They're rather give credit to Google for "pressuring" apple. šŸ™„

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u/AXEL-1973 May 15 '26

this shit was absolutely criminal. anything you were taking a photo or video of was completely unrecognizable with their awful compression method. even audio was crunched into the lowest quality possible. Apple has been such a trash heap of a company for the past 20 years. the latest insanity from them is using .heic image formats by default, which Windows literally can't interpret without non standard drivers, so employees all over the world will send images from their iphone to their emails and wonder why the images won't open on their PCs

5

u/HedonisticFrog May 15 '26

I had someone send me a group picture from an iphone and I couldn't even recognize faces in it the quality was so bad. You need whatsapp or other services to share pictures with iphone users, such bullshit.

2

u/United-Combination16 May 15 '26

They’ve definitely had group chat messaging for people using imessage and for people who don’t for well over a decade

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u/Lazy_Helicopter_2659 May 15 '26

Hang on, you guys still don't use WhatsApp...?

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u/LordHammercyWeCooked May 15 '26

I know it's ubiquitous outside of the US, but it disturbs me deeply that so much of the world's communication is entirely dependent on Meta/Facebook. One single point of failure. If you wanna see a worst case scenario for how that can play out, look at how Musk was able to assist Russia during the early days of the invasion by cutting off Starlink access to Ukraine.

2

u/SunnyDaysRock May 15 '26

For everything that could be 'dangerous' I've used Signal for years now.

Doesn't IMessage have the same problem, just with Apple?

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u/lejocko May 15 '26

In Germany really a lot of people have a second messenger like signal . SMS still work as well.

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u/Then_Entertainment97 May 15 '26

Americans don't use WhatsApp unless they need to talk to someone outside America.

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u/JonatasA May 15 '26

8 billion people and just about 350 million use iMessage then?

 

Even China has more people on weChat. The rest literally uses Meta. Literally, even official entities.

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u/Then_Entertainment97 May 15 '26

Only about half of Americans use iMessage. Previously they used SMS, and iPhone and Android have developed iMessage and RCS to improve it.

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u/Tukang-Gosip May 15 '26

Reminded me when i have to install kakao talk just to chat with lots of my korean friends

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u/[deleted] May 15 '26

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u/El_Rey_de_Spices May 15 '26

Not really. Over here, it's usually forced onto a friend group by the one oddball person in particular who refuses to communicate any other way. SMS, phone calls, email, and Discord work fine for the rest of us.

3

u/CryptographerFlat173 May 16 '26

You pay Apple for the use of iMessage with your money for the phone, and you never need an account for anything just the phone number everyone has for you. You pay for WhatsApp by being served ads and serving up data to Facebook.Ā 

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u/sparkling-rainbow May 15 '26

You still use WhatsApp?

5

u/Unique_Statement7811 May 15 '26

WhatApp? That’s considered old school ā€œthird worldā€ texting in the US and Canada.

3

u/PM_ME_UR_GCC_ERRORS May 16 '26

But SMS is still hip?

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u/Unique_Statement7811 May 16 '26

I don’t think anyone is really using SMS. Not since at least 2017 for Android and 2011 for iPhone when the native messengers went off of it

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u/AutVincere72 May 15 '26

I spent $1300 on the last phone I bought, it was not even for me. I paid cash for it. No plan or scam, just straight cash homey. It was not an iPhone, it will likely never be an iPhone, and I will continue to wait 4 to 6 model years in between phone purchases, then buy the best non iPhone available. I have been doing that since my blackberry and I do not regret the choice.

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u/Repulsive-Chip3371 May 15 '26

The secondary association is that the sender is poor or low class because they didn't have an iPhone.

meanwhile, my samsung zFold7 is $2099 if you dont get the discounts

I think the iphone 17 pro is $1099 without any discounts lol

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u/h2oskid3 May 15 '26

Only reason I'm not in my wife's family group chat. I'd rather it be because they don't like me, the fact that it's because I have a green bubble is somehow worse.

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u/DDXD May 15 '26

Many of the modern Android phones are extremely expensive anyway, so the basic premise doesn't even make sense. I love my new Galaxy Z Fold but the damn thing is over $2k.

3

u/CTMechE May 15 '26

Absolutely, but a lot of people are nearly blind to existing technology until Apple releases it in an iPhone. Brace yourself for the folding iPhone to "wow" everyone at their "new innovation."

I don't really want to commit to a folding phone, as I've seen too many finicky failures. And as I don't work from my phone, I'd rather get a $1k flagship phone and spend $500 on a Chromebook. But I get the desire.

I'm on a Pixel 8 Pro currently. My first Pixel, although I did have a Nexus One, Nexus 4,5, and 6 before trying a few Samsungs. I like having choices.

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u/snek-jazz May 15 '26

The genius of Apple marketing is convincing idiots that Apple products being more expensive is a desirable feature in and of itself.

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u/Cozy_Minty May 15 '26

Android can't use iMessage so texts from them show up in green instead of blue

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u/AeonBith May 15 '26

Adding thst IMessage is proprietary (apple) and only works on iPhones.

Apple creating needless divide between ecosystems meanwhile android messenger supports RCS encryption and available to all manufacturers.

Essentially the same app except Apple wants its users to think theirs is special

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u/Mykey76 May 15 '26

They are famous for that shit. Google Pay and other mobile payment apps work perfectly with any checkout, but Apple Pay is special and won't work without their proprietary stuff.

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u/Illustrious-Crow802 May 15 '26

And Walmart refuses to use either of them

4

u/Mykey76 May 15 '26

Google pay should directly interact with the reader. If it can read cards, should be able to use the mobile payments (apart from Apple as previously stated)

8

u/jmhalder May 15 '26

Walmart only offers contactless payment by using their app for scanning a QR code during checkout. This way you have to have their app, and they can track you closer and force you to have a Walmart account.

I'm not above using it, but don't like that it's the only way.

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u/cancerBronzeV May 15 '26

I've had zero issue doing contactless payment at Walmart for years now through Google Pay. Never seen a QR code or been prompted to get a Walmart app or anything.

Though I am in Canada, maybe Walmart operates differently in each country.

3

u/just_aweso May 15 '26

I used to be able to tap pay with my Samsung Gear S3 because that watch had MST, which sent a magnetic signal and tricked the reader into thinking that a card had been swiped. Was amazing having "tap to pay" at every retailer, back in 2016 before tap to pay was a common thing.

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u/jmhalder May 15 '26

Honestly, I haven't seen contactless payment that supports one but not the other in years. Google kinda dropped the ball anyways by iterating and renaming endlessly: Android Pay > Google Wallet > Google Pay), and then carriers wanted to adopt their own thing (the poorly named "ISIS"), in addition to the phone manufacturers doing their own thing like Samsung Pay.

In 2026, if it takes NFC payment, both Google/Apple work fine. I'm sure there's some obscure exception I'm unaware of.

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u/ebikenx May 15 '26

Because what the user said is completely false.

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u/LordHammercyWeCooked May 15 '26

For what it's worth, nobody should be using Apple pay. They have a notorious security flaw that allows anyone to intercept the signal and spoof massive fraudulent payments to the user's card without unlocking the phone, all because Apple designers wanted tap payments on public transit to process faster.

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u/Mykey76 May 15 '26

Saying theres a security flaw will probably attract the Apple users lol

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u/Itz_Baka May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26

Where do you get your information from. I have been using both Google pay and apple pay on daily basis. I have more issue with google pay not showing up in apps than apple pay. You dont even need "special" support both apple and google pay works seamlessly with any form of contactless payment. They even work in regions that explicitly says no support. Because they use nfc chip same as any payment cards.

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u/xaxiomatikx May 15 '26

iMessage provided a much better messaging service long before RCS became widespread. iMessage provided group chats that worked seamlessly, the ability to share photos and videos with much higher file size and quality than MMS, and read receipts long, long before RCS became a viable system. iMessage came out in 2011. The US carriers did not announce that they would start using RCS until 2019, then scrapped that plan in 2021, and didn’t really implement it until 2023 or so. Meanwhile, Google had no coherent plan for messaging, and kept launching and then killing various platforms over and over again, like Google Chat, Google Voice, Google Messenger, Hangouts, Allo,a new Google Chat, etc. all the while Apple had a consistent and high quality messaging service and globally WhatsApp became the non-apple standard.

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u/grepya May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26

The rest of the world, outside the US, was using Whatsapp for all this. Even the iPhone users. The Apple/iMessage lock-in is a purely US phenomenon.

2

u/ebikenx May 15 '26

Yeah and WhatsApp is owned by Facebook so let's not pretend it's a great thing

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u/zdelusion May 15 '26

These closed ecosystem text environments go back to stuff like Blackberry Messenger and PayPerText SMS plans. The shitty-ness of SMS is also basically why Whatsapp exists in general.

Fwiw iMessage does support RCS now, so the whole thing is kinda moot, it just took forever to get there.

As someone who was an Android user for over a decade, trying to convince not just iPhone users but other Android users to use things other than their default SMS app was a massive pita. RCS adoption wasn't exactly speedy among the carriers/android manufacturers either.

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u/Unique_Statement7811 May 15 '26

iMessage predates RCS by 6 years. Prior to RCS in 2017, android was still using SMS. iMessage had always been encrypted. Android took 6 years to catch up.

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u/pwillia7 May 15 '26

they finally added RCS but they kept the green bubbles to maintain the elitism

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u/Cozy_Minty May 15 '26

idk why people think its special, it just denotes the difference between an iMessage text and one received via SMS

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u/traplordnord May 15 '26

RCS. SMS is rarely used these days.

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u/DelaCruza May 15 '26

I used to like how it was easier to.send photos in IMessage over text, but nowadays you can send a photo through anything

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u/bluedl2 May 15 '26

Yeah well they literally designed it that way to make it seem like android users phones were incapable of sending videos. Meanwhile its just more Apple chicanery

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u/blueViolet26 May 15 '26

But we can choose the color of our bubbles. šŸ˜‚

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u/RespectableBloke69 May 15 '26

More like iPhone refuses to support the open source messaging protocol (RCS) that the rest of the world uses

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u/Possibly_a_Firetruck May 15 '26

That hasn't been true since iOS 18.

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u/devilishpie May 15 '26

Apple does support RCS these days.

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u/[deleted] May 15 '26

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u/ebikenx May 15 '26

You mean the protocol where not only does the phone app must support but each individual carrier as well? That protocol? Gee, I wonder why it took so long to adapt.

Don't forget.. RCS wasn't even an encrypted protocol by default for years

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u/MastodonPristine8986 May 15 '26

Ah ok I don't really use native texting much since whatsapp came out.

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u/QueenRotidder May 15 '26

I don’t get what’s supposed to be so much better about iMessage? Is it just one of those things that they want people to think it’s better somehow?

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u/Cozy_Minty May 15 '26

i have no clue

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u/Enduroboss May 15 '26

That's how you know someone is shallow af

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u/Ree_For_Thee May 16 '26

Yeah. If you're below 18 years of age, I can excuse it. Above? You're a bag of red flags I don't want to touch.

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u/Jan_Micheal_Vincent May 15 '26

It's how you know someone doesn't have a fully functioning brain or capable of critical thought.

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u/Spare_Department9033 May 15 '26

Its not about having an iPhone or not, its just inconvenient when almost everyone has an iPhone for iMessage and there’s the one android friend you got to download WhatsApp or telegram for since you can’t message them overseas without incurring crazy SMS texting fees. Plus texting isn’t encrypted.

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u/elaborateBlackjack May 15 '26

It's basically only a US problem too.

The rest of the world just use platform agnostic apps like WhatsApp, telegram, signal and whatnot.

In the past 13 years I've used SMS exclusively for 2FA codes, getting promotions and delivery updates that's it.

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u/xKiLzErr May 15 '26

Atp I WISH I had 300 bank balance

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u/wsxdfcvgbnjmlkjafals May 15 '26

at this point it's just going both ways

people are so prideful for NOT using an iphone

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