this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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I've never used iMessage and don't know anyone else that does. Could someone explain why it seems to be such a big deal for some people? Especially considering all the news about Apple clamping down on it working on Android. The whole green vs blue bubble doesn't make sense to me personally.
I'm not sure if your located in US, but an issue here is there a lot of people using iphones and a lot of them tend stick to the default messaging app and sometimes can rarley use 3rdparty messaging apps.
For android users the gripe can be since people socially to use thirdparty messangers (its like trying to convince people to use signal over whatsapp). As a result sometimes a good portion of your chats can be stuck in sms.
Group chats are a bit more of a pain since say all your friends are iphone users (and say they already have existing group chats) adding a android user will either not be possible or kick everyones chats back to sms. The biggest problem with the latter is carriers have different limits on number of participants for sms chats.
For a lot of users it’s also about the image quality. A lot of group chats are used to share family photos, or friends parties, or vacations, etc… and inside an iMessage the photos all look great. High quality, shareable etc. Videos looks great and stream just fine. But once any member adds any non iPhone user the group chat gets changed to green and now all the sudden all the photos are grainy extreme low quality, basically not even viewable and videos won’t even share at all. So then people get pissed at the green person and just start a new chat without that person. It sucks.
I actually have a mac mini running as a imessage relay and using (https://bluebubbles.app/) to relay them to my android (been using it the moment I switched from ios to android). It works quite well.
The anoying catch is you have to use imessage via email. The biggest draw is imessage on iphone will show two duplicate chats one for sms and one for email.
I'm sorta working on decomissioning that relay and either switching to the closest 3rdparty app or moving people to sms. I don't have many imessage group chats (I basically have none right now). Hence why I made this post (to test the waters)
As for image quality a partial solution is if I need to use sms I can either use google photos or samsung link share (though this only preservers the quality of images/videos I send and doesn't fix poor quality photos comming back to me).
If you're going to use a 3rd party app to share photos, why not just use WhatsApp (or Telegram or whatever) in the first place?
I guess that makes sense. I still find it strange since it seems to be only (or majority) a thing in the US.
The main culprit was in the rest of the world sms is very expensive meaning people early on where forced and got used to third party apps. In US by contrast sms is usually free/unlimited. As such people initially didn't bother using thirdparty apps and when apple rolled out imessage the default sms app kinda became a pseudo standard (like whatsapp).
At least thats one theory
iMessage came out when most cell phone plans had expensive SMS/MMS rates. Your basic plans used to get 200 texts per month. After that you would be charged $0.05/text. I didn't have a text plan on my personal phone at all until they became unlimited.
When the original iPhone came out Blackberry dominated the business users. They had blackberry messages or BBM. Many of the things you associate with iMessages were copied from BBM.
The only reason that iMessages took off in the U.S. is because unlimited texts was part of the required data plan. Outside of the U.S. the cell phone companies continued to charge for texts. iMessage that would sometimes send it over SMS/MMS and sometimes over the data plan was stupid. So the other messaging platforms became the norm.
Sure, that's certainly part of it. But then we don't usually have the really weird clique thing, I use whatever app I need to becuse random people use random things. If my attitude towards people was to denigrate them based on their bubble color well that would really be a thing for therapy