Isn’t it the fact that there will be features missing if someone doesn’t have iMessage? I genuinely don’t think anybody would care if it were just the color of the bubble that was different and nothing else.
Yes. The iPhone to MMS connection has filesize limits that basically make sending video horribly compressed, and even still images are visibly limited in quality.
And then message reactions aren’t directly supported in MMS, so it becomes a clunky communications experience between iPhone and Android texting.
There’s also delivery confirmation, read receipts, and other indicators in an iMessage chat that aren’t supported in MMS.
The color of the bubble is a subtle UI indicator of what features are supported in the chat.
I think green bubbles (non iPhone) means it’s using SMS so it can cost people money to send messages, especially images which would be sent as MMS I guess.
I’m an Android user though so I don’t really know. Also I’m in Europe where nobody cares and just uses Signal, WhatsApp or Telegram.
it’s using SMS so it can cost people money to send messages
This is basically the historical and cultural reason why the US uses SMS and MMS: basically every phone plan has unlimited SMS before smartphones became popular, so any smartphone OS needed to seamlessly support it for adoption. Apple successfully bridged that SMS interface into a proprietary messaging protocol and app even while maintaining backwards compatibility with SMS and MMS, but not the new standard that came out after the iPhone.
The kids care. Even in Europe. My nephew and niece had to get iPhones, and soon my son will have to get one or be socially left out. It’s a serious crisis made by greedy corporations is what it really is.
Sounds like an opportunity to educate your kids, and by proxy, others.
Kid’s bubble-shaming is no different than any other stupid shit kids have always done.
Don’t feed into it.
And if you really want to have some fun, host something like the iMessage-Matrix bridge mentioned above, or other messaging apps. When your kid shows up as a blue bubble, but friends notice he’s on Android, they’ll be confused…another learning opportunity.
