I’m still unclear on why this whole thing is so important that it’s worth putting time and money into finding a solution for the color of word bubbles.
Edit: all this time I thought it was just an argument over bubble colors. But no, it’s also potato quality videos and pictures ruining every group message with both Apple and Android in the mix.
Its not just the word bubbles. Pictures and videos come through on Android like complete shit. I can’t even have my wife send me pictures of the kids cause I can’t see them on the other end. Nor can I watch family videos sent to me. Its much more than simple colors, but of course kids are getting bullied for that.
Now this makes sense, thank you. Garbage quality video and pictures are a so annoying. It seems to ruin an entire group chat if one of them is on an iPhone. I often have to wait until I see someone in person or have them send it through a different app for the video to work.
I have yet to get a group conversation to switch to Signal or something to avoid the potato quality videos
Apple could fix this by uploading the photos to iCloud and sending a link. But improving the experience of SMS chats is not profitable, so they instead actively downgrade the experience.
Yea, this is a USA problem. Elsewhere everyone just uses a messaging app of their network’s choice.
Tell the wife to use telegram or another messaging client. There are plenty of perfectly good alternatives to imessages.
We use messenger, which I also don’t like. Its ridiculous. If these fucken tech giants aren’t going to right interoperability standards then someone needs to force them to. We made all this shit to make life better and somehow have forgotten that was the fucken goal.
I prefer Signal to telegram and it’s been amazing the whole time I’ve used it
Now if I could just convince more people I know to switch to it that’d be great
That’s certainly less desirable option for many. But why is wanting modern cross platform messaging so bad? It works iPhone to iPhone, works Android to Android, theoretically if there were other players (maybe if BB or Windows still had phones) they could also achieve the same using RCS with Android. This argument is and has always been about default protocols that phone can communicate with. Of course downloading 3rd party chat apps, emailing them, mailing them a letter, using a cup and string, stopping communication because they chose to use a phone from a different manufacture are all still “options”.
I’m still unclear why this gets asked every post unless people keep ignoring the answers.
Me too, really do not understand this on Lemmy of all places. It isn’t and never has been outside of people still school age been about the color of the bubble. I truly want to understand this to the point I’m going to start asking anyone who posts this personally the following:
Do you A) really think that the following are not at all important to people:
- Read receipts
- Typing indicators
- Reactions
- Transferring photos/videos in a way that doesn’t look they were shot on an early 90s camera phone
- Potential E2EE *(Potential because my points are not necessarily specific to Beeper Mini and iMessage, but also relevant to the conversation around Apple supporting RCS and the unknowns about how that will work)
B) Not aware of these things or any of the differences between iMessage, SMS, RCS, etc and truly believe the only difference is the bubble color? C) Is this just a smug reaction to the possibility that one of these App work arounds work iMessage will no longer be as exclusive if they were to succeed, and trying to reduce down the desires of those who would use it (and also the desires of Apple users who want these benefits with everyone regardless of who manufactured their phone)
@Usernameblankface@lemmy.world I’d be curious to know which phone platform you use?
I think the point is all these features are supported by RCS. Open standard that would be trivial for Apple to implement. They choose not to because they are greedy cunts. They are fully aware that this causes bullying and inability of tech illiterate to communicate with their friends/family.
Nobody older than 13 cares about color of text messages and most people recognize convenience of a single app for all messaging needs. This is an issue that Apple could trivially make disappear overnight if they weren’t cunts.
Fuck Apple.
I use Android, specifically Samsung.
I thought it was just the bubble color thing and people getting made fun of for their bubble color because that’s what every headline on the subject is about, and comments rarely go into depth about the rest of the issues that come from this incompatibility.
I’ve noticed similar incompatibility between Verizon messages app and non-verizon standard messages apps.
I have a friend who use iMessage on their Mac and will check that more often than their phone. If I text them during work hours, it’ll be hours before hearing back from them. Turns out, from what I’m told, iMessage on Mac has a setting to not show SMS on the desktop, so my messages were only going to their phone, which wasn’t checked as frequently. I guess when you enable SMS, notifications get messed up, and read SMS on your iPhone aren’t synced, and show up as unread (or something like that). In anycase, SMS got turned off at some point.
Obviously, none of this is really my problem, but it’s frustrating, more than just the color of the bubbles. The Network effect is real, and asking someone to switch to a new platform is not as easy as it sounds.
If they enable iCloud sync for messages it will update everywhere, they can also make sure they have Text Message Forwarding selected on their phone. They’ll get the messages in a timely manner (I get mine at the exact same time as my phone) and read messages will be reflected in all locations. I’ve been using iMessage on a Mac, iPad, and iPhone in some combination or other since the feature was offered, and the only issue I’ve ever had with sync was when I did a clean setup on a new Mac instead of a setup from backup. The above options weren’t selected.
I’m not either. considering that over 70% of the world is on android, you’d think the compatibility problem would be laid on Apple and not 3rd party applications.
iMessage lock in is almost exclusively a US problem (maybe EU, but i have no experience living there so i’m not sure). I’m from Malaysia and 99% of communication here is done through whatsapp and I know this is true for many other countries too. Line is frequently used in korea, Wechat in china, etc. It was only when I moved to the US that I used iMessage in any serious capacity
But Apple users don’t care enough to solve the issue. Partly they see it as an Android problem,if they see the problem at all.
In their defense, they have a messenger that works well, syncs to the desktop, sends high quality, etc, to other iOS users. So I can understand their not wanting to switch, or even seeing an issue.
oh I understand yeah. certainly. but surely it’s not difficult to explain it to most users.
them understanding or caring about the issue is another problem. brand loyalty is a thing. but then there’s users for whom brand loyalty isn’t really a choice, it’s just what they’re used to or they’re not skilled enough to understand what the difference is.
i feel that’s a much stronger problem here. that particular subset of people don’t understand the device they are using. they’re basically angry because the green people in their messages don’t look right or don’t load right. that makes it “bad” if you don’t understand why.
basic understanding of the technology you carry in your pocket is lacking for a huge user base. but apple… kind of relies on people not understanding. it makes it easier for apple to go “Green text bad! hate people with that!” and still keep it’s users that might not understand in the dark.
Group chat. You can’t have a properly working group chat if there’s an android in the mix.
Now that people bring up group chat, I realized that the opposite is also true. One apple in the mix will ruin all the videos in a group chat.
Group chat. You can’t have a properly working group chat if there’s
an androidSMS in the mix.
This is by Apple’s design choice, not because Android.
Android can send as high a quality over SMS/MMS as the network will allow. iPhone can’t.
In Apple’s defense, you’d still lose all the iMessage features when SMS is involved, because what else are you going to do when one participant doesn’t have iMessage? You’ll fallback to the lowest common mechanism.
You can’t have a properly working group chat if there’s
an androidSMS in the mix.
So anything that isn’t iOS/iMessage.
Whenever it has to fallback to SMS.
I mean there’s really no other realistic way to enable a single app to utilize two very different communication “protocols” (in quotes, because SMS is only nominally a protocol).
I’ve always though iMessage was the approach to getting away from crappy SMS.
So when Signal did the same, I was very optimistic. It removed a barrier to entry for users by supporting SMS plus an encrypted method for connections that had Signal. And you could enable it to add a signature saying something like “Sent from Signal, this could be an encrypted conversation if you download Signal” or something like that. That was a great idea.
(weird, not sure why these are two comments and it looks like I replied to myself)
It’s really about interoperability of systems, protocols, services, and clients. Since we’re both using Lemmy I assume we both understand at least a bit about the significance of interoperability.
I think it’s a shame that effort is put in to reverse engineering.
I mean theoretically it would be possible for people to use apps that are already cross platform, like Signal. People just care less than the inconvenience of installing an app on their phone.
Cross-platform clients, yes, but that’s only a (small) part of the way there. For example, Signal is actively hostile to other client implementations just like Apple is with iMessage, unfortunately :(
Which is funny considering that apples current implementation is less secure because sending the non-imessage users from iMessage breaks the encryption, meaning everything sent to a non-imessage recipient is sent in plain text.
OK. And?
It’s been posted many times around here.
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=Why+are+iMessage+blue+bubbles+so+important
