We like to fingerwag at social media companies for knowingly negatively impacting children's mental health and self-esteem, yet Apple is aware of how their systems ostracize children, in their own peer groups, who can't afford to carry around luxury phones.
It's one thing to be ostracized by strangers on social media, it's an entirely other thing to be ostracized by your own friends and peers. The latter is tragically more personal and leaks into the real world with real world consequences.
On the other hand, this seems like a teachable moment, where perhaps kids can be encouraged not to marginalize others based on trivial differences in messaging apps. The drumbeat of inclusivity is pretty loud these days so it shouldn’t come as too great a surprise that including their green bubble friends would be the decent thing to do.
I don’t place much blame on Apple for completely stereotypically standard teenage attitudes. If it wasn’t green bubbles it would be uncool sneakers. The answer is not to force interoperability (though that would be great!), but for parents to help their kids grow out of these tribalizing behaviors.
It's not just a trivial difference in bubble color. SMS conversations in iMessage lose features. The social rejection is a result of the features lost when an Android user participates in a messaging group.
The social rejection is a result of teens being teens, as pointed out. Adults would use another more inclusive tool, like whatsapp, email, discord, rss, etc.
I'm 50 and I'm still on my 1st Android phone (which is a piece of crap, but I have an environmental responsibility to use it as long as possible and it still does perfectly good phone things like SMS and voice and DCSS). I've owned maybe four mobile phones in my whole life.
Most people in Europe only replace their phones when they die, get stolen, or lost.
Other than a few lucky ones, we aren't big fans of contracts, replacing phones every two years, we enjoy our pre-paid variants, and only replacing them when it actually is required.
Even when we use it for more than just SMS and calls.
Is this based on your personal observations or can you back that up with any meaningful statistic?
I know both people that get the latest iPhone every year, and people still on a Nokia 3310(-equivalent), but the latter are in the vast minority in my circle of friends, also in Europe.
Personally, I've been upgrading every 2-3 years (not on a contract), and the phone was never broken.
I'm on my fifth smartphone (since 2009). But I've always used Android. It could be that iOS users are more inclined to replace perfectly working hardware.
Agree GP is an anomaly and will say 15 could be an exaggeration a bit. I don’t know really but iPhone has been around a long time now and people seem to replace typically every 1-2 years.
Not in most European or African countries, majority is on pre-paid, and phones only get replaced when there is an actual reason, not that two years have gone by.
I'm on a post paid contract but i haven't had a phone subsidy in a long time. If you want a "free" iphone/android you can lease the phone (effectively it's a personal loan paid back over 2 years).
Like the others say, I too have a post-paid without a phone. I personally don't know anyone with a bundled phone, because why would you do that? I pay 8€ per month and change the phone whenever I want.
15th phone in total, would be fairly average for someone who has had mobile phones for 30 years. I suspect that's what the GP meant. Smartphone adoption is still not anywhere universal and many, many, are still on their first smart phone since a few years back.
Yeah that was me, and I am talking iPhone. Don't try to overanalyze the "15". There's nothing scientific about it I just made it up and put the tilde in front. Didn't realize it would be the focus of such debate. It could be 10 or 20. Most people I know were early adopters and have replaced every 1-2 years and have also probably broken a couple along the way requiring early replacement. I'm also not claiming my observation is representative of anything other than that, I'm sure it wouldn't match some larger dataset. It's biased by a ton of factors. I was trying to point out 2 things;
1) we've used iphone's since the beginning and are pretty loyal, would likely never consider non iPhone
2) we don't tend to switch apps for "inclusivity" as the original comment parent stated. We blatantly exclude people that are not on the Apple product ecosystem by being rather inflexible to even try the universe of platform agnostic options (WhatsApp, etc).
This is my experience in the US. Basically, we're acting like the teenagers except in a not so mean and judgemental way.
Ok, so you're likely either not bothered by the messaging differences or not don't experience them.
Now take a moment to imagine someone tries to tell you that your messaging system makes you not desirable in a group. What do you do as an adult? Spend extra money to comply with their ideas, or tell them to either use alternatives, or get over it? Does the fact you've never used those apps even factor into the decision?
For context, in many places outside of the us the question is simply "which app do you use" and then you use that like an adult that you are.
As I said, everyone I know is on apple so no I don’t notice the difference. I have seen a couple occasional when non Apple users are on a group text and it breaks some things.
I can totally see how teens are judging each other on this. They’re judgmental creatures in search of social cues to judge you on. Having android is analogous to wearing cheap Walmart clothes in my day. You’re social clout takes a huge hit.
I get it and have empathy, but no solutions as I really think it’s kids being kids and I don’t think Apple as a business should be regulated towards an open protocol (only actual solution).
I’ll never know what it’s like to be a teen that texts or has a smart phone because I didn’t experience it. But I hear teens don’t care about cars these days and that was a crucial part of being a teen with a thriving social life where/when I grew up. You’d get teased for not having one or having a old/ugly one. You were excluded from social activities if you couldn’t find transportation. You couldn’t take someone out on a date and it actually impacted whether you were even worth dating. And, it was very expensive for a teenager.
The difference with adults is we don’t give each other a hard time about it. Or too much anyways. We will however absolutely refuse to use whatever app you ask us to if we’re am not using it already. We’re also probably not using it already. Most of us bought iPhone at the beginning and have never really considered anything else. That’s why we’ve owned so many of their phones.
I’m not European but I find the idea that I should accept I have to context switch between apps based on who I’m talking to be insane. All my texting is in one app, just like email, phone, maps, etc. I might be simplistic but apps are pretty sticky for me once I choose a default for _activity_. I might be wrong, but if I remember correctly the reason the texting apps exploded over there was because you all had bad or expensive SMS originally. iMessage didn’t exist until 2011/iOS 5 and was likely Apple’s response from competition from rapidly growing companies like WhatsApp.
SMS is basic, lacks features. A company builds messaging software that falls back to SMS when it's not communicating with someone who uses their software. They bundle it in their OS and set it as default. They are so successful that lot of people never even consider using other products, because "everyone" is using it. Users of the software defend these actions and consider it great, often admitting that they haven't even tried alternatives because "everyone" is using it.
How is this different from Microsoft, Windows and IE?
Why switch context? Everybody that matters to everybody I now is on whatsapp. I actually like this distinction Europe vs US - we don't have any personal ego polishing at stake and chest thumping about how country XYZ is greatest, we take what we consider best for us, facts are enough.
Fearmongering about China is also less intense here, as if one had to realize that most top android models are not made in China, and one could construct a very effective and truthful fearmongering campaign about US too, since various US laws and 3-letter agencies consider all of us sub-humans and US government is quite often rather unfriendly and spying on us.
At least western part of Europe has average purchase power on par with US average, so phone prices (unsubsidized) are not a factor that much. Even when factoring in subsidizing in US, it doesn't explain whole picture on itself.
And we actually care about this tiny blue planet by our actions, so our actions are as they are (few phone replacements, ie I see most IT colleagues in our bank all making nice 6-figure US-equivalent salaries on pretty old phones, be it apple or android). You really can't impress anybody with your phone if we talk about mature folks, an attempt would cast a rather bad light on your character.
> Why switch context? Everybody that matters to everybody I now is on whatsapp.
Replace the word "whatsapp" with "iMessage" and you've described my situation. That's why I don't context switch. We're talking like once a year maybe I encounter someone not on Apple that says they're on something else. A similar situation happens with P2P payment apps. Someone may say let me Venmo you, but if you don't have Venmo you're more likely to just say I don't have Venmo and default back to traditional payments. Or counter with, do you have Zelle? (if you have Zelle).
My in-laws were expats and coming home to the US was always a huge culture shock because nobody here used WhatsApp. I know that's not true. There's probably some stats out there that show usage of WhatsApp and Android is very substantial in the US. However, unfortunately, I think that in a way those stats and my experience outline the class divide here. If you can afford it, you have an iPhone.
> We will however absolutely refuse to use whatever app you ask us to if we’re am not using it already.
First, because there's a first you use every app. Second, because if you do chat with someone without imessage regularly, you'll want to upgrade to something. If you refuse because of tech... you didn't care enough about that person to begin with.
> If you refuse because of tech... you didn't care enough about that person to begin with.
This has been every iPhone user I've ever found. I've been willing to use any messaging system and have tried many. But not a single iPhone user I know uses anything other than iMessage. And they blame me.
Welcome to adulthood. Adults can be just as stupid, hypocritical, uncaring, and ruthless as anyone else.
In europe, most iphone users use alternative message platforms for everything, and nobody in wider groups use apple's one. US is simply in its own PR-massaged albeit huge bubble, nothing more
And the alternative is that they wouldn’t be able to participate at all.
In the end, I think the social rejection isn’t Apple to blame for. We don’t blame clothing brands for enabling kids to discern who wears ‘the real thing’ and who hasn’t, either.
Or do we want to blame Apple for trying to improve SMS for their users without going through a lengthy standards process? They were a small player at the time in the phone market, so they couldn’t expect an iPhone-only solution to succeed, and writing an app wasn’t really a thing yet, so they couldn’t have gone the route WhatsApp later took, so what could they have done instead?
The colors are UI to indicate to their users who has access to the improvements and who hasn’t. If Apple didn’t indicate in any way that some people have different features available to them, I think people would blame them for that.
Also, US (AFAIK, this is a US thing) kids likely would still learn who could and could not use the features Apple added to SMS.
> They were a small player at the time in the phone market, so they couldn’t expect an iPhone-only solution to succeed, and writing an app wasn’t really a thing yet, so they couldn’t have gone the route WhatsApp later took, so what could they have done instead?
Mate, iMessage debuted in 2011 - 2 years after Whatsapp appeared on the platform.
Technically yes, Realistically there isn't a need. The iMessage feature set has been mostly matched by RCS on Android. Apple does not want compatible messaging.
Google's version of RCS on Android is a proprietary closed source fork of RCS that Google refuses to provide a public API for.
> Google's version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way.
If this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now. Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API and no plans to build one.
If you want to implement RCS, you'll need to run the messages through some kind of service, and who provides that server? It will probably be Google.
So the pitch for Apple to adopt RCS isn't just this public-good nonsense about making texts with Android users better; it's also about running Apple's messages through Google servers. Google profits in both server fees and data acquisition.
It's Google that goes on about RCS being an "open standard" when their implementation of RCS is anything but.
It's kind of like going on forever about Android being open source before making sure most of the modern APIs are proprietary closed source code you only get with Google Play.
I don't think it's this simple. RCS is implemented by carriers and is a feature of mobile service like SMS. It has a qualification/accreditation process. iMessage is an internet service.
If I were Apple, I would not budge.
I haven't used iMessage, so I don't know how it behaves, but my own personal RCS experience has not been good. I am on Google Fi and make heavy use of Google Messages and specifically their web app. I have a Pixel 4a 5G - a good mid range phone. Three Messages configurations are available: regular SMS/MMS, RCS (i.e. Enable Chat Features), or SMS/MMS routed through Fi; RCS is not available if you route through Fi!
I have a couple of really long message histories, and with RCS enabled, it got to the point that I could not keep the web app connected with the phone, open chats, or in some cases see/respond to messages; I'd try to send a message and it would sit at 'sending' for 5 minutes or more, making it very difficult to have an actual conversation with someone. Turn RCS off, and the send/receive delay disappears. Route through Fi as well, and the web app works a lot better and it doesn't get stuck opening conversations.
As another commenter pointed out, it's probably better to use an actual chat application instead of Messages for this. But that's not what I use :shrug:. And my experience, on my phone, is that RCS is not usable at all, and I'm just on SMS/MMS as a result.
Respectfully, this comment solidifies why iMessage is superior. Try sending a 4K HDR video, or low-quality video, files, or photos with a resolution greater than a Nokia phone from 10 years ago, or a multitude of other things over SMS.
Signal, WhatsApp, etc. don't come close to what iMessage offers seamlessly. For iPhone/macOS/iPadOS users, SMS is garbage. Yes, it's a closed system; but it works without a cell signal or roaming charges anywhere in the world over WiFi for free.
RCS seems like a half-baked attempt at catching up with features that've existed since 2011 on one platform. Even third-party messaging apps fail miserably compared to iMessage.
Oh I agree with you, and that's something I forgot to mention - if you do SMS/MMS routed through Fi, they downscale everything. Forget 4k video - any video you take is getting repackaged as a .3gpp file at very low resolution (144p? idk, it's pretty bad). Audio-only clips are similarly compressed a lot, and very noisy as a result. Images don't seem to be affected, but I haven't tried sending anything big.
It's not useless, but vastly better for short text conversations than anything else. Not surprising, it's SMS.
> Signal, WhatsApp, etc. don't come close to what iMessage offers seamlessly
In what way? I know WhatsApp compress media files, which is why people use Telegram when high quality matters. Is there anything else? In any case Signal and WhatsApp have UX barely better than SMS, the real comparison should be against something with legitimately better UX. Is iMessage better than Telegram?
> On the other hand, this seems like a teachable moment, where perhaps kids can be encouraged not to marginalize others based on trivial differences in messaging apps.
If you think that something something inclusivity will effect your children’s thinking more than peer pressure, boy do I have news for you.
TIL that there are people who just use whatever messaging app came with their phone.
I may not like Moxie Marlinspike's decision to host Signal on the Play Store, but it's still the best SMS app out there for providing a moderate degree of privacy, and it'll run on iOS and Android (and desktop!) alike (though, on the desktop it only supports Signal-Signal messages, not other SMS).
Why is the answer not to force interoperability? This is exactly what we should be doing because it's generally good for the communications ecosystem and the overall marketplace.
It's not an answer to the problem of teenagers having to learn decency, but I'm failing to see a downside to taking Apple to task on this.
Forcing interoperability sounds like a good idea, until you recognize that it results in a system of compliance that absolutely stands in the way of innovation for years if not decades to come. Look at seatbelts: the technology has come leaps and bounds in recent decades, with 5 point harnesses being common in racecars, however, you'll probably notice that the seat belts in your current car look a lot like the seatbelts in your first car, because of a government enforced standard. This is the issue with the EU's recent adoption of a mandate that all devices use USB-C (never mind if some of the proprietary chargers that were in use were able to provide a faster charging speed) as well.
Now, admittedly, it isn't impossible to have regulations like this revisited on a schedule to make sure they're still making sense and adjust them, but considering how well that approach has panned out for the USA-PATRIOT Act, I'm not holding my breath on politicians coming up with a reasonable solution here. If your kid complains about the phone they have, I suggest getting them a job application from the nearest retail store. If they're too young for that, perhaps it's a bit soon to have a phone in the first place.
I don't see how your examples stand in the way of innovation. Both seatbelts and the type c requirement are written as minimum requirements, not as "no more no less". Extensions and improvements are allowed or even common, as long as they preserve the base functionality.
A car needs a seatbelt that passes whatever certification is required by law, but there's nothing stopping you from making it better. There are 5 point harnesses out there which are street legal, but the only people buying them are car modders who want to use their racing car on the street and managed to get the rest of the car approved already. Mainstream manufacturers have also experimented with fancier seat belts, but there was no market demand for them.
Type C is similar - the new law requires a device to have a type C port that supports at least all the basic functions. If a manufacturer wants to include their own improvements, they can either use the Type C port like everyone has been doing for years (Warp/Dash charge, QuickCharge, analog audio, thunderbolt 4...) and/or add a second connector. The only one who hasn't been taking this approach was Apple and they haven't done anything innovative with Lightning since it was introduced.
Hell, apple themselves pretty much taken this approach with every other product they have, so it’s not like they didn’t okay over USB-C for years. My guess would be that they deliberately waited out the EU mandate, so any minor public inconvenience that may come from ditching lightning can be forwarded to EU ruling instead of them, they are absolutely okay either way.
Come on, where are all that innovation that happened with lightning or any other cable type during the “unrestricted” decades? It is simply a plain-ass form factor for.. transporting electricity between two ends of a wire, it ain’t getting much better than what we have. Mind you, there is absolutely no mandates on the data part.
Is there some sort of lack of innovation allowing your vacuum cleaner to plug into the same system as your PC as well?
Except there is no meaningful innovation in instant messaging for decades now. This argument is boilerplate of all Apple-related discussions and yet I fail to see what would we actually loose.
Also argument about fast charging is invalid. You are free to have own faster standard, as long as you also support PD over usb-c and that non-issue, as all faster chargers(eg. One Plus), were already working over usb-c.
Besides, it’s kind of absurd to imagine government regulation of bubble hue.
On the other hand, I’d love to see the government regulate Apple’s right to keep using port interface changes as financing events. Every time they change their chargers we’re forced to pay for the new ones which creates waste and is just plain shameless greed on their part. And of course Right-to-repair + Planned-obsolescence.
> Why is the answer not to force interoperability?
Do you want the U.S. government to just strong-arm a private company into adopting a not-very-popular plaintext messaging standard, or do you want them to force the licensing of Google's proprietary extensions that support encryption for 1-to-1 messages as well? (Even with proprietary extensions, group messages are always plaintext.)
The US Government can declare that the companies involved must come up with a way to provide equivalent functionality when interoperating between platforms, and then the companies can figure out how best they want to do that.
Then every day that's not the case after a grace period, or without convincing evidence they're working on it, they can eat fines or sanction from the FCC.
I don't care how they solve this problem, just that they do and that's what effective regulation is about.
What is the difference to Nike providing kids with flashy shoes when the sole purpose is class and coolness? According to the same report, Nike is the most preferred fashion brand among teens.
At least with Apple's message indication you know you're getting encryption and thus privacy from carriers. Would it be less problematic if Apple simply mentioned "warning: this is unencrypted SMS"?
Well, should we mandate grey boxes for every item out there, with a bland label differentiating them from each other only?
Actually, from an environmental standpoint I would be okay with doing that for food items/detergent/etc. Mandate the same form factor and just wash them out and reuse. But for clothing items it hardly makes sense, as a big part of you buying that is exactly the different look.
Citation needed. Is this really true? I keep hearing about RCS etc but I also keep hearing it's not actually a good standard. Not even sure it does encryption frankly.
There is nobody preventing Apple from developing an Android app for iMessage. They already have a bunch of apps on the play store, including one for Apple TV, Beats, and a migration app for iOS. https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Apple
Nothing to do with nerve, and everything to do with self interest.
Do you think Google (or any organization) is capable of shame? I could extend your question to "How could Microsoft whine about Google shutting down its Youtube API access, while Microsoft was shaking down Android OEMs with secret patents and forciing them to make Windows phones as part of the (secret) settlement?" or "How can Apple ramp up its ad products when it rails against Google/Facebook ads?". The answer to all of those questions is self-interest.
People don't seem to agree with you. Google screwing up it's own messaging strategy for a decade and then whining about the consequences of their own decisions shows a lot of nerve.
> Google has been unable to field a stable, competitive messaging platform for years and has thoroughly lost the messaging war to products with a long-term strategy. At least some divisions inside the company are waking up to how damaging this is to Google as a company, and now Google's latest strategy is to... beg its competition for mercy? Google—which has launched 13 different messaging apps since iMessage launched in 2011—now says, "It's time for Apple to fix texting."
My power tools have proprietary battery's too. I buy the same brand over and over because of owning batteries already. This type of stuff is just business 101 and it’s not exactly meant to be in anyone but the company’s best interest. It can be seen in almost all industries.
It's the same old story of perfect being the enemy of good (plus clear ulterior motives for Apple).
Adding RCS compatibility would negatively impact precisely zero iPhone users, and would positively impact literally everyone (including iPhone users!).
RCS may have its warts, but I do not see Apple proposing a better standard? Everyone agrees SMS/MMS is about as bad as it can be... and there's already a lot of industry buy-in outside of Apple for supporting RCS.
You haven't looked that much into it then; RCS has encryption[0], and works great for me. (I have an iPhone 13 Pro & a Pixel 6 Pro. RCS works as well as iMessage for Android-to-Android devices, for me.)
Is that RCS having encryption or is that Google providing an extension to RCS only with their Messages app? And to what degree does RCS with encryption have buy-in from American carriers?
RCS is an open source protocol that can be run by different 'operators'[0]. So it's not so much as an extension, as Google's implementation of the protocol (which is open source and can be added by other operators).
Apple is free to open the iMessage ecosystem if they'd like to allow Android to send encrypted messages to iPhones as well. The truth is that Apple isn't doing this to help customers identify unencrypted messages. They are doing this for the network effect.
This is what people in the hate-Apple echo chamber like to chant, but it's wrong.
When Apple started doing it, there was no network effect.
The color choice was made years before everyone started freaking out about green and blue bubbles.
It was done to show that a message went over SMS, and not iMessage at a time when many Americans paid for each SMS sent, but iMessages were data, and thus included in data plans.
Blue=free
Green=10¢
It served as a warning that you were spending money. I suspect that's why it's green.
Before iMessage (yes it existed) all text messages were green. Blue denoted iMessage. There was no evil plan from Apple like bloggers love to conceive for attention - it’s merely what was originally chosen and they wanted to differentiate iMessage when they released it.
You know why they wanted to differentiate iMessage? It caused issues with SMS. They knew it. They wanted an easy out for the incompatibilities. It is a problem with the "plebs" not Apple. The "plebs" were just holding their phones wrong. After all, even iPhone users don't know how to hold their phone. How can "plebs" be expected to know how to hold their phones if iPhone user can't?
Apple could fix this if they wanted to, but they don't want to. They know it sells phones. It is intentional.
At what time has data ever been cheaper than SMS? That "Blue=free Green=10¢" would likely only have been true for people on really crummy plans sending a message while connected to Wi-Fi. Data has never been "free". They would have had to show iMessage messages as green when sent over the phone network.
It was to mark the "plebs" so the "plebs" would be blamed for any issues rather than Apple.
> At what time has data ever been cheaper than SMS?
Phone plans used to come with a limited number of SMS messages per month (or even none), and the rates per SMS if you went over the limit were beyond extortionate.
>Since BlackBerry messages are sent as data, users do not incur individual charges for each message as they would through regular SMS texting. While phone companies have introduced bulk texting plans, many options still include caps on the number of individual SMS messages that can be sent. BBM has no such limit.
> Phone plans used to come with a limited number of SMS messages per month (or even none), and the rates per SMS if you went over the limit were beyond extortionate.
But wasn't cellular data priced similarly extortionately back then?
>But wasn't cellular data priced similarly extortionately back then?
I guess it depends on your terms. I had--I think--a 2GB per month data plan (which was actually fairly reasonable for mobile at the time) and later went to "unlimited" but I was still paying something like 10 cents per text for a time. I didn't text a lot so I just paid a la carte until I changed plans.
Communications charges have changed a lot over time. I remember when long distance calls were something like $1/minute.
> Communications charges have changed a lot over time. I remember when long distance calls were something like $1/minute.
I can remember Verizon being sued because they forced handset manufacturers to disable Bluetooth for file transfers, because Verizon used to charge you money every time you transferred photos to or from your phone.
The carriers used to completely own the entire phone experience. That's what really changed with Android and iOS. Walled gardens notwithstanding, you have access to a far less restricted and curated set of applications.
Yes, but if you had wifi iMessage was essentially “free”. I always though of it as message went over the internet, vs message went over SMS.
iMessage was released 11 years ago now. Can’t blame Apple for what not considering what the toddlers of the time would eventually do with the technology.
It was certainly too expensive, but nowhere near as expensive as paying twenty five cents for an SMS message that maxed out at 140 bytes.
Before iPhone or Android existed, Blackberry was very popular with teens because you got unlimited messaging on Blackberry Messenger included with the data plan you got with a Blackberry.
Eventually there were cell phone plans where you could add unlimited SMS for an additional fee regardless of what phone you used.
By the time the iPhone rolled around, all the American iPhone plans included unlimited SMS messages without an additional fee.
I think that data plans used to be expensive (I avoided getting a smartphone until 2014 because of the costs), but once you had a data plan for other reasons (e.g. being able to browse the web) then messaging apps were a cheaper way to send a message on the margin. My cheap minutes-only plan with AT&T back in 2008-2011 charged me $0.20 per SMS sent and received, which added up fast with unsolicited messages, but eventually I found the option to just block all SMS to save money (yes, I was just oblivious to whatever people sent me for a couple years, and it probably wasn't good for my social life...).
Basically, anywhere in EU. SMS is unreasonably expensive/limited, on top of being all around shitty (like, bad encoding, utf8 chars taking up more space, the amount of time I had to remove ős from my texts so that it would fit in a single SMS), and is plain text for your carrier to read.
I’m not sure how you can reasonably argue that the chosen shade of green is a negative light on android texts. Any negativity is generated by the social systems interacting with it — the colors, and logos, just give enough information for those social systems to differentiate, and qualify, and judge your usage of, these objects.
Apple hasn’t done much of anything to say android texts are bad… they’ve just said they’re not iPhone texts (and iPhone—>iPhone has better texting). Everyone else came along and said android is for poor people, and used those green bubbles as a signal to act on — just the same as using the logo to judge your shoes.
Key exchange happens through apple. App is proprietary and as far as I know the apple devices upload to the apple cloud in a way that makes apple able to read the messages by default.
Is the iPhone se really luxury? If you are starting from the idea that every teen will have a smart phone, I think apple has blanketed the market with products at all the cost points.
A new unlocked iPhone 13 Mini device is $850 in Canada. I can buy an unlocked Android smartphone for under $80 that'll do what I need. Though I splurged and spent just under $200 on my last phone. Something that costs 4x as much as a decent mid-range model that will meet most people's needs is luxury.
Most people do not purchase phones and service plans the way I do (separately - I buy an unlocked device up-front then use it with my preferred carrier). So they probably don't think about it like that. It's just an extra $30 a month on their bill for the lease. That really starts to add up, though.
After having owned a what was already considered 'old' used iPhone for three years, I finally bought a new iPhone, which I expect to use for the next five years.
FWIW - my 5-year-old "original" SE, which was Apple's cheapest phone when I bought it, finally stopped supporting the new iOS version early this month.
If you combine the SE with the local used market, it can get extremely inexpensive. I'm currently rocking an SEv2 that I got for $150.
I'm not saying that $150 is cheap objectively, but in relation to Android phones - even used ones - it stands up pretty well.
This is especially true since Apple supports phones for so long. If you're cost constrained, you can spread the cost of a phone over more years than a typical Android phone.
But with Android you get much more features for the money. All Android phones are bezelless for instance, even the cheapest budget phone. The SE still rocks the iPhone 8 design from 2017 with all its drawbacks.
Personally I don't use Apple because I have far too many things I can't do on it (mostly due to their restrictions in the app store, like using open PGP keys over NFC). But if I did I'd never consider the SE.
If the discussion is around phone for kids, I think a second hand SE is still a great choice. Kids don’t really care about the features that you or I would care about.
I mean, it makes the phone smaller for the same screen size. That's an improvement for me.
Not enough for me to drop $$$ on an iPhone-mini, but I'd be happy if Apple put future SEs into an "iPhone 13 mini" body (presumably with a single lens camera).
Because it's optimising the usable surface of the phone of course. The bezels don't serve any purpose other than they were technically necessary during the first years of smartphones.
On a tablet you can use them to hold the device but a smartphone is small enough to grip by the edges only.
And OLED really is a total must-have for me these days.
The screen size/battery size would probably be larger on a price competitive Android phone then the SE, however I doubt you'd get as fast a processor/as many years of software updates either so it really depends what you prefer. I may be biased though having the SE, think I'll only bother to upgrade it when Apple finally switches to USB-C
I wish Apple would bring back the fingerprint scan. Once my iPhone 8 plus bricks they won't sell me a new 8. Face scanning is too dystopian and violating for me, but any iPhone after 8 requires it. I tried buying the SE to resist this practice, but it's designed to be intentionally tiny and inconvenient to force us neo-Luddites into the current corpo-dystopian era
The SE is so dang small, and I love the 8 Plus's still having a home button and fingerprint sensor. I feel stuck because I don't want having my face scanned (even if Apple says it's not sent to a centralized auth server, it creeps me out).
It's pretty luxury nowadays. Decent smartphones go for less than half that cost, and good ones can be even cheaper. The accessibility and affordability of high quality mobile computing devices has risen across the board.
But Apple is very much on the upper mid range to high end side of things.
It's its own entire market. Generally I would suggest looking for bigger companies and ones which have policies to replace batteries if they are below a certain health level.
Anything that has 87% of the market is by definition mass-market.
Edit: Back in the '90s, PC Magazine had a saying, "the PC you want costs $3,000". This figure was fairly stable despite the improvement in PCs' performance over the decade.
By this standard, and considering that as well as a PC it's a phone, a camera, an atlas and an encyclopedia, a TV and a music player, the iPhone doesn't seem too much like a luxury.
"Machrone's Law" as I recall had a $5K price point. And, yes, it held until probably sometime in the 2000s. Yes, PCs were pretty expensive if you consider the PC you "wanted" was probably close to $10K in today's dollars.
I wouldn't call Finding Nemo or it's current equivalent mass market even though I have no doubt 87% of children have seen <<insert cultural movie I probably am missing by a generation or two>>.
I would call 'people under 10' to be a targeted market. And it seems Wikipedia agrees:
"The mass market differs from the niche market in that the former focuses on consumers with a wide variety of backgrounds with no identifiable preferences"
You ever tried that? It's a horrible experience. I love Android but you definitely need to spend much more to get something out of it. My advice is to get a second hand Samsung flagship - I have S9+, that's a great phone you can get for $200 - but don't go for anything less, you'll be very sorry if you do.
“ Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. ”
No, it's so bad it's better to have nothing for a while, save some money and then buy a better phone.
These phones really are so bad. Give it a go. Usually it's a horrible mess of Chinese tracking code, shitware apps you can't uninstall, and it won't be getting any system updates in a year.
Buy an older flagship second hand phone for $20, that's going to be much better experience than a new $20 one, even if it's 5+ years old and doesn't look good anymore.
It is when you need a phone to run apps to do your job or for simple things like banking. Talked to a pest control guy who works for a large company, and he needs a smartphone to do his job. He is quite literally managed through an app, needs it to check-in to work, for time sheets, find out where the next customer lives etc. Someone like that cannot go without a smartphone, requirements like that are leaking into low-level service and retail jobs, now.
No, it's not. Never buy a new $20 phone - it's subsidized by all that tracking and pre-installed shitware and it won't be getting updates soon, if it ever got even one, and the hardware is going to be absolutely terrible too. Buy a second hand one if $20 is all you can spend.
Samsung has unlockable bootloader and good LineageOS support. Unheard of with these $20 phones. And even without flashing, I'd still rather be tracked by Samsung than whatever they put into these $20 ones.
The average worldwide cost of a smartphone is ~$300.
Android phones can be bought new in box for $50-$170. The iphone SE which is basically last years model starts at $429 and comes without the power bring which allows you to plug into an outlet which costs an additional $18. That is iphones start at a cost more than the majority spend on a phone admittedly worldwide but that isn't what I call all cost points.
> The iphone SE which is basically last years model
The iphone SE is not last year's mode. It's an iPhone 8 body (including camera) with the current CPU. For example, the SEv3 came out this year and has the same CPU as the iPhone 13 which came out at the same time.
Yeah the SE is probably the fastest iphone model there is because the CPU is top notch while the screen resolution is smaller, so rendering is less complex computationally.
I don’t think that any iphone model has trouble with rendering, so it is likely not a bottleneck. Nonetheless, it is an insanely fast phone 2-3 generations ahead of current top android chips.
The Apple website prices only reflect the top end of the iPhone market. The iPhone SE 2nd generation is still sold new directly from low price/prepaid carriers for under half that price (right now $189 on the Tracfone website for example, probably even cheaper elsewhere). Compare that to new Android phones in the same price range which often are loaded with adware/spyware apps that cannot be uninstalled, and blocked from all security/software updates, the longevity makes an older SE competitive with the cheapest 3rd world country android phones in the long term, and with performance that exceeds even the highest end Android phones because of a better cpu.
Is there any point in calculating with worldwide averages? There are people who live on less than a single dollar per day, should we really compare them to first-world citizens who easily spend an order of magnitude more on the way to work?
Is there a reason to allow a tech company to arbitrarily emphasize ostracization and bullying to increase their bottom line?
I know there are common accusations of fan-boyism in both directions but I would hope this community can unite in calling out Apple over their messenger bullshit. Real stakeholders at Apple need to realize how damaging this profit optimization is.
They invented a ton of new messaging features that SMS didn't support, and the phone has to make it clear which conversations support those and which don't. So they had blue bubbles replace existing green ones.
Ostracization and bullying is what teens do for a thousand different reasons over a thousand different things. Yes Apple is responsible for creating a walled garden of messaging, just like WhatsApp has over most of the rest of the world, and basically every other rich messaging app is trying to do. It's not like Google Allo was trying to be any less walled garden.
But to say Apple is responsible for ostracization and bullying is to take the notion of responsibility too far. Is Supreme responsible for kids who bully other kids because they aren't wearing Supreme...?
If you want to fix teenage rebellion and cliquishness I applaud your efforts. I certainly personally suffered from bullying when I was a teenager over my clothes and haircut and pretty much every other facet of my person so if you can come up with a way for no one to ever endure it again I'd celebrate your achievement. Humanity hasn't managed to impart real empathy on teenagers in thousands of years of existence - we have accounts of rebellious teens from Rome so I assume it's not an easy fix.
So, maybe instead of focusing on bullying we can just focus on punishing companies that profit from bullying.
> So, maybe instead of focusing on bullying we can just focus on punishing companies that profit from bullying.
This is an extreme take. Yes bullying is is a consequence of society. Don’t be lazy and blame someone else for your societies ills. Especially when the solution is simple: encouraging the use of an alternative. No. RCS isn’t the alternative. WhatsApp, Line, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat, TikTok, Discord etc, etc, etc are all mature, are used widely by the rest of the world (where SMS is practically free to use as well). The easier solution, and much cheaper for everyone is to change behaviour. It’s extremely naïve to think that changing the colour of a bubble will stop this sort of bullying.
I don't think adding RCS support is going to instantly solve all the world's ills but Apple is pretty explicit about their reasoning for not supporting RCS: to create a specific and exclusive messenging experience on their phone. This exclusive experience is causing just another thing kids can be assholes about - they are currently and will forever continue to be assholes about a lot of stuff but this particular one is one artificially created by Apple to benefit their profitability. I'm sure in their internal meetings they like to think that exclusivity will only really affect adults and that we're mature enough not to bully each other (which, we mostly are, since the behavior we most bully as adults is bullying itself) but this exclusivity also affects teens that are far less mature. Personally I'd also love it if everyone moved off SMS/RCS in general since it's billed as an extreme luxury by carriers but I don't know if we can make that happen when Messenger comes pre-installed on iOS devices.
I don't assume that fixing a bubble color will fix all bullying but I do stand by your interpretation that I find that changing the color of a bubble will stop all this sort of bullying.
Apple
( the largest technology company by revenue (totaling US$365.8 billion in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company by market capitalization[0] )
Love that you angryly included the source, like the internet is a debate club. You and all the other pitchfork handlers are assuming Apple actually needs to be fixed for this entirely-made-up and self-imposed issue. They don't. It really is that clear.
It would be great if the general population would switch to another messaging app (or better yet a protocol that multiple clients support). I get the sense that this is how WhatsApp is used in other countries. It feels like a real regression to be using SMS based messaging in 2022. Seems like iMessage succeeds only by sheer numbers and ignorance of the general population.
Messaging is pretty fascinating. WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Line, Telegram, iMessage all so strongly dominate their respective set of countries/regions and a lot of them have their own distinct set of user mannerisms/memes.
I thought this was funny when I went to work in Korea for a year, as an American, with a bunch of other Americans; all of us stationed there in the military. Upon arrival, the other Americans immediately told me: "You need to get Kakao. It's how you text in Korea." I complied, but I often made the point that it was just another mobile app that they could install and use even back in the United States, and something like Hangouts would work just as well in Korea. When I moved back to the United States, I kept using Kakao to stay in touch with some of my old co-workers who were still in Korea, and this blew their minds, including some people who were otherwise quite tech savvy.
Note that I don't think many of us were using Kakao to talk with native Koreans, which would be a good reason for using it. Honestly, we didn't mix much. Nearly everybody on my contact list was an American.
It's similar in Japan. Everyone here uses LINE, and AFAICT, absolutely no one does SMS texting any more. I don't even know the phone numbers of any of my friends here; everyone just exchanges LINE contact info by QR code and that's it. The only time anyone uses a phone number seems to be for non-personal purposes (e.g., calling a business or government office), and the only time SMS seems to get used is for automated messages from official places (like your utility companies).
A lot of people here have iPhones, but it's not because of some stupid blue bubble.
What's funny is that Americans will sometimes make fun of Japan because some people (mainly businesses, maybe some elderly people) still use FAX, but Americans are the ones who are all still using SMS.
I can relate - I also spend 4 years living and working in Korea. And I also still have Kakao group chats filled with just other expats including gyopo, in addition to the ones with native friends. :)
Kakao is in many ways kind of the worst of chats - phone number-bound, unspec'd, closed, non-federated, unencrypted, known to be under surveillance, ad-infested. But on the other hand around 2010-2015 the UX was quite ahead of many others, and while Telegram & co have since pulled ahead it's still nicer than, say, WhatsApp or Signal.
I was using it in 2014-2015, and yeah I thought the UX was fine at that time. I did have the foresight to tie my account to my US Google Voice number (which has long been my primary number), so I didn't lose the account when I returned to the US and lost my KT phone number. I think that's what tripped up the other Americans who thought it was only an option in Korea.
I have few friends with iphones here in Spain and of those all of them use WhatsApp. Not sure if they use iMessage with other Apple users but nobody ever uses it to SMS me (and if they did I would tell them to use something secure)
The main messaging apps in use here are WhatsApp (#1 by far), Telegram (used a lot for groups) and sometimes signal.
I've never had a friend suggest something else like Google, iMessage or Facebook/Instagram. I'm not on any of those anyway (even though I have an Android phone I don't use a Google account with it).
Telegram has existed for a good number of years and despite all the hate from HN is the Ukrainians (and Russians) preferred way to share news (not military secrets, obviously).
Their flagships are, sure, but the SE is extremely competitive in the US, especially when you consider their longevity and support. And then of course there's the used market.
I mean, if 87% of teens own an iPhone, then that's very much by definition NOT luxury, as luxury is necessarily exclusive to some degree.
> I mean, if 87% of teens own an iPhone, then that's very much by definition NOT luxury.
Yeah this is the point. Apple has a strong brand and pricing tactics that places itself as a high-end company. This branding works really well and Apple is perceived as luxury by many people, but the truth is that it creates consumer products and there's no luxury in that. If the iPhone was a luxury you wouldn't find it everywhere in almost all high schools. Luxury doesn't dominate a mass market.
Some tech guys seems to think that value comes solely by a sort of price/performance ratio. If you can get MORE POWER for less money then you are getting ripped off. The rest of the price is not justified, you aren't paying for anything else so you must be paying a luxury premium.
That's really a shallow way of analysing apple products. You pay more because the following is included: long time support (software updated and that continues to work without random behavior for 5yrs), really high quality control and higher quality components (no things that randomly stop to work after one or two years), great customer and tech support (yeah, non-tech people actually need it), seamless software integration, privacy and security guarantees. There are so much more things included in apple devices beside than tech specs and people find a lot of value in that.
If you're talking about an unlocked smartphone that you can install apps on, there is absolutely no such thing as a new Android phone for $20 that any American consumer can buy.
The Samsung Galaxy A03s is Samsung's cheapest, it's considered "ultra-budget", and it costs $160. The Moto G Pure, Motorola's cheapest, is also $160.
(Edit in response to comments: yes if you buy a locked phone with a plan you can obviously get it cheaper upfront, but you're just dividing the remaining cost monthly. It's not actually cheaper. You can also get iPhones "for free" upfront if you pay for them on installment plans either bundled with a plan or separate from one -- so "prices" for locked phones are utterly meaningless for comparing the cost of iPhone vs Android.)
> If you're talking about an unlocked smartphone that you can install apps on, there is absolutely no such thing as a new Android phone for $20 that any American consumer can buy. Or even close to it.
Hardly anyone buys a phone unlocked in the US. Most buy carrier locked devices and at the low end, it's mostly prepaid. I just bought a Samsung A03 from target that was for prepaid carrier Total Wireless for $10. I didn't activate it, I just use it for testing a mobile app on a lower spec phone.
> The Moto G Pure, Motorola's cheapest, is also $160.
Right now, you can get a Moto G Pure for $49 from three different no-contract pre-paid carriers at Wal-Mart.
On the other-hand, plenty of people will buy a locked phone direct from a carrier. The Moto G you mentioned only costs $35 from tracfone. You can't change carriers, but you still can install arbitrary apps.
And as mentioned, you can buy any top end iphone for likely free with a sufficiently expensive plan, how is that relevant? You do pay for the full price (often multiple times).
Just for the sake of argument, there are brand new android go phones in amazon. So, if you need a phone you can install apps on, $50-$200 being the base price, you can consider $1000 a luxury.
Erm. Every iPhone comes with a lightning cable in the box. You can also buy lightning cables from other manufacturers for considerably less than $19. Get your facts right.
I think most kids understand that. It's just that adults reality is way easier - if you don't like some people you just don't spend time with them.
For kids, if you are not friends with people you spend 80% of your time with, you can't get the same kind of friendship elsewhere. The social games they play are way more complex than anything they teach them in school.
The shoes thing is definitely still true in some circles. It's a valuable lesson to teach, but a very hard one. And most people don't internalize it until adulthood. Most parents will shrug and just spring for the iphone rather than listen to the incessant complaints.
Yeah, my son is entirely too young for a phone right now, but my wife and my plan is to just upgrade every few years and give him one of our old phones. It wasn't too long ago that we did the same thing for our parents.
I just got a backup iPhone SE for $430. It's fantastic. Same chip as recent iPhones. Very decent camera. Better battery life than my 13 pro. Actually fits in pocket. More fun to play games with one-handed. Easily will last 5 years with a case. Not a luxury device, but pretty competitive with what a lot of young people in even middle-income countries would pay for phones.
$430 is getting close to luxury phone. And the features on remotely affordable iPhones are often below or maybe on par with what you used to be able to get from LG for $220 before they sadly stopped.
The chip only matters for gaming really, cheap Android phones have been fast enough for years, and if the price difference is similar to a Switch or something then I'd rather have a dedicated gaming machine if I was really into gaming.
I suppose it also matters for niche stuff like music production, but Android does very well at being a generic multipurpose device for non-enthusiast tasks, and at being cheap enough that you can afford a dedicated device.
Is it anywhere near a luxury if 88% of teens can afford it? The iphone starts at $430 and tops out much higher than that, so the ASP is considerably higher.
Feel free to interpret it as 87% of teenagers’ parents can afford to buy (often multiple) iphones for their children. The actual market share of apple in the US is also at around 50%, so I wouldn’t call it luxurious.
Though let’s add that a smartphone is probably the single most used item a person will own (used more often than your shoe), so it does make sense that people will give out quite a sum for these.
$430 is a lot of money though... and probably a lot for a "kids" phone too? You can get previous generation androids that aren't total POS for ~$150, like a Moto G 8-9.
In the US?? It was VERY rare to find a phone that cheap in 2014. I had a Nexus 5 in 2014 and it went for $350 ($437 in 2022 dollars). And that was considered a really good deal/budget phone.
I got an 'LG Optimus' phone in 2015 for $125 (after tip and tax, down from the $150 I had in my memory.) I don't have the 2013 receipt for the $40 phone though, that might have been through a WalMart contract.
A new 'Moto G Power' can be had for $150 right now (down from $250) and a new Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro can be had for $220. You can find sub-$50 phones too, especially in the used market.
What? I want to know more about the circumstances that led to you paying a tip while buying a cellphone. What country was this? What state/province? What store?
(I see that your comment mentions the US and Wal-Mart, but I think both of those are about the $40 purchase and I'm curious about the $125 purchase.)
Moto G line has models that are $169 new. You can get older used models for $60 and a line of service for $20 a month. I think people vastly overestimate how much money average people actually spend.
There's a fair number of posts in the thread now pointing out that iPhones are not-that-expensive, and all of them drive up my own engagement with the plight of the people who can't afford one. If you're, say, in a 5% bracket of society who can't afford one, it's all the more awful and potentially debilitating to have a marker on you that flags you as part of the 5%, no?
And at $430 it's still a lot more than 5% in the USA.
If you think a green bubble is the only thing that will mark you for that 5%, that people will judge, you've never been, or known anyone, that was poor.
With the SE (and regular 13 & 14) having not-that-great 60 Hrz displays, I could never switch from my 13 Pro to anything else but a 14 Pro (that's why my second phone is a Pixel 6 Pro [or sometimes a OnePlus 10 Pro], as 120 Hrz & 1440p are requirements for a phone to be in my pocket).
I used to have a SE (2nd Gen), prior to ever experiencing a better display, and now I can never go back,
However, if the came out with an SE that did have 120&1440p, I would definitely buy.
You can buy SE 2020's for significantly less, it's just that Apple themselves don't sell those in retail (but are still producing those and selling in gross).
This seriously concerns me. I'm almost of the opinion that teenagers should not have phones for anything other than strictly communicating: voice and video calls and messaging. But that cat is out of the bag and now we have people growing up literally addicted to devices that are very detrimental to brain development and intelligence, emotions, socialization, etc.
I remember my parents saying that TV was going to rot my brain... then video games... before that it was comic books. Are there any reputable studies that show having a smart phone is detrimental to the health of a teenager? I've seen studies suggesting social media has a negative influence on the mental health of certain teens, but they aren't one and the same.
I think the difference is that there are fairly conclusive studies showing that social media use, for all ages, can negatively influences happiness. Studies for TV, comics, and games never seemed to be conclusive. They're all very different things. An understanding of one doesn't give an understanding of another. They each deserve their own conclusion. I suspect VR will be the next one in that list.
That's true, but are TVs and comics in your pocket or beside your bed 24/7 like phones? Are they computers that also directly attach you to several friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers instantaneously across several avenues? Do they notify you that you are "missing" something? I don't think there's any example in human history of things that have garnered the daily and sustained use of human attention more than smartphones, tablets, and the Internet.
There is the book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr that covers this stuff and points to research.
There's also the Wall Street Journal article by him called Does the Internet Make You Dumber?.
Well, just use any of the litany of messenger programs out there that are available on every platform? I know there is a huge network effect, but I don’t think it is fair to blame apple here — they ought to somehow show whether a message goes from your SMS budget vs mobile data one.
This is quite frankly utter bullshit unless there is a lack of parenting going on i.e. you brought your kids up to be judgy assholes.
My kids and their friends have a right mix of all sorts of phones. They don't even talk about it. They just work out how to deal with it. Mostly that results in them picking a common platform, usually Discord or Snapchat and using that.
You act as if they don’t make cheap and relatively accessible phones. They do. iphone se is a perfectly good phone that can be bought new for $400. Sure it’s not at the absolute bottom end of the market, but it is fairly accessible when you compare it to their flagship phones.
Maybe America is different but to me 400 for a phone isn't cheap. If poor people in the US are buying their children $400 phones then they can shut up about high living costs.
I'd consider my ~$130 Oppo to be the upper end of cheap with NFC and snappy performance.
In the current context, "cheap" is used in comparison to base configs of flagship smartphone models, such as Galaxy S22, Pixel 7 Pro, and iPhone 14. All of which tend to go for $700+. And that's not even mentioning the luxury models like foldable Galaxy ZFold4 going for $1.7k+.
Sure, I wouldn't count a brand new $400 smartphone to be the most budget one, but it is almost half the price of a flagship. And that's not even getting into the used market.
Just because manufacturers have inflated the prices over the years that doesn't make $400 cheap.
My current $200 phone is better in every aspect than the high end flagship phones not too long ago. With its performance and features it's still far from the low end.
Apple phones also last long enough, barring accidents, that if the adults are using iPhones, the kids can probably get hand-me-downs that're still usable and receiving updates for at least a couple years.
Fortunately, an iPhone isn't strictly a luxury, as there is still a healthy market of second-hand and independently refurbished models available at a variety of price points. Apple's actions over the last few years threaten to seriously undermine this, though.
The low end goes way lower with one than the other. And that's important for everyone who's not as privileged as you and me. And believe me, an iPhone (any brand new unit), just as the Pixel or the Galaxy S22 are way unaffordable to a huge swath of the population. That being said, the low end of Android phones is quite good and quite quite cheap.
It's like saying that there are Lamborghinis that cost as much as a Nissan GT-R Nismo. Yes, that may be so (even if it isn't in reality). But your Nissan Altima is way more affordable to way more people.
Then just buy an iPhone, or get over it? You're acting as if Android vs. iPhone is an immutable part of a child's identity. It's not.
You can get a totally workable used iPhone cheap, because they keep working for so long.
It's not like you need a lot of horsepower for texting. My kids take a beat up 8-year-old iPhone 6 out when they go to sleepovers and things. It still works fine.
Nationalistic flamewar, and any flamewar, is not ok on HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly, including elsewhere in this thread. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Two options:
- everyone installs an app that can deal with multiple vendors (like 90% of the messengers)
- everyone that is not having a phone of vendor x gets a new phone from vendor x and throws away the old one (or keeps both lol)
The former is almost for free and the latter costs hundreds of dollars .
It's so much worse that you cannot even make out this difference
Is this similar to the "trauma" suffered by teens that wore Levi's Jeans that didn't have the Red Tab, back in the 80s and 90s? To compare a green text bubble to mental health issues is offensive.
I'm pretty certain that a lot more interaction occurs through phones than through jeans.
As an adult, some of my friends have asked me to switch to an iphone so they could use imessage features in a group chat. It's not hard to imagine being left out of a group for this reason. I don't think I've met a girl in my age group who has anything other than a negative opinion of "Android Users." This stuff doesn't bother me, but I can see how it would upset kids.
I'm ignorant, but what are the features in group chats that Android people don't get? The heart/emoticon bubble things? I used to do group chats with my last Android phone, but now that I have iPhone...I just have too much anxiety to open these chats and respond, because I don't want to hear the notification sound buzz in triplicate over the next hour. I dislike my phone and using it so much that it's making me socially isolated.
Apparently adding a new member to a group text with an android user is a much less pleasant experience than if everyone is on imessage. I'm the android user causing problems so I dont really know the details :P But honestly that the guy singled out the "one android user" who was making his life difficult was disconerting to say the least.
I almost always have my phone on silent for that reason. I like to check my phone when I want to, not when it wants me to.
> Apple is aware of how their systems ostracize children, in their own peer groups, who can't afford to carry around luxury phones.
Tell me about it. Audi, BMW, Ferrari and Lamborghini have been ostracizing me, and so have all the gas stations around where I live! Not only that, but Microsoft, developers of pro software, movie theaters, restaurants, travel agents, lawyers and hookers! The nerve of them all to exclude me from their products and services simply because I can't afford them. It's very cruel and so arbitrary.
I think people here take issue with the walled garden model of an intra-device comm protocol, not the price point or desirability of iPhones. The comparison to luxury cars is especially crude because it's an industry far more tightly regulated to the benefit of customers than any section of consumer electronics.
> I think people here take issue with the walled garden model of an intra-device comm protocol, not the price point
GGP specified ostracizing by Apple of those "who can't afford to carry around luxury phones." Now you are suggesting that Apple excludes communication from non-Apple customers by using an "intra-device comm protocol," which I believe most refer to as iMessage. I'm pretty sure it was conceived to save the user from paying for SMS and MMS, or at least being a relief to use of those for-pay protocols, and the dreaded "green bubble" merely an indicator that the cell provider may be charging for it.
The idea of competing for space here seems to be very popular, and there are many alternatives, such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Signal, and many others. I just had the strongest sensation of deja vu, no, yes... something... do you at all remember IRC, IRQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, MSN Messenger, Google Talk? I don't recall anyone complaining about iChat or any of the other services mentioned for being exclusive, which they all are.
Are you sure the grievance is legitimate? Where were the complaints before with the legacy chat apps? What makes Apple deserving of special scrutiny while every other message service with similar exclusivity is doing nothing wrong?
I also don't see how Apple is responsible for narcissistic parents raising bullies and shitheads. Innocent kids being ostracized really could be, and I think really is, the responsibility of bad parents.
Let's put it this way: I am largely on board with your line of reasoning, in so much that you're forcing people to make up their mind on what they're really upset about and what the root problems are. :-)
For myself and my own grievances, I'm not a fan of comm protocols that don't allow an open market of clients and servers to exist and to interoperate. I much prefer using the ones that do, and so I do a lot of my group chatting on Matrix in the social spaces where I can. The "green bubble effect" and who gets to control it adds another to my list of reasons to want the more open systems to be well-made and prosper, although it's not a primary driver.
I think you have a nice intentionally harmless approach to this, but I'm still not sure how iMessage is exclusive of other protocols rather than conveniently saving the users from cell providers' charges for SMS and MMS when possible. iMessage still supports SMS and MMS, and it only prioritizes its iMessage protocol when messaging other Apple device users. I don't use iMessage and never have, but my understanding is it communicates to Android users, other smartphones and even dumbphones though the cell providers' SMS and MMS services. Seems like the only ones that should have any complaint here are cell providers for being undermined and cut out of their instant messaging revenues.
My take here is that if iMessage is truly a Better Tool, I'd be great if it was available on any computer that fulfills the hardware requirements to participate. For example, Apple could release an iMessage app for Android (and if they priced it fairly, this would still be cheaper than an iPhone, yet still turn them a profit). Or release specs so others can do so.
Do I think they should be or should feel obligated to do so? I'm not sure. I think society is having a debate about whether modern communication networks have "public infrastructure"-type characteristics and need to be regulated more in general, and this is probably also a question on that spectrum to a degree. Let's say I wouldn't be surprised if one day we come to the conclusion that the answer is yes and a larger functionality scope for what is considered basic interoperability is important to us, but there are also some good arguments against it.
Another angle to approach it from is the spectrum of arguments pro and con of bundling/unbundling of hardware and software/services (i.e. need-iPhone-to-iMessage). Governments which run environmental certification/badging schemes for example are increasingly expanding them to apply to software and considering or enacting rules that are decidedly against bundling with HW. The reason is that it tends to cause more frequent hardware replacements to stay compatible with SW/services and therefore a larger energy/carbon footprint - unbundling allows legacy HW to keep going longer on average. A project along these lines I was tangentially involved with myself was the research to expand Germany's "Blauer Engel" label to software.
What guides my thinking here is a bit overboard and flowery again, and also personal. As a software engineer and teenager myself I cut my teeth on making and maintaining one of the better-known IRC clients at the time; this was my first project that really had other users project part of their lives into it, hours at a time. For me it was quite powerful when I realized that I knew people who had met using my chat software and later gotten married and started families. It solidified my view of the engineer as a supportive toolmaker for others to better live their lives and build civilization. The modern day equivalent to the people who conceived of and made the flint tools others would use to start the fires to tell stories around. Comm tools being broadly available and interoperable and their social effects are stuff close to my heart, and stories of folks suffering from lack of access that isn't due to real technical barriers just aren't great, even knowing the complex economics driving the situation.
> if it was available on any computer that fulfills the hardware requirements to participate
Thank you, that's the walled garden perspective I was missing, same as the complaint of those that want to run macOS on non-Mac hw. Usually the walled garden complaints are from the other side of the wall, Apple device users being prevented from installing what they want unless it is already available from AppStore. I didn't consider the other side of that wall.
Yes, sorta. But I think the case of a chat protocol and "Apple should make macOS available for all PCs" are still a bit different.
For example, speaking personally I have no gripe if Apple doesn't want to write an iMessage app for Android, but I think it would be great if the specs and/or APIs were available so that others could write one, even without reaching for one of the regulation-style arguments mentioned above.
Both imply asking Apple to spend effort. With putting macOS on PCs the effort is obvious. But making it possible for others to write an iMessage client also requires effort: For example designing iMessage's technology in such a way that a malicious client can't compromise the system, keeping the protocol relatively stable and sanely versioned, documentation, and so on. With my engineer's hat on, as an opinion, I think this type of effort would contribute to make iMessage better tech as it's in line with the nature of a strong comm protocol, while macOS doesn't benefit as clearly from being on other computers.
The main counter-argument to it is the notion that walled-garden messengers have innovated faster on UX than the standardized ones and then you're back to unresolved quibbles about what's user value and so on. I don't think we've found the one true way to better-tool-to-more-people yet.
(iPhone user here) It does seem to me that Apple isn't playing fair and this is no longer the technical issue it once was. Apple has so far refused to adopt RCS (the successor to SMS and MMS) which is now an industry standard for text messaging. Because of that, aside from the green bubble, the text messaging experience with non-iPhone users is subpar. Images and videos are compressed and things like tapback and group texts just stink.
RCS is awful. It’s an out-of-date, encumbered “standard” with poor global commonality in adoption. It exists for one reason only - because US carriers wanted some way to keep charging per message like their old sms cash cow, instead of being reduced to just proving dumb internet piping. Despite that, the carriers couldnt even agree amongst themselves on the "standard" RCS features to deploy for 10 years or so, until google co-opted the effort for their own goals semi-recently.
Let it die.
That’s only sort of true. Consumers don’t pay directly, but the carriers charge each other for them, and they still make a lot off people injecting sms into the system (think twilio, marketing, 2fa, application generated traffic). RCS was aimed (and priced) to try and make lots of money off a2p
There are some bad points for RCS like encryption, but still it's far better for openess/compatibility compared to iMessage. Perhaps good to have as an alternative to MMS for fallback of iMessage.
RCS is not end-to-end encrypted. (But neither is SMS, I get it).
The fact that they're pushing a protocol in 2022 that has state-of-the-art design for fifteen years ago, is disingenuous, and is emblematic of all the chefs that have their hand in the pot with the Android ecosystem.
While this may be some technicality in a spec, the reality is that all the people I know using Android are enjoying end-to-end 1:1 encrypted conversations using Google Messages. Group messages were announced to get e2e encryption soon.
The month-day-year format is the standard for 4.23% of the global population, but it's the default in most IT systems, including every globally-deployed cloud system I have ever used.
Does the iPhone have a standard that other phones could adopt? Ie is your argument that Apple has been pushing an alternate standard, but Google is rejecting it? If so what is it?
> Given the iPhone's marketshare, is it RCS really the industry standard?
It's funny to me seeing this statement, as half of the people out there push it the other way when discussing App Stores. "Well iPhone isn't a monopoly world wide."
Naive question here. What's the encryption story here with RCS?
What I like about iMessage is that I feel its relatively secure. Given the choice of trusting Apple vs a Frankenstein arrangement between Android and the various carriers, I'm inclined to go with Apple, unfair practices aside.
RCS with Google's implementation allows e2ee for two party conversations (finally, as of last year). It doesn't do e2ee for group chats, and other implementations don't provide e2ee.
RCS is less of an industry standard than iMessage.
Apple built something better. So did Google. Then Google killed theirs. Then they did the same thing three more times.
It's no wonder nobody wants to use Google messaging, and that Google resorts to smear campaigns. People would rather use WhatsApp spyware from FB/Meta or totally unencrypted Discord/Slack than bother with another Google IM product (which, let's be clear, is 100% what RCS is).
PS: Apple preserves a backdoor in the end to end crypto of iMessage for government surveillance that allows Apple to read all iMessages. iMessage isn't good either.
It's (iMessage) not a standard if it isn't open for adoption by anyone else.
It doesn't matter how much better it is, if the only way to use it is via Apple hardware. It's their prerogative to do that, and it makes good business sense assuming it doesn't bring them monopoly problems (and IMO it probably shouldn't due to the aforementioned stats re: worldwide usage at 27%, and even US usage is only at 55%).
But it in no way is a standard. It's just a proprietary piece of software. So literally any other standard proposal is "more of a standard" than iMessage.
I want to against this. Even if the app is well made, messaging platform only for specific company's devices is completely broken idea. Tragedy is that US people adopted completely broken platform.
Lol RCS a standard. Because Google says so, just as with so-called "web standards"? In the real world, people use WhatsApp, SnapChat, Insta, Telegram, Signal, and, in fact, iMessage and SMS/MMS.
Iphone users on android devices are also subpar. When you "like" a text or whatever those interactions can get sent as a new text. One iphone user in a group text can spam the entire group with a flood of pointless interactions.
Isn't this because they're trying to make RCS universal and Google has that API locked down from anyone else using it while claiming "RCS is a universal open standard" lol. Typical "do no good" stance from the goog
I know the "green vs blue bubbles" gets a lot of press, but as someone who is not a teenager, and on the contrary is considerably past middle age at this point, that is not the real reason iMessage has a stranglehold on users.
I've got an Android, and I recently went on a vacation with a group of friends who all had iPhones. I did feel a bit like a leper in the group chat we had set up for our vacation, and it wasn't because of green and blue bubbles. Not only was the experience pretty broken for me, it essentially broke the experience of everyone else. I couldn't do emoji responses, which are a huge way folks communicate in group chats these days. Videos I received on my phone were essentially unwatchable. Videos or images I would send to the group would randomly just not show up on some people's phones. At the end of the vacation my good friend said flat out (jokingly, but still with a point) "Dammit hn_throwaway_99, just get an iPhone".
It's the breaking of group chats that makes iMessage the lynchpin of Apple's anticompetitive stance here.
SMS has supported Unicode since the very early 2000s. I remember getting SMS messages in Thai on my Nokia 7110 GSM when I was in Thailand in 2003. So there's no technical reason why iMessage fallback to SMS doesn't support emoji.
I'm not talking about the ability to put emojis in text messages. I'm specifically talking about the way virtually all messaging apps these days (iMessage, Android RCS messaging, Slack, etc.) have the ability to do emoji reactions to previous messages, e.g. long press and add a thumbs up, heart, barfing, whatever.
> At the end of the vacation my good friend said flat out (jokingly, but still with a point) "Dammit hn_throwaway_99, just get an iPhone".
My friend groups mostly communicate on WhatsApp (a lot of them are either international, or Americans with significant overseas travel). This is the first time I have ever been glad to be a WhatsApp user. Oh, and messages, photos, and emoji reaction show up just fine cross-platform.
Asking a friend to get a $xxxx device because the company you use is unwilling to make their silly messaging application cross-platform is extremely out of date.
1. RCS is now available and a standard. iMessage already "degrades" to sending SMS messages to those not on iMessage. There is no reason they can't better support RCS.
2. While MMS groups were missing a ton of features, there are just things now that are much worse as an Android user interacting with an iMessage group than it was previously in an MMS group. I.e. I never used to have issues with dropped images before, but in an iMessage group it's like a crapshoot whether my photos get delivered.
It is a bag of standard parts thrown together by a bunch of telecommunications companies in a desperate attempt to hold on to their 50c per message cash cow.
If you spend more than a minute actually looking into it, you'll realise that Apple would basically have to run it in a virtual machine for security, and then hand over control to a bunch of telcos that can't even all agree on what is and isn't included in RCS.
> It is a bag of standard parts thrown together by a bunch of telecommunications companies in a desperate attempt to hold on to their 50c per message cash cow.
But in the US (the market being discussed here) basically all US mobile plans include unlimited texting anyway...
Rumor has it that, despite Apple's public claims, one reason why is that iMessage is tied to a physical device. This helps keeps spam, malware, and banned devices all under control. Expanding to Windows and Android by definition means that iMessage can no longer have that per-device tie, which undermines these controls.
1. It's multi-device at least when we're talking about non-phones; that's one of its better features, being able to use it from your Mac or iPad
2. You can make an iMessage account without having an iPhone; just having an email/Apple ID and some other Apple device to use it from
3. If you had an Android phone, presumably you wouldn't also have an iPhone at the same time? And even if you were using it on an iPhone, it seems like nothing stops you from being logged in on a second iPhone
Yeah, and that's exactly why I've never received spam through iMessage even once over many years (despite being active in a bunch of group chats and 1:1 conversations).
All while I receive whatsapp/telegram message spam on a fairly regular basis, despite not being active in any groups or channels on those apps (and in general, opening them maybe once or twice a week at most). The only reason I even use those 2 apps is to talk to select few old relatives of mine who are not very tech literate and who just happened to learn how to use those apps +a couple of friends who simply insist on using those apps.
Hard for me to disagree with that. The reason I have an iPhone is that I was having trouble with the family group chat when my mom was in the hospital.
Whenever I go in vacations with friends we talk. Rarely, we talk over the phone, otherwise we talk in person. Never text. That is the point of going together and not separately.
The sarcastic tone of your response is annoying, given that it misses the point.
Yes, I do, and I use them. But when I'm amongst a group of, say, 9 other iPhone users, who happily all already use iMessage (and already have existing chats among different subgroups of the members), telling everyone they need to switch over to a different, unfamiliar messaging app doesn't go over very well. It's difficult enough to attempt this among adults; it's not surprising that teenagers would laugh in the face of another kid who attempted a "Hey guys, let's all use Signal!!" request
It's worse than that. At our kids' school, they are required to have iPads for their school work. By default then, iMessage becomes pretty much the only game in town for them to message with their friends. If they want a phone that can also then participate in those conversations, iPhone is the only option, it's not even a choice. SMS isn't a thing, if you have any other phone, your friends with iPads only don't even have a phone number to send it to. Something like Discord is really the only other option, but that only seems to have any sort of mind share with kids who are more than just casual gamers.
I find it strange how iMessage has become so important (for lack of a better word) in the States. I have had to use it for the last 2-3 months, as WhatsApp cannot be installed on my not-updated older iOS anymore, and I have to say that WhatsApp is way better at doing the messaging thing than iMessage.
Granted, I'm in my early 40s and I honestly didn't know that there were different "bubble colours" when using iMessage (depending on the phones that are part of the conversation, that is).
Although in the States, most people don't use WhatsApp by default unless they regularly text overseas (which most don't). I have it installed but there is like one person who I very seldom use it with. Another person I use Facebook Messenger with. Work folks I often use Google Chat for. Everything else is SMS/iMessage and, as a non-teen, I absolutely don't care what color the bubble is (unless there's some cost implication for international texting).
Text messaging is free for the most part in the US--and most people don't care about encryption details--so it's natural to just use what's built in.
Let’s not forget that on the original iPhone, all the bubbles were green because it only had sms. When iMessage came to the iPhone, Apple didn’t intend to rule the world with blue bubbles, blue was just an indication that you were talking to one of the few other iPhone users.
> When iMessage came to the iPhone, Apple didn’t intend to rule the world with blue bubbles, blue was just an indication that you were talking to one of the few other iPhone users.
While I want to agree with that statement, Apple really makes it obvious that they try to make SMS suck compared to iMessage.
The biggest glaring example is the green and blue shown in their messaging app.
Their design guidelines literally for iMessage for businesses say contrast of text to background should be 4.5:1 or higher[0], but to target 7:1. Now what do their text bubbles comes out to?
Someone did a blog post about that, but it was actually misinformation (literally).
The Contrast between Green and Blue is actually roughly identical, it's just that both colors fade upward as time passes. So, the author picked a green bubble from higher up (which had faded), and a blue bubble from the bottom (which was fresh and dark), thereby comparing Apples and Oranges. Both have similar contrast when freshly sent and arrived, and similar faded contrast.
> Someone did a blog post about that, but it was actually misinformation (literally).
> The Contrast between Green and Blue is actually roughly identical, it's just that both colors fade upward as time passes. So, the author picked a green bubble from higher up (which had faded), and a blue bubble from the bottom (which was fresh and dark), thereby comparing Apples and Oranges. Both have similar contrast when freshly sent and arrived, and similar faded contrast.
You wanna check yourself? Because I pulled screenshots from my phone and tested this myself before I even posted that first comment.
I'll even go back and verify with the best case scenario that you stated of the color the very bottom pixel of a bubble at the very bottom of the screen (not counting the border).
Why not even do the simplest thing of verifying before you try to claim "mIsInFoRmAtIoN".
EDIT: Re-reading this it has hostility in it, which I'm sorry for and apologize for. I am simply tired of people claiming "misinformation" on a topic while not even bothering to check the claim or to even try to backup what they claim themselves. I specifically went out of my way to check this, and include the exact color values. Only to be replied to with "well someone said XYZ" with no links, supporting information, or even an attempt at proving what they claimed.
I definitely think part of it was to make those iMessages more visually appealing. I don’t think they knew how well it was going to work, but to some degree I do think this is what they were going for.
I mean it’s possible, but the messages icon on the iPhone is a green bubble itself. So are the phone and Facetime icons. I think Apple actually liked Green! They uses it on the most important apps on the phone.
Same in Australia although American cultural bullshit tends to leak/be adopted. So the blue/green bubble probably will become a thing with our teenagers after they import it via social media.
I love the idea that somewhere, there are a bunch of high-priced antitrust lawyers having multi-hour serious discussions and debates about green and blue bubbles.
and what would those lawyers do? green just means sms. if you disable iMessage you should get that on iPhones too. there has to be a way to differentiate the method of sending texts, as they may incur some costs in some markets.
My two high scoolers are produ members of Android generation and apparently dong give a damn as long as they get to play games and chat on discord and text with girls. I am going to count that as a win against the industrial marketing complex.
Ahhh I see what you did there. No, totally, it is either succumb to apples marketing or support Google ad monopoly.
I did try to give them the HTC windows phones that I had in reserve but there was a limit to their understanding...
I'd call it a win if you get them into rooting and custom distros like Lineage (which might give them a better overall appreciation of how tech works, encourage them to tinker, etc.)
Maybe... It's better than using Google/Samsung/whatever build of Android sure - but it's still feeding the google machine which is not a good thing. We need completely 'de-enterprised' Linux/BSD options.
Yeah, I wish there were good Linux options for handheld touch devices. Though I'll have to say that Android rooting as well as Hackintosh experiments (among other things) definitely paved the way for me running Linux fulltime and going into the engineering field. Lineage and others still let you use the standard social apps so you can communicate, while providing a platform to experiment and debug when things go wrong.
With big-tech algorithms working against that, weakening their minds so they just accept the easy, clean route of what is put in front of them /s ... good luck :-)
You realize Apple is turning these days rapidly into ad-too company. The money are too sweet and seemingly users don't care enough. And Apple's marketing is much stronger than Google's, just look a this whole thread...
The phones from an ad company let you use apps not made by the ad company with the same functionality. The phones from the luxury and ads company don't.
Granted I don't live in the US, but is Apple even spending a lot on marketing the iPhone in later years? I feel like their success is based on social pressure/word of mouth more than bombarding the public with messages. At least where I live, most of the iPhone ads are made by carriers if anything
Yes they spend tons in Europe, and very cleverly. Every day I go around International school in Geneva, where children of the powerful of this world and future power holders study.
All ad posters around the school are currently Iphone 14. So are some ultra-premium locations within city. Nobody is doing as big ad campaign here as Apple.
And they know it works, peer pressure is pure emotion-based reaction, and teenagers are not yet experienced and smart enough to fight it.
"If you see a green message bubble instead of a blue one, then that message was sent using MMS/SMS instead of iMessage. There are several reasons for this: The person that you sent the message to doesn't have an Apple device. iMessage is turned off on your device or on your recipient's device."
So apparently iPhone users see text messages from us Android users in a green bubble instead of a blue one. And apparently they've been conditioned to think this is icky?
It more means the group chat will all switch to using SMS (to include the non iPhone user) which isn’t as feature rich as using iMessage. It’s not a judgement on someone for their phone, it’s more that including their phone makes the group chat function worse.
Your quoted source has that backward -- messages you've received always appear in light grey bubbles, regardless of whether they came in via SMS or iMessage.
It's only messages which you *sent* which appear in green or blue, to let you know whether each message was sent via SMS (which may have incurred a charge from your telco) or iMessage (which is free). At least to a casual glance, there's nothing on received messages to indicate whether they came in via SMS or iMessage.
In iMessage, which seems to be a thing in the USA (I don't know of any other market where it's a dominant messaging system), non-iPhone users participating via SMS appear to iPhone users with a different (green) background color to their message bubbles.
Your own messages appear in a different color, not theirs. At least not on current iOS.
It's so you know that the messages you're sending are going over MMS instead of iMessage, so zero features other than sending plain text to individual recipients will work well, if at all. It's like time traveling back to the late '00s with text-chat-groups inexplicably splintering mid-conversation, adding new participants screwing everything up, and potato-quality photo and video attachments that take forever to download and simply fail a good fraction of the time.
My friend group solved this by switching to WhatsApp. But if we'd all been iPhone users I doubt we'd have bothered, because iMessage is at least as good and, if you use some of the more-advanced features, much better, provided your chats are actually going over iMessage and not MMS.
iMessage is basically exactly the same as having a good messaging app just for iPhones plus a necessarily-shitty MMS one, except you don't have to switch between them because they're combined.
I distinctly recall Google trying to do the exact same thing when I was an Android user, must have been over a decade ago: on a major OS update, they replaced the texting app with some unified MMS/other-messaging-service (who could possibly keep track of them all? May have just been gchat, at the time) app. I had to "downgrade" to the old texting app because the new one was so broken that it was unusable. In particular, it lost messages all the time, or would switch mid-conversation between MMS and other-messaging-protocol, screwing everything up. iMessage is nowhere near that bad, at least, even when in "green bubble" mode.
Android users’ text message bubbles show up green, and you can’t send the “tapback” reactions (or rather, they show up as a “so and so has liked your post” rather than a thumbs up icon). This is annoying for Android users and it’s kind of tedious for iPhone users to have to vet group chats to see if there is a single Android user who might be annoyed. Apparently this is factoring into people’s phone purchasing calculus.
It actually only shows the "so and so has liked your post" on Apple devices unless they've changed it recently. In Google messages you see the reactions from iphone users as they should be shown.
Maybe an old version of android but this has what it's look like on Google Messages. Think it changed sometime in the past year. https://i.imgur.com/GYHMkHy.png
That's patently incorrect. Incoming texts from my Android-user contacts are green bubbles. Incoming texts from my iPhone-user contacts are blue. Source: I'm looking at my iPhone right now.
Who tf uses imessage? Its all whatsapp, telegram or fb messenger or discord here. Sweden. SMS is not used. Only for... passwords, spam and reminders for packages.
Its gonna come here too. And probably is here already but I am an out of touch old man. We love to ape america and all the kids wanna be in eupohria on hbo.
Anecdotally, my twins (both 17) have been asking for Android phones since they got their first phone at 14. I thought they’d be excited to get iPhones because I read reports and stories like this, but it doesn’t appear to be universal.
It's about as anti-competitive as you can get. Even putting aside the shortcomings of SMS, simply putting bright white text on an acid green background is visually nauseating. Why would a company that cares so much about aesthetic make this deliberately terrible visual design choice? If iPhone had a market share below 50%, this would be a terrible business decision. Turns out, since they have a very high market share, it's an excellent business decision.
> My two oldest children - 13 and 15 - have loudly proclaimed that having a "green bubble" would be worse than death.
They'll get over it quickly, since in reality (I also have two teens) all group chats with friends are "green bubble" chats because participants include Android users. They'll instead grow to loathe the "blue bubble" chats with their parents and/or guardians.
I had hoped the younger generations would move away from being complicit in manufactured corporate status schemes, as a kind of rebellion against the terminally online & connected older generations. Sad to hear they're more compliant with these schemes than any other generation. Hopefully the next generation will rebel.
Everybody should just install Signal and be done with this nonsense. Teach children that when they use Imessages, Apple can intercept them. This is not a complete endorsement for Signal as decentralized E2EE protocols are better for other reasons, but Signal is the easiest for people to adopt.
it's not "pressure to conform" it's that you will end up gradually pushed out of friend gcs especially. it's not always intentional but there is 100% a certain amount of social isolation that usually results.
(p.s. this is actually a bit better than it used to be, everyone's a lot more comfortable doing a snap gc because it has most of the same features and the UX isn't dogshit like a mixed gc vs imessage.)
What astonishes me is how the mind of teens just cannot palpate the world they live in. Not to plagiarize Louis CK but even with an android flagship in their hands at 14, being cast away due to strange techno/market forces is enough to forget everything and suffer.
in 2050 kids will storm out because their pocket nuclear fusor isn't the trendiest. 'thanks moooom'
I'm sorry, but no they won't. They will make a small amount of money, and then will be sued into the ground by Apple if they ignore the mountain of cease and desist warnings they will get.
There have been a few attempts to make a cross-platform iMessage client (see: https://bluebubbles.app/), and they all require either genuine Mac hardware, or a virtual machine with spoofed serial numbers.
I use matrix bridges for all my chats (to Whatsapp, telegram and signal) so I could add iMessage too. But I don't have anyone in my friends or family that wants to use it.
> A lot of teenagers would rather be dead than uncool.
and the more we push this culture-magnified story about teenagers, the more this will might approach actually being true. An awful lot of teenagers would much rather be uncool than dead, actually like their parents, don't find school terrible and so on. But for some reason, our culture has been spinning a yarn about them for decades now that both stands in opposition to the truth, and has simultaneously reshaped it.
from someone who is not too long outside of high school and so maybe remembers this better:
imessage is specifically impactful because it doesn't exclude from individual communication as much as groups. you can still talk to your friends just fine but i remember being left off group texts because the experience is otherwise just so bad. can't add people can't react to stuff whatever.
what usually happens is there ends up being a second gc: 1 is ostensibly the "main one" with everyone in it and the unofficial second is with just blue bubbles. but communication usually ends up in the blue bubble one.
i will add it's not nearly so bad now, most people just do a snap gc but that wasn't the case e.g. 6 years ago.
Seems like an opportunity to teach that it is folly to "Keep up with the Jones."
Wait till they hear that they can make purchases in other areas to "Keep up with the Jones" - fancy cars and McMansions. By then they will be fully enslaved to debt, but boy will they have that glorious glorious status.
I hate apple with a passion for not opening up iMessage, but here we are.
That being said, I am getting my first iPhone in just a few days because I am sick of the 100000 choices between android phones that all suck in one way or another. I don't believe they will last more than a few years if my last samsung is any indication. And I don't give a crap about what android can do- I just want a phone that works.
So I guess you win Apple.. but it's criminal that a vast reason they have so much market share is because of imessage and the fact that it's "broken" with SMS to some degree.
Minor annoyance? Android is becoming just as much of a locked down walled garden as iOS. Hardware remote attestation is already here and it threatens to deny access to apps to all rooted phones.
If I must be in one of these little walled gardens, I'm choosing the better kept one. It sure as hell isn't Google's.
Yeah, running GrapheneOS will cause remote attestation to fail, rooted or not. Because it's done in hardware, software like Magisk will be unable to fake the attestation. It's complete bullshit.
You can hate the King with a passion but still pay your taxes. Sometimes people feel like they barely have a choice and can hate them in-part for that too.
I hate Verizon and Comcast with a passion but if it’s between them or no internet access, well I hardly call that a choice.
I would like to use a Google-free phone.
However, online banking apps (e.g., N26) require you to have a mainstream phone (Android/iOS).
You can't have root access, since apparently those banking apps won't work then.
You need to have a SIM card as well, and you need to identify yourself when purchasing one.
I really hate all that.
At this point, I dream to live without smart technology as much as possible.
Living mostly with "dumb tech".
"Smart" ain't smart for us, it seems, it is for the benefit of those companies (e.g. Samsung TV's).
More control, I suppose.
Can you install uBlock Origin on a Samsung TV?
Furthermore, Samsung phones come with bloat, and you can't even remove them easily.
I mean, if you hate Apple and Google, you don't have a whole lot of other options. I'm vaguely aware of some competitors, but they're quite obscure. And I don't think going without a smartphone is all that feasible either these days.
N26 (Europe) requires you to have a smartphone and a SIM card.
Obtaining a SIM card means that you need to identify yourself.
You can't just have a smartphone.
The OS needs to be unrooted and also mainstream (iOS/Android).
This really sucks.
Furthermore, Google and Discord lock your accounts, if you don't provide a phone number.
The alternative might be to use an Android/iOS just for banking.
Another Android/iOS for services such as Google (Play store).
And a Librem or any other open source phone as your daily driver.
Or, just live with a "dumb phone" or no additional phone.
I am not sure about the SIM card.
Is it even possible within the EU to buy one without identification?
Obviously, if you’re in one of the many EU countries that require identification (even if simpler than Germany’s video identification system) it’s not trivial to go to a supermarket in NL.
I imagine it’s possible to buy one online from NL, CZ, the UK if it has EU roaming, etc.
I think you might be understating "minor annoyance". I don't like Amazon but I often buy niche products from them because I'll get them in days instead of months.
> it's criminal that a vast reason they have so much market share is because of imessage and the fact that it's "broken" with SMS to some degree.
That's just speculation, though. It's entirely plausible that the fundamental reason they have so much market share is because people agree with you:
> I just want a phone that works.
I've gone back and forth between Android and iPhone myself, and what draws me back to iPhone is the lower TCO and more appliance-like nature of the phone. I have enough tech toys to play with every day, I don't need my phone to be one of them.
That suggestion that people buy iPhones merely because of iMessage is outrageous to a non-American. While I might certainly be one of the reasons, I doubt it’s the reason, unless the user is 12.
Not being able to communicate in large group chats with all your friends is social suicide for many people. You won't get 10-15 people that have used IMessage for years to switch, so yes imessage is a primary reason to use iphone.
Absolutely. iPhones have a much better resale value if you replace them every two or three years. And if you just want to keep them until they die, they receive updates for maybe 10 years.
I've never lost more money on phones than when I was buying flagship Android phones.
You might be able to spend less if you buy the crappiest Android phones. But that's not even a little bit comparable to the cheapest iPhone.
Is there some sort of troll farm apple campaign going on here? In my experience Apple has been much more troublesome, their walled garden pretty much guarantees bugs and errors and ofcourse the trademark throttling of CPU, battery, functionality in general when they think it's time for you to get a new phone, where's the die-hard fandom come from? My $340 Android works better than a $1000 iPhone.
I admit they're actually better built phones, but Apple is shooting yourself in the foot and paying for the bullet.
> My $340 Android works better than a $1000 iPhone.
You trolling? I've not had any of the random problems with my iPhone that you describe. And I feel like by now HN users, regardless of ideology, are well aware that the CPU throttling with a degraded battery was a sensible choice to prevent reboots, but was terribly handled and became a PR disaster.
It shocks me how much that supposed technically minded people regurgitate half truths in order to wage an ideological war against Apple.
Whether it’s throttling, repairability, or the App Store, many of Apple’s decisions make a lot more sense when you observe them as products of tradeoffs. One may not like which side of the tradeoff spectrum that Apple chose, that’s fine, but it’s preposterous to pretend like we live in a world in which they do not exist.
HN has the absolute worst combo of people who are very technical but without the domain expertise to actually understand the limits of what they know. Lots of software people making wild ass conjectures about semiconductors and CPU architecture...
I’ll one up you. I contend people here are simply average even in their domain of expertise, let alone anything outside of it. It’s not a special hideout for geniuses, it’s a generic forum not unlike Reddit. The only reason it appears the way that it does is via selective moderation.
I won’t argue with the point about not everyone being geniuses (I know a sample of one that isn’t).
But the discussions here are still 100x more civil than all other alternatives. That, alone, makes it seem people are at least closer to the genius side of the spectrum.
I agree with the civility, but it's a consequence of strict moderation. Reddit has subreddits that are just as civil, also due to strict moderation.
On the other hand, what betrays this community as being not much more sophisticated than anywhere else is the low quality, trite, and reactionary comments (sometimes not even relevant to the information in the article) that don't get flagged or downvoted despite adding nothing to the discussion and having been repeated countless times in the same thread. It's clear people have strong biases and aren't afraid to air them out instead of discussing the posted content and they're supported by their peers who hold the same biases.
I started lurking here about 6 years ago and every year the comments have become more and more predictable (and not in a good way), exactly what I had noticed happening on Reddit until I stopped visiting because it had exhausted its usefulness to me.
You can still push back against the bubble elitism: Settings → Messages → iMessage Off. My bubble’s not turning blue until Android users can participate.
My next smartphone is gonna be an iPhone as well. Android is becoming ever more locked down, hardware attestation is already a thing and there's really no reason for apps to not require it. What's the point of putting up with Android's imperfections and Google's bullshit if my rooted and customized phone can't run the apps I need because I "tampered" with it? Might as well get an iPhone.
Because Android lets you run apps that iOS won't, including apps that you write yourself. Attestation is a security issue. If there's some useful feature you can't get on Android, that is a permission issue. It is silly to throw permissions out the window and allow apps to do absolutely anything. Instead, make an appropriate permission.
It's not permissions, those are fine. It's apps being able to tell the difference between a corporation's operating system and my own customized system. They should not be able to tell the difference.
Unfortunately, hardware remote attestation makes it possible for them to know. Now apps will insist that you run the unmodified corporation's software. Bank apps will require attestation because of "fraud". WhatsApp will require attestation because of "terms of service". Streaming apps will require attestation because of "piracy". Games will require attestation because of "cheating". Every app in the Play Store will find a bullshit reason to require it and the result is we can't use their software if we own the machine. We're all hostile users and the only way they'll allow us to use their services is if we cede control to the corporations who lock everything down and spy on us.
It's a heavy blow to mobile computing freedom. It wasn't that great to begin with but this makes it even worse.
And why not? If it's tampered with, it could have been tampered with by a malicious actor who can now lift your bank keys from the device.
Ultimately, it is about permissions. You modified your OS to do something you couldn't do on an OS that wasn't tampered with. If instead, the thing you wanted to do was available behind an appropriate permission, you wouldn't have had to modify your OS to begin with.
Because I'm the owner of the machine and I decide what informarion the applications running on it can obtain. If I want them to believe they're running on an unmodified operating system, then that's what they should believe.
> it could have been tampered with by a malicious actor who can now lift your bank keys from the device
Then give me the keys to the machine and let me use them to sign my own software. People who don't care can use the easy corporation attestation but I still get to maintain control.
> You modified your OS to do something you couldn't do on an OS that wasn't tampered with.
> If instead, the thing you wanted to do was available behind an appropriate permission, you wouldn't have had to modify your OS to begin with.
And what if what I want to do goes against some corporation's terms of service or whatever? What if I want to monitor what apps send over the network? Reverse engineer an app? Copy and manipulate their data? Automate tasks? Fake the personal information returned by system calls? Block advertising? Block surveillance?
Essentially, what if I want to do anything that harms their bottom line? These are not things that corporations will ever give me permission to do. It's an affront to my freedom as a computer user.
> And what if what I want to do goes against some corporation's terms of service or whatever? What if I want to monitor what apps send over the network? Reverse engineer an app? Copy and manipulate their data? Automate tasks? Fake the personal information returned by system calls? Block advertising? Block surveillance?
You can do all of that on Android, many of those without root. If you want to modify any process's memory, you need a permission that doesn't exist. With sufficient imagination, you could invent a permission system that allows you to do that but doesn't allow a malicious app to do that. If instead you allow arbitrary tampering like you want, up to and including replacing the system partition without indication, there's no way for the bank to know your banking has been hijacked by somebody other than yourself. Your bank doesn't give a damn what you do with the banking app on your device. It cares if it has to deal with mass exploitation of its customers.
I'm in the exact same boat. It's not that I don't like Android, I've even built custom ROMs and still write code for Android apps monthly, it's just that it has lost its value as a daily driver.
> I don't believe they will last more than a few years if my last samsung is any indication.
I think this is the real reason for kids using iphone, most a seeeded with parent's castoffs. If your parents are android users the phone is probably broken. :)
You misremember. It was Facetime which Jobs promised Apple would make into an open standard, in 2010. He died the week before Apple released iMessage.
"And we're going to take it all the way. We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard." - Steve Jobs, 2010 WWDC Keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOxf9tEXEKQ
That was FaceTime, not iMessage, and FaceTime ran into patent issues which Apple lost in court, repeatedly, and so had to be reengineered in way that made it not work as an open protocol.
We went through exactly this 2 months ago, I motivated her to buy Iphone 13 mini, first Apple products between both of us ever.
We both regret it at this point sourly, its a properly shitty overpriced device with decent (but not extraordinary) photos. Compared to any average android for half that price its - fugly and looks cheaply, too thick, too thick black borders on screen, properly fugly and dysfunctional front notch camera (faceid doesn't work half the time, ie when its dimmer, with masks etc), you will lose pattern unlock for good, there is no fingerprint scanner under the display, battery is average (meaning really not impressive despite thickness like its 2015). Apple supports only basic bluetooth protocol so any properly good headphones will have slightly worse sound. iOS is fast but rather poorly architected (I understand a lot of this is down to what folks are used to, but stuff she showed me that annoys her is outright poor engineering and step down from current Android in usability).
The way its done and architected insults your intellect constantly, "we know better what you want/need than you, and you have no say/options".
You can argue its not for power users, but my wife is exactly that - just a normal user who just wants to use the phone. For long term android user devices like comparable Samsung galaxy is simply much nicer device to use. She likes her 5 year old Samsung much more than new Apple. So much for wow factor.
At this point we both regret getting it, she for paying for it and me for recommending it. The only benefit is decent resale value. Since this is mostly US forum I expect to be grilled for this, but this is proper long term android user's point of view, who gave recently Apple device a chance and regrets it.
Pixels have unusually high rates of hardware and software problems over time. The reliability isn't there. The current issue of the month is random failure to call emergency services. If you randomly experience this problem, you could call 911 over and over, dozens of times, without success. It also doesn't matter if you have 4/4 bars.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. They most certainly have had historically poor build quality. My Pixel 2 began boot looping after a couple of years of use and apparently that was motherboard quality issue that had been around since the Nexus line. I got a replacement and it happened again after another few months. Google "Pixel 2 bootloop" and you'll find thousands of threads from people with this issue.
That was around four years ago. I switched to an iPhone 11 and have had a fraction of the problems that I had with Android phones.
Because of the insistence on anecdotes rather than actual industry reports to back up the claim. Even your claim is your personal anecdote. But when you dive into actual industry repair reports, Pixels do not (at least in the ones I've looked at) stand up in terms of being "historically poor quality". For every anecdote of someone having an issue, there are a large majority that just use their phone day in and day out without a problem. And of course, there's also that person that has to point out that their Pixel is working just fine in response to the person with an issue.
I'm not trying to dismiss the issues Google has had. Just to put it in context that they get a lot of press about the issues they do have, and so there becomes an impression that it's historically bad when the actual numbers do not seem to show that to be the case. (Also, if anyone provides links to 2021 or newer reports, I'd be happy to revise my opinion here based on new data, if it shows that I'm no longer correct, as it's been a bit since the last report I saw.)
Can you link said industry repair report? I've not heard of such a thing.
I know you want to write my experience off as "bad luck" but I had several high-end Android phones with serious hardware and/or software issues before I made the switch.
I really wanted to like Android but I also want a phone that works. :/
I am not writing off your experience. I am saying, that while your experience is valid for you, it cannot be extrapolated industry wide.
For the report, I don't have a link handy. I looked into this in the past and was able to find a few different reports of that nature. I haven't looked for one in the last year or two, so like I said in another comment, if things have changed and what I read is out of date now, I'd be happy to have an update as well.
Pixels may have what seems to be an unusually high rate of problems over time if you judge things by anecdotes on Reddit. There are many more folks just puttering away on their Pixel oblivious that there are any issues at all (or even posting their own anecdotes in response to the anecdotes about problems telling folks that their Pixel is fine). But they don't generally show up leading the pack in industry reports from the folks repairing phones, at least the ones I've looked at.
Every manufacturer has some level of issues, Google sure seems to be about average. I will say that their insistence on automated (read: poor) support can sometimes exasperate problems (which then leads to more anecdotes being posted).
What sucks about Xiaomi 12/12X or Pixel 6A for instance? S22 would be also nice phone if it were not for not so great battery life (and most of the people won't notice slow shutter).
There are plenty of great phones depending on what's your requirements, now if you want SMALL Android phone you have very limited options with lots of compromises usually, if you don't care about size too much there are plenty of good options.
Yes, there are no ads in Xiaomi phones, nobody force you to use preinstalled Xiaomi apps and there are no ads if you pay attention during setup and don't just click Next but read what's shown on screen.
Brand new iPhone cost 380EUR without any plan same as 6A? Provide please link, I will make tons of money reselling them, thank you.
iPhones are amazing, and there are definitely a few brands of Android-based phones that also deserve to be called amazing. iMessage definitely helped, at a time when SMS sucked and nobody (not Google) was stepping in to improve the situation, but they also crush Androids in accessibility and ease of use all day. Something that gets teenagers hooked early...
Wow, that's an intense level of myopia right there.
There are lots and lots (and lots) of people who don't need a Galaxy. Take my wife for example. Entirely happy (or as happy as you can with any contemporary portable computing device) with her old LG Aristo 5, it started failing a few weeks back, and we replaced it with a T-Mobile Revvl 6 Pro 5G. $219. Entirely adequate phone for her, and for most the people we know.
Yeah, I'm an old, and I don't personally use a cell phone of any kind.
What about Google's Pixels, Sony's Xperias, Oppo/OnePlus, Xiaomi? There's plenty of choice, but that's a good thing. You can decide if you want to spend $100 extra for that waterproof model, or if a good enough camera is good enough.
I tried avoiding the iPhone bandwagon for practically a decade, going from flip phone to the HTC Droid Incredible, to some HTC M<#>, to Samsung S4, and then a series of Pixel phones, starting with the OG Pixel, and ending with the Pixel 3.
I have to say: besides a few clunky swipe experiences, the iPhone is better in every single way. The camera opens when I click the camera button. The phone pairs wonderfully with my airpods. With Android, the camera would inevitably lag after pressing the button, sometimes taking 10+ seconds to load, and making me miss a photo.
I've been a lifelong Android user but this problem is very real and has only gotten worse, and even with a brand new current-generation device it still takes 2-3+ seconds (sometimes up to 10 seconds like you mentioned) for the camera to open. Extremely infuriating. Does no higherups at Google use an Android phone and see this happening? Or maybe they just don't give a shit
I switched recently due to divorcing myself from Google services and products. Overall I've found the iPhone experience to be basically the same, but with a much worse notifications system.
> ...Pixel 3. ... The camera opens when I click the camera button.
I still have a Pixel 5 and one of my favorite features is double pressing the power button to activate the camera. It works so well that my camera is ready to go before I have even focused on the subject. I don’t know if this feature is available on an iPhone.
On the iPhone you need to take it out of your pocket, wake up the screen by tapping it once, or lifting it to some angle that the screen turns on. Then you need to long press the on screen camera button.
If you enabled the double tap, you still need to take it out of your pocket and wake up the screen before you can double tap.
On Android you could have the camera ready before the phone is even out of your pocket.
Also, from an awakened lock screen, as an alternate to the long press of the camera button, you can just swipe left on the screen, revealing the ready camera app, which saves a second or two.
Technically it's possible but not reliable due to many false positive/negatives in my experience on my 13 mini. I wanted to use it for quick flashlight, but double had false positive and triple had false negative.
I was forced to iPhone 18 months ago and while it isn’t as bad as I’d feared, notifications just don’t seem right to me on iOS. I’m constantly missing things that I never would have on a Pixel.
Apple recently added "modes", which I like about 80% of the time, and 20% of the time I'm in the wrong mode for whatever reason and the wrong set of notifications get sent.
In the budget range it's the other way around though.
For €300 you get a decent phone with bezelless 120Hz OLED screen. The iPhone SE that is almost €600 doesn't even have any of that. Cool that it's made from finely crafted aluminium but the screen is what I interact with constantly.
I am on an Android bandwagon since first Samsung Galaxy. The sheer joy of being in a total control of my hardware and software is still here. I am installing some apps directly from vendors and thus avoiding big companies censorship. My current phone is more than four years old for now and I am thinking about buying a new one only because the battery is slightly degraded. This is just a phone, a tool, used mostly for communication (including right now).
For some users. If you somehow fall through the cracks or off the happy path of AirPods usage, modern iPhones that lack the headphone jack are miserable experiences. I've had enough struggles getting AirPods to connect to switch back to wired IEMs for good.
I don’t mind the Android OS but other than one of the Google models I had the handsets were crappy, with pocket dialling or freezing on the numeric pad to make a call, sometimes full of telco adware. I could only handle 3 years or so of it before switching back to iphone.
This claim seems a little odd to me. I searched more about it and found this article: https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/01/06/gen-z-survey-says... from January saying the exact same thing as this fall survey, and this article form 2020 which says it was 86%: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/apple-rules-86-pe... . I can't find an estimate for teen iPhone ownership besides this company but this just seems very high to me when you account for teens without a phone as well as non-iPhones. In comparison from what I can find about half of adults own an iPhone. The fact that it is this high and stable for several years seems suspect to me.
If not owning an iPhone really makes you the social outcast that some comments here are suggesting maybe people don't even admit to it for a marketing survey.
It's like a survey on how may times you have sex in a month.
Americans, do people not use whatsapp over there? In Europe everyone uses whatsapp for literally everything, with a sprinkling of Telegram if you are into something a little subversive and Signal if you actually care about privacy.
The only time I use text/sms is to recieve codes for things, and I'm doing that less and less.
Lifelong US citizen here - I've barely heard anyone mention it in person my whole life. If it wasn't for reading about it in discussions like this, I would probably never even think about it. iMessage, social media DMs, and regular SMS seem to be the most common in my experience. Signal/Telegram are pretty much only used here by tech people and/or people discussing not-so-wholesome things and I'm always surprised to see people on HN talk about moving their whole family to one of these apps or using them more casually in general.
> If it wasn't for reading about it in discussions like this, I would probably never even think about it.
I'm the same, but in the sense that I can't even begin to understand that people will marginalize each other based on the colors of their text messages, or that it would even matter at all. Having lived in Asia for the last ten years, having multiple chat apps is just so normal, most of my friends use WhatsApp, some use Messenger. Friends in China is WeChat, some friends from Japan and Thailand use Line.
We're not talking about normal people, we're talking about teenagers. Adults see the green bubble and understand someone in the group is using Android and as a result their messages are insecure, and they generally don't care about that. If you're an adult and concerned about security in your chats then just use WhatsApp. You'll never get teenagers to adopt that approach though.
In my experience the only Americans who use WhatsApp have family outside the US/Canada. There's a very large proportion of the population living entirely inside the Apple ecosystem.
US carriers stopped charging for SMS around 2010 or thereabouts (cannot remember), or they included so much in the plan that it may as well have been free, so most people just stick with the convenience of not having to install another app on their phone. For photos my friends and I just emailed them to each other. I usually tried to move the conversation to Skype/AIM/MSN though after cell devices were more developed. Now its discord and telegram for everything for me with SMS sprinkled in.
It was so annoying having to send and receive SMS back when I was working with some USA people. Over here in Mexico everyone uses WhatsApp, as well as friends that are in Europe.
Mainly use WhatsApp to chat with European friends or a group chat that includes someone with android. Else it’s all iMessage, Telegram, Signal, and Slack / Discord for more community groups. And the occasional Instagram or Twitter DMs. (And that’s not even mentioning WeChat, Facebook Messenger, GroupMe, …).
Amazing how fragmented the messaging space has become.
I live in northern Europe and the only people I know use WhatsApp are immigrants and children of immigrants that use it to communicate with people in the old country.
Where is northern Europe? Because here in northern European UK, everybody uses WhatsApp, which is convenient because also my southern European Italian friends do, and my relatives in equatorial Africa.
When I was a teenager and mobile phones became widely available everyone had Nokia, Siemens or Sony-Ericsson, depending on how well-off the family was, it was either the old or new model. But we customized the phones as much as we could - custom ring melodies, screensavers, custom covers, if the phone didn't allow that then at least some stickers. Everyone wanted to be unique, go against the social norm.
Android phones are arguably equivalent in terms of functionality for what today's teenagers use (whatsapp, tiktok and camera), but offer much wider variety and a chance to stand out.
Why do the current US teenagers follow the herd in this regard?
Messaging network effects, if you're in an iMessage conversation and an Android user joins, suddenly the conversation becomes SMS only with photo and video sending being crippled.
Its the same as a social network, if all your friends use it, you almost have to in order to communicate with them.
This always comes up when non-Americans talk about US messaging systems. The simple fact is SMS was good enough (being pretty cheap or even free for many years) that people didn't care to switch. In contrast, many other countries had much more expensive SMS so free messaging systems were built and widely used.
I think the common take on the "Apple tax" is a false impression. A sort of knee-jerk reflex when seeing the price tag, without any further thought. Every brand has a premium product segment with premium price tags. The difference is that Apple doesn't have a budget segment with budget price tags.
I think Apple have a pretty big range these days. There are older models and the se. There’s also a pretty vibrant second hand / refurbished market. Perhaps one issue is that devices can still be somewhat expensive secondhand but that’s because they are still good quality and expected to last (eg being supported and getting updates) for a long time – the alternative would surely be the kind of complaints about planned obsolescence or poor resale value that seem more fitting for the typical androids device (I’m not sure about premium. Maybe typical android devices get more updates these days).
This stuff scares me a bit, both because green bubble culture is creepy, and because I really do not want iOS to become the dominant mobile OS just as Android is becoming one of the most amazing platforms out there.
It's in practice mostly open, anyone can make apps for it, they give you enough APIs for things like Tile to actually work, and it's pretty much hassle free. Stuff just works.
It uses tiny amounts of power on cheap hardware and still is always reasonably performant.
It's very discoverable and convenience oriented, there's no gestural control stuff(Aside from the hideous pull to refresh feature that I hate, which I'd imagine apple has too).
Anecdotally, Bluetooth never seems to give any trouble(Aside from a rare bug where it was turning bluetooth off occasionally, which i think was specific to my phone model), wheras Apple users seem to always have complaints whenever they try to use it with random gadgets.
And subjectivly the intent seems different.
iOS is an appliance. A multipurpose appliance but still an appliance. It has a set of things it does and some it doesn't, and it trusts you'll be able to get by without the stuff it doesn't do.
Android is a generic multitool made into a consumer friendly format. It can replace a sizable fraction of ones's material possessions. It seems to be meant to be the catch all point for everything that integrates with everything else no matter who made it.
Also, hardware wise, the phones are relatively free of luxury fashion, which is a really specific aesthetic that only appeals to certain groups. All Apple's stuff has a theme, it feels like it's meant to be at home next to a whole foods bag, some Nike sneakers, or even some Supreme underwear.
They're much more willing to use plastic instead of metal and things like that, instead of spending money on stuff that can't even be seen when it's in a case.
I’ve been an iOS user for about 5 years now. I switched from Android because after 6 months of owning an Android-based phone it was practically unusable form a performance standpoint. The hardware companies used was low quality. The experience with Samsung, Motorola, etc. bloatware and half-baked features basically forced you to root and flash the device if you wanted a decent experience. iOS may be a walled garden, but it works. Well.
My partner switched from Android a little over a year ago. These problems, on her current gen, top of the line Samsung phone, still persisted. While the quality of the hardware had definitely improved, she was essentially stuck with a phone that was seemingly trying to become obsolete.
IMO, Android has a longggggg way to go before it really shakes that perception. I realize a lot of the problems aren’t Android’s fault. I’m sure they want companies to provide updates to their devices for years. I’m sure they don’t want some Bixby crap taking over. But, in the end, that’s really what you can expect from their approach.
I haven't noticed any of that for years, although phones before maybe 2018 or so definitely had some horrific lag(Think low end PC from 2014 with no SSD and 10 crapwares running at once level bad) at times, although they mostly stayed usable.
I do see very occasionally delays when turning on from sleep, but I also have way too many apps installed and my phone is a year past support.
In practice Androids are also used well past the update period, until either it physically breaks, or you hear of a CVE that bothers you more than the cost of a new phone would.
Firefox with the built-in "Enhanced Tracking Protection" gets you about 70-80% of the blocking that a dedicated adblock system can, depending on the site, and at least saves you from some of the worst behaviors. Between that and network-level ad blocking (Eero+), I really only see first-party ads like FB/IG. When I'm not at home, the chances are pretty low that I'm just casually browsing the web rather than using a dedicated app (where I probably bought or subscribed to avoid ads).
Edit: and if you're willing to use Safari on iOS, there are dozens of Safari plugins on the app store that provide good-enough adblocking.
I have never understood the arguments that Apple doesn't have a monopoly or monopolies and thus should get away with all the anti-trust violations they get away with. They definitely have monopolies when it comes to market power and influence, even if Android phones (which are split across several manufacturers) have a larger worldwide market share.
This is the concept that's about to be tested in court. The majority of the revenue generating segment of the smartphone market is iOS while the majority of the overall smartphone market is Android. I get the sense that Apple did this on purpose but the Unity lawsuit may write a new chapter on what it means to be a monopoly. This Planet Money episode talks about this dilemma: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/18/914563075/apple-v-everybody
I'm going from memory, but I have looked into the actual definition of a monopoly in the context of anti-trust. If I recall correctly, it doesn't even explicitly say that you need a market majority. It basically says that if you have undue market influence and power and use it then you have a monopoly. A market majority is simply one of the most common ways that that is attained. Again, that is from memory. I'd have to search for the language again to be sure.
Like you point out though with it being tested in court, maybe precedence is strong. Those laws and definitions were written a long time ago. Today's companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are very different from companies of yesteryear.
Apple is probably the biggest bully of a company in the world. They absolutely don't just make more money. They use their power to ensure they make more money.
A lot of kids got oculus quests for christmas/birthday but I suspect many collect dust. Some sort of daily or weekly active user stats for teens using VR would probably be a better indicator.
I see a lot of heat over SMS.
In Italy almost no one stil use SMSs, they are basically dead.
Almost all use Whatsapp, Telegram or both, no one use iMessage, not even iPhone owners, because smartphone market is much more balanced towards Android phones.
I'm an Android lifer and Apple's refusal to open iMessage is why I will not own an iPhone. That said, I'd willingly pay $5-10/mth for iMessage on Android. Apple has a number of services on Android now (including Apple Music & TV), it irritates me to no end they refuse to support this
The biggest concern I have from this is how comfortable the next generations will be in walled gardens where they are unable to look under the curtain let alone tinker.
So I have owned an Android all my life and never daily driven an iPhone. The iPhone (edit forgot the iPhone part) screen seems more responsive and very bright and colorful. To me the freedom of an unlocked phone I can put my own apps on is very important for me for Android. Why should I get an iPhone?
edit: not sure most teens care or are unaware of Android's around 3 years support length for a phone.
That's true. The Android marketplace is full of a _lot_ of bad products. The good ones get most of the attention, thankfully, but its easy to walk into a phone store and walk out with a shiny piece of pain.
I am a musician and the iPhone has lower latency. Many music apps perform better on iTunes and some app developers never even bother developing on Android.
> edit: not sure most teens care or are unaware of Android's around 3 years support length for a phone.
I don't think they care either, but in many cases it makes iPhones a wiser purchasing decision, so they should care. If we're decrying the effectiveness of iPhones' marketing and intentionally cultivated and preserved incompatibilities on children, our alternative must be to encourage practical decisions. Sadly, a slightly old iPhone is often the most practical decision, because Android is still a closed platform masquerading as an open one, and they aren't kept updated outside of Google's and the manufacturers' hardware marketing strategy.
Apple is making money from the use of its phones, so (mostly) happily keeps them going far longer.
If flexibility and having an unlocked phone is important to you then you might just be better off with android. I've daily driven both. I kind of like the iPhone hardware a little better but android software a little better. both do what I need.
Interestingly, I am a heavy Apple user, and I am trying to convince my teenage daughter and wife to use iPhone and have offered them iPhone and Apple Watch, and they have strongly preferred to stay on Android. I think it's unsurprising most people use / want to use an iPhone in the US, because it has a network effect with iMessage and it's clearly a superior experience for the average person. But, globally that network effect doesn't exist, so it makes sense in a more international sense that many people would prefer being in the Android ecosystem.
The claim doesn't surprise me, but I definitely think it shouldn't be taken as universal.
It is not clearly a better experience. Give me a break. 99% of the time it is a grid of icons that launches apps. The notification area on Android is far superior and is actually quite useful compared to iOS where it is a jumbled mess. Apps on both platforms, more and more, are virtually identical. If you want integration with apple watch, then great use apple but your blanket statement about superior experience is exactly the pernicious "network effect" (fanboi-ism) these kids are being hit with.
My statement doesn't come out of any sort of fanboyism, I was an Android developer and built custom ROMs for many years, was heavily into Android in the beginning, and I still use and support Android devices in my home (see above).
It /is/ clearly a better experience for several reasons, not the least of which is the difference in privacy stance and the tighter integrations for families. I do not want to re-litigate this every time I comment in one of these threads, because it's annoying, irrelevant to my central point, and obnoxious. If you wish to engage, please engage me on the central point I was making, not on an aside.
If it isn't central to your main point and you don't want to re-litigate, then why make comments that are debatable and are guaranteed to be obnoxious to many people? After saying you don't want to re-litigate, you then repeated your inflammatory claim and trotted out evidence to support your belief. I won't bother trotting out my counter-examples, but just saying, if you prefer iOS good for you, but you did provoke this. Or maybe you meant to say "It /is/ clearly a better experience in several specific ways that matter to me"?
Man, kids aren't stupid. They see a busted, slow old phone running 2 or more major versions of Android behind, that puts a bad taste in their mouth. Apple has made many deliberate steps to appeal to youth, iMessage playing some part, but that's not the whole picture.
Kids want something that works and is as fast as they are.
Like the person you've replied to, I have built custom ROMs and still do Android development, and I agree with their assessment. Will you dismiss my opinion as well? What is your metric based on which you label people fanboys?
Notifications might be better, but the random bugs and glitches, endless vendor whims and all the inconsistencies are simply not worth it. Holistically iOS and its ecosystem are more consistent, faster and have fewer bugs. If you add the entire Apple ecosystem to the mix, it is a clearly better experience.
Your comment is so crazy, seriously. I said it was not clearly better. I never claimed the opposite either. I never gave my opinion at all except to say, essentially "it's debatable". You are the one dismissing everyone who likes Android and accusing people who just say they disagree of shutting you down which I never did. The fanboy was true of the parent and is true of you, a fanboy is someone who is so in love with their own POV that they categorically claim their favorite phone os (give me a break) is the best, and then when someone even tries to say that isn't "clearly" true, they then get so defensive that they attack that person claiming that they were attacked. So yeah I'll stand by my fanboy comments, you have validated them.
Yeah, my mother is basically the only one in my family who uses Android, so when Tim Cook ticked a bunch of people off the other month by suggesting that we should buy our moms iPhones, I suggested it to her. She doesn't really know the difference between Android and iPhone, but she seems ideologically opposed to paying more than a drug dealer would spend on a burner phone because "that's all she needs". It's pretty frustrating because when she has problems, she asks me for help and isn't all that happy when I tell her to get an iPhone.
It was also very frustrating when trying to share photos to put together a slideshow for a funeral. And on that subject, it's her primary camera now and the quality leaves a lot to be desired on that front.
On the other hand, it's kind of amazing how much an $80 Android phone can do, and that it can take passable pictures at all, so I sort of see her point too. And obviously there are quite high end options as well.
> It was also very frustrating when trying to share photos to put together a slideshow for a funeral. And on that subject, it's her primary camera now and the quality leaves a lot to be desired on that front.
This is actually one of the main reasons why my other family members prefer to stay on Android. While the average Android handset may not have a camera better than an iPhone, the best phone cameras are generally on Android handsets. This is partly just because Android runs on handsets from many different manufacturers and everyone competes on camera / picture quality for their flagship phones, and there is iterative improvements in technology over time. While the recent DXOMark report disagrees, in our testing ourselves, the S22 Ultra outperforms the iPhone 14 Pro, although both capture very good photos.
Yep, the problem is the burner Androids bringing down the average. Basically every phone that I've used in the past decade has had a decent camera, but I'm aware that the premium Androids have some superlatives in that department.
Used Android since like the original HTC phone in my early teens, owned probably 6-7 android phones in my life (majority Google since the good old Nexus days). My first iPhone was the 12 and as of now, I think my kids first phone will be an iPhone. The walled garden is annoying and monopolistic but an iPhone just works. 2 years later, my iPhone is still going strong and I don’t even want to change my phone for the near future. They’re just built better and supported better. My family relentlessly complain about the Pixel 6 heat issues and plans on “upgrading” a year later.
I switched to the iPhone and, under some aspects… it’s so much better. I had an iPhone for on call duty previously.
If you see the phone as just a tool, the iphone has no rivals.
It either can or cannot do something. You don’t have to evaluate seven different brands.
The ui is okay, and once you get used to it you’ll 99.9% recognise the ui in the next iphone.
It’s small! The iphone se is beautifully small. Yet fast and snappy.
And the next time I can get the next iphone without thinking too much. Which is huge. Xiaomi today might be good, and xiaomi tomorrow might be trash. Same for samsung. Same for pixel.
My kids have iPhones because they inherit ours when we upgrade. I suspect it's the same with many other parents. And: Much easier to provide support, share photos, reimburse them/send money, and do many other things that would be frustrating with Android.
I remember when Steve Jobs apologized to parents for unapproved in-app purchases and promised to do something about it. And they did. That resonated with me. I think the company still cares, as evidenced by its support options and privacy requirements.
When I still bought Android devices they tended to be problematic. Probably HTC and Xiaomi were the best designed, but updates were a pain especially on the Hongmi. LG camera sucked. Google Nexus had screen problems and eventually bricked, with no support options. I think I got my son a "Blu" phone at one point, which just had bad performance. Was happy to give him my iPhone 6 and move up to an 8.
Green bubbles are disgusting, to the point where you won’t be allowed to certain events or parties if you RSVP with a green bubble. You’ll just never get a response back, don’t even bother. It’s a way to gate keep. There is even an androidphobic slur for those who text in green bubbles, that I won’t repeat here. Ask your kids.
Our whole family and extended family only have Android. Our kids all get the free Android phones.
As for me and my house, we shall never own Apple products.
People can get what they like, but I struggle with the cognitive dissonance of "Everyone should just get iPhones, it'd make everything easier" and "Oh no why is <company> acting evil with their monopoly?!". I like choices. I wish Windows Phones could have stuck around longer.
We'll ultimately get what we deserve as consumers. Is it any surprise FB wants to be the Apple of VR? We've shown we like our cozy premium walled gardens and are willing to be abused.
There is no sane technologically educated person who will buy Apple or Google phone. It is obvious that the smartphones are data gathering and control tools for the surveillance economy. Degoogled smartphone with limited usage is the safest bet for now. Apple computers are still valuable, when configured properly, but I don't have a high hopes for the future. Apple will lock whatever they can to "protect" the bottomline and expand the Imperium.
- long term support - can expect a new device to get 5-6 years of Apple Updates
- AppleCare
- better build quality than cheap android devices
- Reasonable expectation that required software will support it
- Not having to listen to a teen complain about what their friends have that they don't
- Finally, Updates, APPLE SUPPORTED UPDATES! - I'm really salty that my android phones had to be rooted and have another OS installed just to get basic security updates after 12-18 months.
- Privacy. Apple didn't built their business on milking people's data unlike google and so many others.
- Security. Among many other factors the walled garden does provide a higher degree of security compared to Android.
- Performance. Not only iPhones completely destroy Android in terms of performance and optimisation but the fact they are so performant make them great long term purchases. Still rocking my iPhone X from 5 years ago and it's still buttery smooth.
Kids aren't stupid, they want something that works and is as fast as they are.
GP didn't mention those because they are all points in favor of Android.
Privacy: Android lets you install apps without telling anyone. iOS requires you to tell Apple. God forbid you want to use an app you build yourself because then you also have to give Apple your banking details. Android lets you get your location from the GPS sensor without telling anyone. If you want to get your location at all on iOS, you must also send your location to Apple. Android lets you use fully offline maps and have that handle map links. All map links on iOS must be opened by Apple Maps, telling Apple what you're looking at. I could go on and on.
Security: Android updates the browser and other system apps without rebooting the phone. iOS requires a reboot, meaning updates are batched before delivery and then applied more slowly. Android app stores have superior security, with F-Droid having reproducible builds and the Play Store running apps in VMs to do dynamic analysis. The App Store had to rely on external researchers to find Xcodeghost apps to take down, not even having basic static analysis do it themselves. The exploit market has responded by pricing iOS vulnerabilities lower than Android vulnerabilities. Despite what Apple tells you, the walled garden is for Apple's profits, not your security.
Performance: Despite Apple's hardware lead, the software is so unoptimized that it's not unusual to see iPhones lose to Android devices in app opening speed tests. A few years ago, iPhones were so slow that they would lose to previous generation budget phones on those tests.
> - Security. Among many other factors the walled garden does provide a higher degree of security compared to Android.
Depends on the specific perspective.
I think the effort that has gone into securing Linux globally has and will continue to yield better results than Apple can achieve on their own with an opaque stack. Exploit prices also seem to correlate to some extent.
But I also do think it's better in terms of average end-user.
They had a choice between slowing the device or providing a substandard user experience when the old battery couldn't keep up and the phone shut down. I think there are plenty of reasons to criticize Apple but I have no idea why people have latched onto this obviously false narrative.
That’s called replacing your battery. All phone batteries degrade and start underperforming over the years. What Apple did only affects those people with years old underperforming batteries.
Batteries begin to degrade the moment you start to use them. All phones do this. Apple does not have some sort of magical technology to stop it from happening. No one does.
I wouldn’t expect a device that’s likely being drained and recharged daily to retain full capacity after two years. To suggest that shows a lack of understanding in the basic physics of a battery.
No company, Samsung, Google, etc. will “recall” your phone for normal wear and tear items like a battery. If that’s what you’re expecting, you’re going to be very disappointed.
I never claimed anything like. You demonstrate dirty sophistry there.
The issue is not that battery degrades, it is that their phones could not handle it and shut off when charge still remained. 2 years is a very little time. None of the devices with batteries I had exhibited that behavior. And I have devices that are over 5 years old in regular use.
This is a nice headline, but doesn't match reality. I really hate how much of an Apple fanboy I'm coming off in this thread, but if you're just going to spout straight lies, it's hard to ignore.
It's true that overtime iOS has become way more bloated, but they have released major updates which actually sped up older devices because they were focused on bug fixes and improvements, rather than something that's flashy and looks good in a commercial.
Is it a useful tactic to sell more phones? Absolutely. It also means that iOS completely destroys Android's statistics on % of users who run the latest version of their OS.
Yeah, good point, if I remember they did give you the option to override the battery safety feature and preserve your clock speed. Still, I think it is fair to say that iOS did over time start to feel more sluggish as they were adding more ambitious features which an aging chip couldn't handle.
I'll take updates that slow my phone as long as I'm also getting security updates. I don't like have my banking app cut off because I no longer get Android updates.
I switched from iPhone to Android (Fairphone 4) recently, but my reasons for doing so prove the point, I think. I was willing to give up a slicker UI and a nice camera (and getting-a-bit-too-much-now postprocessing) in order to have more control over my audio files. But this thing wasn't cheap and to 99% of teens I assume it would not be worth it, even disregarding social pressure.
Even if people said that apple lacks innovation after Jobs, what they have done here in market penetration, branding, and ecosystem is brilliant. I don’t even know how they did it, they just keep creating new stuff in the ecosystem that makes it so hard to switch out once you’re in it
The visionary should be rewarded. Maybe that’s Tim? He does a far better job compared to the other ceo of big tech companies..
I'd like to challenge this narrative somewhat, why do people care about what teens like exactly? I've heard for years (EDIT: decades, as long as I have been alive) teens are a "coveted demographic," but teenagers, especially today hardly have any disposable income. Why is some sense of "popularity" valuable, which is somehow valuable enough to be its own category apart from sales, a quantity that I thought would be much more important.
Wouldn't being popular amongst people who actually buy your things more important? iPhones are definitely popular, but they are profitable not just because they are popular, but that they are popular at the price point they are.
That's kinda surprising given apparently it was only a few months back that iPhone's market share finally surpassed Android in the U.S., and it bodes pretty well for Apple's long term future - are there stats on how often people change between Apple/Android (and is it predominantly in a particular direction)?
(FWIW I think I went through two iPhones 15 years ago when they first came out I guess, but found their screens overly prone to getting smashed and switched to Android/Samsung, lots of reasons I doubt I'd ever switch back now, though it's certainly not impossible).
My guess is a lot of their parents are iPhone users who pass their phones on to their children. My wife only recently upgraded her iPhone 8, and only did so because of how noticable better the photos were on my new iPhone. In my experience Android phones don't last that long.
This could be just another index for measuring a country's wealth. Percentage of teens who own an iPhone. I like that. Here in Brazil, the price of some iPhone models is greater than 1 year of the national minimum salary.
I have a different take than most here. Let's face it the devices are pretty good in both platforms. Apple does the basic stuff fast, but doesnt even support the other stuff because it's a prepackaged experience. Androids are very versatile and have some convenient features (secure folder, headphone jack, sometimes better cameras etc). The primary reason for apple is the brand recognition and lifestyle choice. Many people think they d look 'amateurish' holding an android. It s an uber-popular fashion item. And kids are a ton more sensitive to peer pressure
What I don't see discussed in here is why we should care what phone teens, particularly, have. Teen preferences are largely built on what's popular right now; it's not as though I'm still wearing untied high-tops and carrying a boom box. Do we have any evidence that this particular early preference carries on to adult life, when it's they who are making the purchase with money they have earned? Do we think teen technology preferences have influence on other age groups?
I guess it is something people outsides of American can't reason about. SMS here is like 10cent USD per message (Taiwan). No one is using it outsides of verification codes now. People all use line, fb, wahtsapp or whatever network based IM. Because You can get a infinite data traffic plan with a decent price like 20USD/month.
Besides that. You don't really want to give other your phone number unless you know them well. IM's identity is disposable unlike phone number.
Is this green bubble a US teens thing? Personally never heard a person in real life complaining about it. Maybe cause people here use WhatsApp, viber, telegram etc
Very much a US thing. Perhaps the idea of green bubbles is specifically a teen thing, but what the green bubbles represent, a worse messaging experience over SMS/MMS, is an entire population thing.
Μένεις στην Ελλάδα; Ποια εφαρμογή χρησιμοποιείται περισσότερο; Viber;
I am always surprised by stories like this. I'm part of several distinct, mostly non-overlapping social circles. The majority of people in all these circles are iPhone users. But none of these circles use iMessage as the chat app.
I'm in NYC, so it's not like I'm in some obscure corner of the planet either.
It's just a line in the article, the data isn't provided. This is the source of the headline quote:
> 87% of teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone; 31% of
teens own an Apple Watch
And sorry, but that's just laughably wrong. Even in my teen's upper middle class school of tech scions, the penetration of any kind of phone sits somewhere around 50%. And I don't think I've even seen a smart watch on these kids.
Why is this laughably wrong? Why is this so hard to believe?
Also, why would being a tech scion mean that you wouldn't want to use an iPhone? If anything, I'd argue that being in tech makes you appreciate the benefits of having an iPhone.
> Also, why would being a tech scion mean that you wouldn't want to use an iPhone?
I think this is the opposite of what the person who is replying to you is saying. I'm going to disagree with both of you and say that I think that the kids of techies would be far less likely to have an iPhone, because they're more likely to judge technology on its merits rather than on marketing (for the same reason that both of my parents being programmers made me a programmer.) On the merits, iPhone/Android is going to be closer to a 50/50 split than an 87/13 split.
My experience among tech parents jives with that, FWIW. But even so: if techie kids are less likely to own phones, you need to be pushing 90%+ iPhone usage in working class schools, which is, again, nuts.
These numbers are wrong when interpreted as a global sample, they just are.
I think there is the implicit assumption in your comment that people benefitting from tech are more likely to use tech but I'm not sure that's a safe assumption
My 13 year old daughter has an Apple Watch. It allows her to send and receive texts even though her phone has to be put away, and the teachers haven’t stopped that. Yet.
Is there no one who feels that kids shouldn’t have iPhones until they are 18 and don’t accidentally put information online that leads predators to them?
As someone who was on the internet by age 12 and was coding by 15 I see this argument and can't help but shake my head.
If you want your kids to grow up with zero street smarts or ability to distinguish threats then sure. By all means keep them locked in their bedrooms till 18 too.
Don't be surprised when they stop talking to you by age 21.
Well, religion sells, that much is clear. Who ever said that the younger generation were not religious? They are, they just changed their object of devotion.
Meanwhile my daughters use second-hand Android phones running AOSP-derived distributions, as do I myself. Only my wife - who has a company-issued Samsung Galaxy A40 which they do not want me to mess with - runs a stock distribution but I did manage to tame the beast by disabling snoopy Samsung "services" and installing an ad-blocking local VPN firewall. They haven't complained yet so I guess we're good to go.
For the price of a single second-hand iPhone SE2 (around $200 where I live (Sweden)) I could buy both my daughter's phones as well as my own. Still these Android devices offer far more useable features than that iPhone and they'll last longer as well if my 11 year old Motorola Defy which I use daily is anything to go by [1]. It still gets 3 days on a single charge, running the original battery - which is replaceable if so needed.
Instead of iMessage we use mostly Telegram plus some XMPP as a backup in case Telegram goes bad. My oldest daughter also has Whatsapp installed but hardly ever uses it. Our data is kept on the server-under-the-stairs, out of reach of greedy data hogs like Apple/Google/Microsoft/etc. The Invidious server (also under the stairs of course) keeps Youtube ad-free, our own mail server (under... you guessed it) keeps our mail from being harvested by data parasites, etc.
Just like iPhones often are stepping stones to largely Apple-dominated monocultures so these AOSP-derived Androids can be stepping stones to free software households. I do know which of these I prefer. There is only one system left here running Windows, this being my wife's company-issued laptop.
The moral of this post is that parents do have some influence over their children's choices if they start early enough. By the time they reach their early teens they are far more focused on what their friends do so make sure to inculcate a healthy distrust of Big Data and its marketing practices - green bubbles and all - in them. If it worked for us, it can work for you.
[1] The Defy was marketed as being 'IP67 waterproof and shockproof'. My oldest daughter used to have a Defy as well. She left it in her trouser pocket when she dumped those trousers in the washing and started the cycle. One complete cycle (at 40°C) plus 1200 RPM spin cycle later she found it - it was still working... The damage? I replaced the earpiece, for the rest it just worked. I'm using that device as a remote-controlled media player now. While rather underpowered and short on memory the thing still works fine as a "dangerous work" phone. You won't like browsing the Javascript-encumbred web on it though...
The reasons my kids have iPhones can be summed up as
1) I use iPhones so I get a new one every 2.5-3 years or so.
2) The phones last long enough (performance, battery life, OS support) that when I get a new one, my kids are perfectly happy to take over my old one.
Let’s face it, kids don’t choose phones their parents do. When you become a teenager these days you are probably on your second or third smartphone. At least if you got the first one at age 7-10 somewhere, you probably didn’t decide between Android and iPhone, your parents did. It doesn’t matter so much then whether it’s a status symbol or what color the text bubble is. You chose a platform long ago.
My 16 year old son has an iPhone because Apple has the best parental control integration built-in. Kids can always get around it, which is why I have monitoring the little bastard doesn't know about via my WiFi router, along with automated deactivation of his cellular data connection via a schedule with the carrier (after 10 PM on weekdays).
The "green bubble" crap that I get from my iPhone owning buddies due to my Pixel is most obnoxious because it's entirely Apple's choice to have that.
However, no question that teens are incredibly status conscious. After all, Abercrombie and Gap built massive businesses slapping labels on shitty goods and marking the price up by 1,000%. Nike as well.
Sitting in front of a phone all day at this age leads to severe mental health problems and is probably the biggest portal for unfiltered harmful content
You're assuming the relationship is nasty. It isn't a given that people who raise kids differently than you do will fill them with hatred and bitterness.
To me it is an enormous step toward abuse when it is monitoring that the 16 year old doesn't know about. Even for a much younger child I would find that very disturbing. Just doing some filtering or time limits is completely different. I'm over 30 now and if I found out even now that my parents surveilled me secretly when I was 16 I would be disgusted, so just be prepared that your child will never talk to you again if he finds out, if he's anything like me. Maybe he is friendly with you now but it is on false grounds because he doesnt know what you are doing and you are deceiving him
I have a friend attending Stanford for undergrad whose parents monitor his location 24/7, and another dealing with the same nonsense at BU. If she wanders too far from the places she's supposed to be, she gets an angry call from parents/her long distance bf (who is also in on it somehow).
I guess even that isn't that bad compared to the parents that literally move across the country to wherever their kid is going to college so they can keep controlling them.
Wow I can't imagine the mind of people that trust their kids enough to give them a $300000 education at Stanford and then keep such close tabs on them.
Jesus. I know it's off-topic and things differ across cultures or whatever, but I remember moving out of home to go to university at 16. The idea that there are parents out there doing stuff like monitoring their kids' internet connections at that age is almost inconceivable to me.
I think we should evaluate that stuff based on the outcomes, not just on assuming our personal culture as a norm. I moved out to live with friends at 15. Wouldn't say it was the greatest idea, although I wouldn't change it. I have also met Indian guys whose parents are all the way up their asses at least until they're into their 20s, and as far as I can tell it results in a good degree, good employment, and early marriage.
It's one thing to have monitoring that your kid knows about, but monitoring your kid doesn't know about is child abuse. 16 year olds are people too, and this is no different from installing spyware on your partner's phone because you suspect them of cheating.
Come back to me when your kid (at 13) gets addicted to video games, and starts setting an alarm to wake and play at 2am behind your back, and getting no sleep.
Their brains aren’t developed. You don’t let a 3 year old pick their own meals.
It's inevitable, and my WiFi monitoring is intended not to find out what sites he visits (I don't care that much about that) but set up to notify me if he's found a way to bypass my nightime blocking and is doing what he did before, and playing video games in the dead of night. And it's still not foolproof. He can theoretically hack a neighbor's wifi, although the weak signal isn't ideal for gaming.
I've educated him on the addictive nature of both games and apps, and he's more aware of the signs of addiction now, but that doesn't mean he won't "relapse" back to it.
I can't prove this without a scientific study to generate truly empirical data, but my theory as to why "boys are in crisis" and aren't graduating high school at same rates as girls involves video game addiction. A shockingly large percentage of my son's male friends get bad grades when they really shouldn't be. They live in stable, higher income homes, but have overly permissive/clueless parents. I'm a parent in a carpool, and I've been shocked at how many times a kid gets in my car and tells my son he was up all night playing games behind his parents back. In fact, this just happened 2 days ago. I picked up a kid, and he told my son he was up all night playing the newly released Overwatch 2 game. His grades suck. I can't help but think sleep deprivation is a huge part of this.
your technique is probably less insidious than mine (forcing packet loss)
but yeah, controlling your kid's gaming habit is hard. I went off the rails and it probably cost me about half a million dollars in opportunity cost. Those games should be illegal/controlled, they use literal gambling mechanisms to hook kids
So he can MITM his son on WiFi and invade his privacy. I bet the day you can own a 5G AP at your home this guy is gonna MITM his son on that. Some people need insane control over their kids, for some reason.
It’s to prevent video game/app addiction and well documented psychological issues. He gets straight As for a reason. I implemented this after he got hooked before, and grades tanked.
I'm the one here advocating for treating a 16 year old like an adult, warts and all, and you're the one secretly adjusting your son's behavior, so I'll stay right here and say what the fuck I want to.
Yes. My kids aren't old enough for that (they are all asleep at 9pm still) but if I had one that did I'd definitely find a way to ensure they avoided pitfalls I suffered through in school (game addition is a really debilitating habit and can remain with some for years afterwards).
1/3 of my kids have iPhone. The use of iPhones amongst them and their peers is directly related to their level of IT/Tech knowhow. Long story short the kids on android are probably gonna wind up building the tech the kids on apple consume. Or atleast that's how it's playing out amongst them atm. iPhone kids legit just take photos and short vidyas mostly of themselves. It's like you can correlate an iPhone with a toxic level of vanity and a lack of technical literacy amongst the teens.
Doesn't match what I see. Tech knowhow is more likely correlated to whether the kid has a laptop or PC to play with rather than what OS is on their phone.
The iPhone ownership tends to roll on to the laptop/compute choice. And much lulz the apple kids are basically stuck in the realm of fisher price kids computers using apple.
They watch on in awe as the normal pcs play games, open any program they want and so on.
Tbh I actually find it quite depressing. I setup online games and score free stuff for the kids and half their mates can't even participate cus they are cucked by apples stubbornness and general refusal to play ball w the rest of the world.
Been on a slow mission to donate them all pcs. I run a micro msp so I get used gear regularly. Theyre all getting exposure to Linux too cus why the hell not.
But the kids with the iPhones will be the financier controlling the purse strings. See the Commodore vs. IBM clones vs. Mac in the early 1980s. Apple wins because wealthy people use them, it's Apple's advantage.
What's your evidence that Apple "won" because of computers bought by rich families in the 80s because last I knew after the mid 90s Apple got (checks notes) massacred in the computing world by Microsoft and the rest and really only won in the mid 2000's via consumer electronics with the creation of new markets that they've largely dominated since.
I guarantee that kids who grow up to be financiers won't be a significant fraction of the 87%. Just like kids wearing Air Jordans when I was in school didn't all grow up to be pro ball players.
Ironically, it's a very Silicon Valley privileged child POV. The anecdotal observation is that some smart kids, usually the hardware-oriented tinkerers, use Androids because they're more customizable. It's certainly not universal.
