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.
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"?