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?
