i believe that thus far it's a win for apple - all they need to do is introduce the perception that beeper is not 100% reliable, which is the kiss of death for something as potentially important as a messaging service.
the alternative is just continuing to sms people from your android because at least you know the messages are definitely going through, green bubble or not
Is this really a problem? I seriously doubt many people are going to leave someone out because they use an Android phone. I certainly won't because I like communicating with people and people are far more important than technology.
That's nice of you, but by all accounts from the US (where iphone is dominant): Yes, it's a problem. The visual marking and decreased integration/service towards users of non-iphones is pretty obviously part of why Apple has such a big phone market share in the US - if not, they wouldn't fight tooth and nail to keep those anti-features. There's plenty of examples of Apple being quite open and friendly to integration when it benefits them, and here they aren't, so it isn't.
It’s not just about market share. In Scandinavia about 90% of middle class people use iphones, but this whole blue-green bubble nonsense is a total non-issue. We have group chats in whatsapp, fb messages or sms, nobody cares.
This makes me wonder, what’s the iMessage situation in Japan? Their smartphone market is also majority iOS, sitting at above 60% (while it is only a little bit above 50% for the US)[0].
Despite that, I am yet to hear about their version of the whole “blue bubble exclusion” controversy. It could definitely be just due to the japanese users not being super active on western internet, and not necessarily due to that controversy not being a thing in Japan. But it could just be a non-issue in Japan.
Yeah, I was familiar with LINE and Kakao, and I like how similar the setup is for SK and Japan.
Thanks to your point, this way we can easily see that despite SK being android-dominant and Japan being iPhone-dominant, both are not heavily into iMessage and prefer their native super apps instead.
Which provides a solid data point in favor of those claiming that the iMessage proliferation and dominance don’t necessarily have a direct causation stemming from iOS/Android dominance in a given market.
Interestingly enough in Korea, the iOS market share is fairly high among some demographics, especially young professionals with enough disposable income. Android (Samsung, at this point) phones are seen as an option for boomers or younger kids.
So in practice my wife uses FaceTime quite a bit with her siblings, and falls back to KakaoTalk when needed. Her iMessage usage isn't zero either, but mostly 1:1, group chats happen over KakaoTalk, since you know everyone will be there.
I don't know if similar patterns are seen in Japan.
Yeah, I suspect there is indeed something special about Kakao compared to LINE as well.
Out of my friends who moved to Japan, pretty much not a single one of them uses LINE aside from rare one-offs. But with Kakao? Hell, everyone I know who even traveled to SK uses Kakao on regular (not even talking about those who moved there) pretty much as the main app in general for so many different things.
EDIT: oh wow, this sent me down a pretty interesting rabbithole. Apparently 85% of people under 30 in SK had an Android as their first phone, with 53% of those people having switched to iOS since then[0].
Well in Europe Android is dominating the market (but with a very fragmented experience depending on Android version).
The result is that as an iPhone users I feel sometimes feel left out because different friends circles on Android turn to different secured messaging services (WhatsApp, FB messenger, Telegram, Signal, etc...).
I firmly refuse to give my personal ID to all theses companies just to keep in touch so I often default to sms/mail (or I get left out of group chat).
iMessage is not perfect but they did get the sms fallback right and with upcoming RCS support maybe it'll be easier to bypass theses competing closed and incompatible walled gardens.
So from my point of view, the whole "blue bubble" tyranny look like a joke. Apple kept conformance with SMS/MMS standards from the beginning and added a secure layer on top. I wish others services just did the same.
>Apple kept conformance with SMS/MMS standards from the beginning and added a secure layer on top.
iMessage is not a "secure layer on top", it's a totally separate proprietary protocol and it requires an Apple account to work. It just happens to run in the same app as SMS/MMS messages, which has its pros and cons.
“The “magic” is that you don’t have to sign up for an account, or create a new username or account identifier. You just send a message from your phone number to another phone number, and if both numbers are registered for iMessage, the message goes over iMessage instead of SMS, even if you don’t have an Apple ID. Beeper had that working last week. Now, Beeper users need to have an Apple ID, and sign into that Apple ID within Beeper. (Beeper should actively encourage users to create and use an app-specific Apple ID password[1] for Beeper.)”[2]
And yet here we are, in a thread about a service abusing Apple's servers to make something available to the opposite crowd who feels left out because they refuse to use messaging apps that are available for their phones.
Look I think Beeper Mini and the whole thing is silly, but no, Android users are not refusing to use the apps available for their phones. iMessage is not available for Android.
I can understand not trusting FB, but you have to give out the ID you want people to be able to find you by. What you give to Signal is probably less than what's in the phone directory.
> I wish others services just did the same.
Signal did, then someone convinced them that the risk of accidentally sending an SMS which you thought were an encrypted message, was bad enough to break messaging integration on Android.
I wonder if whoever convinced them of that maybe didn't want it to be so convenient to use.
Signal is strongly focused on secure communication, so it never made any sense for it to support SMS/MMS.
I think bundling different protocols in the same app is a bad idea in general. Besides the security and functionality problems, it just creates confusion. The whole iMessage/bubble-color mess wouldn't exist if Apple made it clear to their users that the iMessage protocol is different from SMS and incompatible with most phones.
Well imessage does the exact same thing. It doesn't seem to confuse the users. More basic protocols as a fallback mechanism can be a good idea, if you understand the risks (and of course, if you allow the recipient to use the better protocol!)
Signal always warned me very clearly if it was forced to send a message via SMS, and even pushed me to invite the recipient to Signal. It made sense to support it still, because it's the second most basic service in the Android world (after calls), and now that Signal doesn't offer it, it can't be the default service any longer.
Signal's task as I see it isn't just to protect your communication, but encourage widespread use of strong encryption so that you don't stand out for using it. For that, there are tradeoffs. I think being able to handle the forced insecure communication for the user, clearly marked as such, was a great tradeoff for the sake of wider adoption.
>Well imessage does the exact same thing. It doesn't seem to confuse the users.
What % of iPhone users do you think understand the difference between SMS, MMS and iMessage protocols? I bet most don't. But if iMessage had its own separate app, they would know it's an Apple-only protocol. And that would make them less likely to exclude non-iPhone users and more likely to use cross-platform alternatives. It's not like all iPhone are jerks, they're being mislead on how "texting" in the default iPhone app really works. That's what I meant by confusion.
This is a problem, out of band communication is always a second titer and always overlooked, always incomplete. We as developers see this every day with documentation running out of date in relation to code. The same way the out of group communication falls behind the primary channel.
One Android user means you can no longer send images, video, gifs, or emoji. You can’t react to messages. Sending and receiving no longer works on wifi, so it doesn’t work well in many workplaces.
SMS is a disaster, so it’s best just to leave out the green bubbles.
iPhone users can react to messages when Android users are in a chat. Also, I would not call SMS a "disaster". It works well for text messages and images. These are the two most important things for most people. Also, I have sent images to Android users and they have never complained about image quality. I really think some people are overstating the importance of iMessage. Does it add some nice features? Yes. Is it amazing? Nope. Also, I suspect that the discrimination problem is more of a people problem. Basically, the people who discriminate will find something else to discriminate on if they did not have iMessage.
Just to add to this, iPhones send potato quality video to Android. I am constantly reminding my family that uses iOS that they have to send an iCloud link.
The videos are genuinely useless, I don't know why Apple bothers. It sends like 240p "90s security camera" quality video. I can't tell who anyone is, I once thought a bear in a video was a wolf.
Iirc, Android pops up some kind of "this video is too large, do you want to share it with Photos instead?" modal that converts it to a Photos link instead of sharing directly. That's not perfect, but it's a damn site better than sending a video that you know is useless.
If you're (iphone) sending a message to an imessage user (beeper, or someone switched off iphone) with their phone number, and they're enrolled in imessage, an SMS will not be sent and they will not get it.
This is hearsay based on prior threads, but I haven't read a word against it.
Yes, there's an error message, but if you close your phone, it won't notify you that it failed to send. Hours/days later, you might reopen the message thread to find the message was never sent.
Just pointing out that effectively, it is the same "problem" that SMS has with dropped messages that happens quite rarely (both are rare, actually).
This could easily backfire. Given the blue bubbles it's not possible to know if you're talking to an Android user, which means from the iOS user's perspective, iMessage is just less reliable.
