> While blue-bubble FOMO is certainly real, suggesting that it’s the reason people want iPhones is A-grade, uncut “people only buy Apple products because they’re status symbols” kind of delusion.
~ Macworld.com
yeah, ok...
> Since Apple made that choice not to support Android, though, it’s probably safe to say that Apple never actually intended for iMessage to compete for instant-message domination over the rest of the world
apple has made exclusive decisions over and over and over again. and i think everybody outside of the apple bubble knows that its because Brand Prestige is a HUGE part of apples branding.
I can't disagree that Brand Prestige is a big part of their marketing and branding. I used Android phones and linux or MS operating systems on PCs exclusively for my entire life, until the last 2 years or so. I was also quite zealously anti-Apple and anti-Apple-fanboy, and I considered their 1984 ad to be incredibly ironic.
Once the fifth android device in a row bricked on me I made a decision to try an iPhone 11. I couldn't be happier. It just worked, never crashed, and certainly didn't brick during the time I used it, just under 2 years. I recently upgraded to an iPhone 13 and am still thrilled with it. I never had an Android phone that lasted longer than a year before issues started to surface, and I never had one make it 2 years ever.
The performance of the iPhone made the take the plunge to try a MacBook Pro for my personal use. Couldn't be happier with that, either: it offers a linux-like experience on the command line, and provides a mostly great UI (I don't care for Finder--but I haven't any other real complaints).
Edit: my Android phone purchases were top-of-the-line models: Nexus and Pixel phones purchased off Google directly.
I am not sure what budget range you were choosing for these Android phones you mentioned. If you spent the same amount of money that you spend on an iPhone 13/11 on an android, it wouldn't brick. My Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and S2 are still working. They aren't fast but they could be used if I was desperate. I am glad iPhones worked out for you, but I have to say I haven't had any problems with the Androids I have used. I also like that I can root and customize the OS at a deep level. I have an iPad mini and iPod touch. I am familiar with both ecosystems. My iPad mini 4 has crashed on me and it is getting worse with every iOS/iPadOS update. Ram seems to be the limiting factor.
I've had plenty of bad experiences with flagship Android devices. Nexus 5x bootlooped after about 12 months. I had an Essential phone that decided to be off, but not respond to the power button; a known issue with no fix other than to wait until the battery drained itself all the way (which isn't fast because the device is mostly off). If you wait long enough to find out if an Android device is long term reliable, it's not going to be available as a new devicd anymore, and even if it was, you will have a much shorter period of updates after purchase.
All that said, if you want value for money, you embrace the disposable nature of Android devices, and buy around the $200 mark. They may not consistently last much more than a year, but $/year on phones is much less. If you can get upstart flagship phones when they've crashed down to earth, even better: Fire, Robin, Essential was a nice period of commercial flops that made decent phones (baring that power state issue). And Mr. Rubin is rumored to be working on a new upstart phone, so maybe another good buy is coming up soon. (Hopefully with a headphone jack this time)
The definition of flagship is specious at best. Recent Pixels have been coming out with budget mid-range processors and less technological prowess as compared to their brethren from Samsung etc, and the camera is at a standstill since the Pixel 2.
On the other hand, devices like the Nexus 4 had a big emphasis on powerful CPU and midrange price. Safe to say that Google's strategy is fluid, to put it charitably.
That is like saying the 601 limousine was Trabant's flagship product. Sure, yes, you are technically correct but... no. The Nexus devices were less than half the price of actual flagship products.
Back when the Nexus came out, the top iPhones were selling for $599, if I recall correctly. So at $400 it was more than half, but that's splitting hairs because it was Google's flagship. By sales volume a bit player, but it occupied tremendous mindshare because of the brand.
I paid $400 (or more?) for what was billed from google as their premier nexus device (I just got whatever the lowest RAM was). I got it for a testing device. What was lauded was "doesn't come with carrier bloatware/apps". OK. Fine. It was a middling experience at best, but was presented as Google's 'best' at that time.
> If you spent the same amount of money that you spend on an iPhone 13/11 on an android, it wouldn't brick.
In my experience that has not been quite true. Do you consider it fair to consider top of the line Pixels with mainstream non-Pro iPhones? I'd say they are roughly in the same price class. If so, I can tell you almost every other if not every single Nexus/Pixel generation has major and widespread issues after a year or so. iPhones usually have none of that and they have longer software update cycle.
Huh? What kind of issues are you talking about? The person above said 5 bricks in the row. You have to try really hard to get that even with cheap noname Android phones.
As for non-critical issues, the debacles with "holding it wrong" and forced low performance mode are quite memorable. I don't remember anything quite as bad as forced slowdown in the Nexus/Pixel line.
We have a box of bricked Google branded handsets in the office. It’s quite normal. They’re not worth repairing or replacing. Conversely we have no dead iPhones at all (apart from where some idiots cratered them). We’re rolling out iPhone 12 and 13 to replace the androids. In fact a friend of mine’s flagship galaxy that is 11 months old dropped dead in the middle of nowhere the other day and left her up shit creek. She went to the apple store on Monday and bought an iPhone 13.
>We have a box of bricked Google branded handsets in the office.
And here's why:
>It’s quite normal. They’re not worth repairing or replacing.
People have bricked and broken iPhones fixed all the time. In my small 50k citizen town there are three shops that only fix iPhones. That's all they do for a living. There's exactly zero "Android repair shops". At best you could ask one of the iPhone shops if they can help. Please stop this myth of Apple devices not breaking. They break all the time.
It kind of depends on the user. My iPhones never break. My daughter's - who actually USES them - are a consumable. Mostly they die due to physical damage or because of the battery croaking after multiple charge cycles per day, but I think she had one where she broke the flash before physically breaking the phone beyond repair.
Now to nitpick on your post: is it possible that there are a lot more iPhone users than Android users in your town? In mine there are no iPhone repair shops, just generic phone repair shops that fix everything if they can.
Edit: there's a discussion further down about plastic laptops vs aluminium laptops and someone saying his plastic laptops never broke. He should take a look at my daughter's laptop :)
Never been a brand zealot, never will be, but also almost never seen what you say either. I used Androids for almost 6 years before jumping to iPhones. Androids were consistently unreliable and had to be repaired or changed often -- severely lagging just mere months after a buy, bugs that go unfixed for a full year, displays randomly getting super dim, batteries getting hot and going to 60% of the original capacity in just several months, volume buttons breaking etc. I am on my 3rd iPhone and I completely forgot that my phone can be a source of trouble. I have no reason to make this up. I am a normal consumer who goes after reliability.
I understand that many people are somewhat offended by Apple's mere existence (because they indeed do plenty of shady stuff) but please strive to be more objective. Not everything that Apple does is bad and your generalization is not helpful.
And as another poster said, any smartphone will break if you're rough with it. I've seen my fair share of drunk girls dropping their phone on a concrete floor, clumsily trying to pick it up, proceed to fall ass-first directly on it, and then rage how the phone is "trash for breaking as easily".
> In my small 50k citizen town there are three shops that only fix iPhones.
I live in a capital city (~2.5M people) and I know a smartphone shop owner who also owns 2 service/repair shops. He gave up on repairing Androids because Android users are very price-sensitive (his words): "they buy a phone for 220 EUR and when they hear a replacement for the display they broke is 90 EUR they just say: screw that, I'll buy a new one, or just grumpily leave". He was paying 2 Android phone technicians to basically sit around twiddling their thumbs all day, for basically 4-8 repairs a month, so he let them go and paid for his iPhone technicians to learn Android repairs for the occasional customer who needed them.
The iPhone "repairs" were mostly routine work in comparison: many people, myself included, routinely swap the battery when it reaches 80% capacity (because at that point you do notice a reduced battery life). Often people break their displays so they need new ones. Very rarely they had to actually replace a logic board or anything else internally.
The shop owner also told me that he can count on the fingers of one hand the iPhones he has to completely replace in warranty during any given 3-6 months period.
As is the case with 98% of everything, the reasons for a phenomena are economic. No grand conspiracies or big bads.
I mean, I am sorry, but I find it extremely hard to believe in 5 bricks in a row. Even if we optimistically take that 1 of 10 devices bricks on its own, the parent would be pretty unique at 1 per 10000. That just does not add up. Some significant part is missing from that story.
The nexus line cost less than half of actual flagship products. Besides, I disagree they had widespread problems. I owned almost one of each type and all are still functioning 100%. My girlfriends old iPhones on the other hand are broken, every single one of them. Now she buys Android phones and they work just fine. See, anecdotes are useless.
I have bought flagship android devices from many brands. The most expensive Samsung Galaxy native Google Maps app would be more laggy than an iPhone SE in the web view gmaps (and the native app would be even smoother).
The only exceptions I've had where performance was reasonable given the price are Sony's phones, the LG G1(?) and some of the pixels. But generally speaking everything on Android stutters _so much_ it's really painful.
I have always had this silly theory that this is somehow a Java thing, because there have been very motivated people trying to get low latency stuff working on Android and are just unable to... but it's just unavoidable no matter how much money you spend.
I am not an Android developer myself, but my understanding is that you can write extremely performant code, so it's probably not true that Java is holding back developers who want to write stutter-free apps.
So this might have changed, it's been a while since I looked into Android dev, but I think that some of the C++ integration stuff ends up hitting FFI latency. So you can get good performance, but you're still bound to (for example) latency in the input layer because your hooks into the OS HID layer is still going through the same stuff, _and_ you have some FFI nonsense.
I imagine that thanks to people at Epic and Unity that things will have improved much on that front, it's not like games don't exist on Android after all.
All in all, Google just made a big disservice to the Java community with their Dalvik and ART forks running Android Java, and the sooner they are on their coozy Kotlin universe with Android running on top Kotlin/Native (Kotlin is after all so much better than Java /s), the better.
It's also about controlling both the hardware and the software and the resulting integration. Like people were able to create not stuttering games with 8 bit CPUs in the 80s.
I was purchasing them right off Google: Nexus and Pixel phones, very much the same price point as iPhone. I assure you, they were very poorly made (one Nexus had a faulty power button that caused the phone to constantly power cycle) and the software was terribly unstable besides. I suppose I got statistical outliers every single time, but while it's possible it's not likely.
Nexus phones were cheap compared to iPhone, that was their whole differentiation. For example, Nexus 5 launched at $349 while at the same time iPhone 5 launched at $649. There's nothing comparable in those prices.
If you really did buy all of these, then you certainly didn't pay the same price. And after that, there was 3 years break before first Pixel - so you used a bricked phone for 3 years? Or it worked fine for 3 years?
Unless they stated otherwise elsewhere, why are you assuming they went from the Nexus 5 straight to the Pixel? There’s also the Nexus 6 (2014) and 5X/6P (2015) before the Pixel (2016).
Only one of my flagship android phones bricked iself: a Samsung S3.
The rest just became painfully slow.
When I tap camera and the flagship phone seems to have to finish a conversation with some server somewhere before camera opens and the moment is gone then I get annoyed.
So after iPhone got user replacable keyboards I dared to try it and it has been better for me.
> My Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and S2 are still working.
My Galaxy S4 and Note 4 were working quite fine ~18 months later, but only technically. They were aggravatingly slow and I was factory-resetting them each every 3 months, also rooted them and de-bloated them quite thoroughly. This rejuvenated them for a while but then some mere 1-2 months later they were back to a crawl.
We can throw anecdotal evidence around until the end of time but to say older Samsung are working only applies in very strict dictionary terms and not what an average user would find acceptable (f.ex. various functions were routinely taking 2-3 seconds before the device responded). Several acquaintances had the same experiences.
I believe generalizing all Android phones without differentiating between a flagship experience and budget price experience to be a dishonest representation.
Is it though? You have a reasonably consistent and good experience from iPhone SE to 13 Pro Max. Why would it be unreasonable to expect the same from Androids?
(Personally I have found the real differentiator is not the price, but the amount of crap the vendor adds. There are crap 1k+ phones running Android and often you can find some cheaper ones that have a better software experience)
You have a fairly reasonably consistent experience going from one Samsung to the next, or from an LG v20 to LG v60. But, going from a Samsung to an LG? Yeah, there's differences. They're skinned differently, some have their own custom apps by default that aren't stock Android. Each does certain things slightly better or worse.
As an example, in my experience and preference, I've preferred the audio on my LG phones to my prior Samsung phones (I don't use my current Samsung with headphones at all, as it doesn't have a 3.5mm plug and I don't have an adapter and I don't want wireless headphones, pure personal preference there on no wireless and I've had no need for an adapter for the duration I've had the Samsung this last 9 months). I'd say for my personal taste and use, the audio experience has been a fair comparison as I've used the exact same headphones and largely listen to the exact same music files across the different phones (literally by moving the SD card from one phone to the next, no copying involved). I'm sure someone out there will disagree, though, and that's fine.
But, there you go and counter an anecdote with another just like OP pointed out. I can counter the counter too: I have all my old Android phones - all the way back to my Sony Mini (with sliding keyboard!) and they all work just fine. All of my girlfriends old iPhones are broken or bricked. I'm sure that wasn't what you meant with a reasonably consistent experience from Apple devices. There are a ton a Apple repair shops in any town so its not unreasonably to say that it isn't a rarity that they break. These are anecdotes and you simply cannot use it to compare.
IMO that Apple devices break less are a myth. They just get repaired instead of thrown out hence last longer on average.
Also the SE cost twice what most Android phones cost. It is not a budget phone.
iPhone SE (which you seem to describe as "budget price experience" considering the message you're replying too) base price is 489€. I can buy 2 very decent budget price Android devices for that amount of money. 6 if I don't go with decent.
Prestige is great and can really juice sales, but it only works for so long. If your product isn’t good the prestige won’t last.
I’m not saying your product has to be the absolute best, but it needs to somewhat earn its reputation.
Brands have lost their prestige in the past for this exact reason. Some probably are right now.
Apple has been a juggernaut for ~20 years (since the first iPod). The “people just buy for the prestige” argument can’t hold that long if that’s all a brand has.
macs make up 10% of apples quarterly revenue[1], with iphone being pretty much always at least 50%.
with something that makes up a practically annual or semi-annual purchase (iphone) vs mac (maybe every 4-5 years?) i think the social value plays a massive role, and the actual product simply has to have plausible deniability of being "good enough to justify the price."
frankly, iphones being $1k+ is part of their social perceived value.
nobody is saying iphones are bad. but apple throws its weight around in bad-faith ways. and they get justified by the apple bloggers. the "walled garden" is part of the prestige.
oneplus 6t - Nov 2018 to present, and i can't justify buying a new phone yet. i will probably need to replace the battery soon though.
my laptop is a mid 2014 macbook pro i traded my unused vacation for when i left that job. still going strong. amazing actually, considering it's 8 years old now.
I’ve got the same mid-2014 mbp. I had to get the battery replaced, but otherwise it’s been the longest lived laptop I’ve had that still gets regular use.
I had a nexus 6, too. I was doing some mobile development at the time and figured that a flagship product would be a good introduction to android ecosystem. It wasn’t a bad phone, but I was surprised that the build materials weren’t on par with anything Apple had at the time. The screen was good and responsive, but seemed plasticky and 2nd rate compared to the glass that both high-end Samsungs and Apple used.
Similar experience with the nexus 9 tablet. Good idea, meh execution.
Maybe things have changed, but the nexus line, considering it is (was?) a flagship product, didn’t seem to live up to expectations.
Nexus were never premium. It was cheap-ish high-end SoC best demonstration of Android OS.
However, Pixels are definitely meant to be flagships, and IMO they are still not worth that name.
Anecdata: my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 fell quite literally hundred times more than my Pixel 5 (I was very clumsy/drunk by then, and got better), and is still perfectly alive , while my Pixel 5's display broke very easily (it's not even the glass that is broken, it's some internal circuitry). Maybe phones were to be tougher back then? Well, I also have a Samsung Galaxy S10e, it survived many falls just fine (well it does seem a tad worse than my Galaxy Note 2, because paint goes off where it fell).
I had the successor to the nexus 6, the nexus 6p, and it had a noise cancellation issue that canceled out voices instead of the background. Made the phone completely unusable as phone. I rarely made phone calls and didn't realize the issue wasn't just sporadic until out of manufacturers warranty. Haven't bought an android since (I also really disliked the hey google stuff they were integrating at the time.)
The bricking might have been your usage of it. I own an old Android phone (moto g 1) and it still works just fine. How old is that now? 10 years? Probably. It only has become a bit slow, as apps require more performance.
> my Android phone purchases were top-of-the-line models: Nexus and Pixel phones purchased off Google directly.
So the problem is with Google's phones not with Android in general. Anecdotally my Samsung Galaxy S2 failed after 6 years (which is sad but fair IMHO), my Sony Xperia Compact still works after 5 years, same for a Samsung A40 after 3 years.
I think you have encapsulated the concept of FOMO.
Undoubtedly, for the money Apple devices cost - they better damn well work flawlessly for the next 10-15 years. But they don't. I use a MBP and iMac for work and I hate it.
The price difference between iPhones and high-end, official Android (e.g., Nexus, Pixel) phones is negligible.
It's simply not possible as far as I've seen to purchase a PC laptop with similar construction quality (when they're not plastic garbage they're poor imitations of the metal body and interior layout), but one can pay almost as much for a MacBook Pro to get a PC laptop with similar or somewhat superior performance characteristics. That construction quality is worth a premium price point.
I prefer plastic and other material than aluminum unibody. They are lightweight, solid enough, not become too cool, not edgey, and soft. Don't link aluminum == premium.
It’s inferior in every respect, quite aside from any “cool” factor. It breaks easily and it doesn’t support the non-plastic pieces (e.g. the monitor) well are two of the most important factors.
I guess the point is "citation needed". What you said is "common sense", but the source of that "common sense" is mostly marketing material. At least I don't recollect seeing any hard data, that would support either of those claims.
FWIW, I'm reading this on an early 2013 MBP. I think it would still have years of use in it, but new MacOS versions don't support it any more and I have this gut feeling that Linux maintainers aren't okay with the idea of supporting decade old hardware from the hateful enemy.
Not quite sure what you were doing. I have been using Android since the HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2 in the US) in 2010, I’ve been rooting and installing multiple custom roms (only on my last phone did I switch to just staying on official LineageOS), and I never had a single phone get bricked. I have no idea how you managed to do that while staying on stock, not have I ever heard of people having such issues.
None of my Android phones lasted under 2 years, my last one lasted almost 5 years and only got replaced because I wanted a slightly better camera, and both the battery and USB-C connector started to fail.
> We have a box of bricked Google branded handsets in the office. It’s quite normal. They’re not worth repairing or replacing. Conversely we have no dead iPhones at all (apart from where some idiots cratered them). We’re rolling out iPhone 12 and 13 to replace the androids. In fact a friend of mine’s flagship galaxy that is 11 months old dropped dead in the middle of nowhere the other day and left her up shit creek. She went to the apple store on Monday and bought an iPhone 13.
But maybe the issue is just with Samsung or Google phones, Samsung I dislike as much as Apple, Google phones (the Pixel ones, I had the Nexus) seem overpriced for my needs.
Maybe, but what you consider bricked, and what a layperson would consider a bricked phone will also differ. Which drastically reduce the chance of a truly bricked phone. Getting an android to the point of being unrecoverable is definitely harder than an iPhone. But that is irrelevant for $MYMUM
Yeah, I’ve had 2 or 3 soft bricks or bootloops. *Always* after doing a mistake when flashing a new ROM. Even with custom roms, the worst thing during normal usage I encountered was an unexpected restart.
Nah, the 99% of law students in my classes who went for shiny macbooks instead of absolutely any computer that allows its user to take notes and search the web obviously did so after carefully weighing the pros and cons of every solution. Not because they felt compelled to fit in the group.
My parents have been Windows users since the 90s and I am regularly their IT person to solve their computer issues (which have been aplenty!). I somehow managed to convince my mom to switch to a Mac Mini about 5 years ago whereas my dad refuses to switch. I get far more calls from my dad about issues with Windows than I get from my mom. As such, I recommend all my friends and their younger siblings to get a Mac. Even if it's just for taking notes in law school. It just works.
99% of developers that don't develop for Windows also seem to use and prefer Macbook Pros, so the argument "the law students don't know squat" doesn't really hold water.
If my Thinkpad was not a solution, I would have continued using a Mac even with their lack of ports and upgradability.
What? In what world? I think that is a bubble in itself right there. Software devs are among the most aware groups of people (which still is not too aware, sadly)
about limitations, configurability, free software, and open source software on their devices. You cannot even test websites you develop properly on MacOS (including what happens with blocking solutions in place, as MacOS limits their capabilities). Also browsers do not have the same right like on other systems. Only Safari has, which is not what you should test with. It is ill suited at least for web development.
> Also browsers do not have the same right like on other systems. Only Safari has, which is not what you should test with. It is ill suited at least for web development.
What right does Safari have over Chrome running on a Mac?
Developers need much more in a computer than the average law student. Heck, I would consider buying a macbook myself, they're obviously very good computers. All I'm saying is, let's not downplay the insane trendiness effect that goes with Apple products.
There are numerous stories on reddit of kids who get bullied if they have an android phone instead of an iPhone. Teenagers crying when they receive the last Samsung phone instead of an iPhone. Etc.
> Brand Prestige is a HUGE part of apples branding.
I agree it is certainly part of their branding. An iPhone is an iPhone no matter the price you pay. The iPhone SE for $400 doesn't feel any less premium as the most expensive $2000 iPhone. There isn't really a obvious design element that tells you it's the cheap iPhone (except the notch and the camera, but it could just be that you didn't buy a new one) and this is also true for the hardware.
Other manufacturers definitely have a much worse customer experience for people that buy their low-end models. This is understandable because they don't have the margins Apple has.
But pretending that people buying Apple just do so because they are held hostage and they are missing out on a better user experience is delusional. Android and iOS both are trying to lock you into their ecosystem and try to sell you additional services which increase your lock-in. I'm not conviced that they deliberately design their products in a way to increase the lock-in. It probably comes naturaly if you don't have any open standards and interopability as a design goal.
People on here talk about RCS for example but if you look at the Wikipedia page about RCS [1] you can see that carriers started implementing RCS in the last 4-5 years. For my country there is only one carrier listed and they implemented RCS less than 2 years ago. Sure RCS was a standard when Apple released iMessage but at the time most providers were still charging outrageous prices for SMS/MMS. Good luck convincing them a standard which would remove a revenue stream. So iMessage was a good solution to offer a better experience for iPhone users. It just works, no configuration required and you can always fallback to SMS/MMS.
They probably could've made iMessage an open standard or made an Android app. But would've other manufacturers and Google participated in this standard (mind you it would've been centralized, there was no Signal protocol) or would everyone using iMessage be better than what we have now?
I think a lot of the criticism today is hindsight. We know a lot more today and a lot of stuff was in it's infancy when it was released and tried to solve different problems than what we see today.
Sorry for the rant. This post went a bit overboard but I had a lot of thoughts on the topic that ended up in this post. And I'm interested if someone has something to add or disagrees with my assesment completely.
Switching from iphone, which all my friends and family use, to a pixel caused so many issues with texting I almost went back to iOS solely because I was causing headaches for others.
FOMO is real for sure, but plain old inconvenience is also at play. If your entire family and social circle is on iOS, it's a massive pain to leave. This is by design.
I completely understand what you mean by this, and what bothers me the most is that this is problem should be entirely avoidable. Pleaes correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't think of a single technical reason why "a non iphone in a group chat" has to cause such infuriating levels of inconvenience for everyone involved. Someone had to put explicit effort into making it as unbearable as it is.
The only reason I can think of is Apple using a dominant position in a network in order to sabotage alternatives.
> Pleaes correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't think of a single technical reason why "a non iphone in a group chat" has to cause such infuriating levels of inconvenience for everyone involved.
SMS/MMS is the lowest common denominator for non-Messages devices. So including a non-Messages device in a group chat means the whole chat needs to be downgraded to SMS. Even if Apple added support for RCS tomorrow, group chats would need to downgrade to it and lose E2EE and rely on the participants carriers to deliver messages just like with SMS.
There's no good way for Apple to integrate the shit show of non-Messages protocols in a sane way. Carriers made a mess of RCS in the design, implementation, and deployment. Google has had to run their own RCS backend to allow Android users to actually use RCS thanks to the carriers' bungling and meddling. Even they haven't helped the situation with a decade of half-starts in messaging apps.
Blaming Apple is a bit ridiculous. They're not going to spend a billion dollars fixing the problems created by carriers and Google when they already have their own messaging system.
It's a problem APPLE CREATED! this is texting, plain and simple. Apple decided to do their own thing and call it texting instead of just making their own entire messaging system. Now people are brainwashed... But only in the US really...
> Apple decided to do their own thing and call it texting instead of just making their own entire messaging system.
They did make their own messaging system. Their Messages (née iMessage) is entirely separate from carrier provided SMS/MMS. It's accessed via the same application as SMS because on early iOS they only supported SMS. The Messages/iMessage features were added to their existing application.
Saying "this is texting plain and simple" ignores a ludicrous amount of complexity about the underlying systems. There's nothing plain and simple about text messaging systems. If you're going to bash Apple for supposedly creating problems at least familiarize yourself with the subject.
>Blaming Apple is a bit ridiculous. They're not going to spend a billion dollars fixing the problems created by carriers and Google when they already have their own messaging system.
I blame Apple for making communications software (iMessage, FaceTime) that is utterly useless to me as an Apple customer.
There are exactly two useful ways to make this kind of software.
(a) Build on top of a standard that others can implement for other platforms.
(b) Support all big platforms yourself.
Apple has decided to do neither. They made something that is totally useless for everyone outside of some close-knit circles in the U.S. Lock-in strategies are always lock-out strategies as well.
But they're not just pissing off their own customers, they're also playing a very risky game. Messaging apps have a tendency to become platforms in their own right (e.g WeChat).
By taking itself out of the picture, Apple is creating a power vacuum that is being exploited by the likes of Facebook. Ultimately this could even threaten Apple's hardware sales, for instance if Facebook manages create something interesting out of WhatsApp + Oculus.
So in my opinion, Apple's strategy is unintelligent and norrow minded. It's classic short sighted "corporate greed".
When Apple released iMessage and FaceTime respectively there weren't really good "standards" for them to adopt.
For iMessage there were desktop messaging standards like XMPP or the immature at the time RCS from cellular carriers. XMPP is not a great protocol for mobile devices with unreliable/changing network connections and background processing constraints. RCS was immature when iMessage was released and hadn't really been deployed by carriers or was deployed but not interoperable between them. It also requires a SIM and a cellular service. So it's a non-starter for non-phone devices. Additionally it doesn't offer E2EE without proprietary extensions and running private relays like Google has done.
For FaceTime there was never a really good video telephony standard to implement. FaceTime uses some existing standards but all over Apple infrastructure. Remember FaceTime has always been an over the top data service and like iMessage has no tie to carriers. When FaceTime was released it didn't even work over cellular, it was WiFi only.
So what standards should Apple have adopted? As a minority player in the mobile or computer markets which of their own services should they have pushed as standards?
Obviously standards are the way to go since WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Google's 400 different messaging systems all implement the same standar...oh wait they don't.
Messages is a value-add for Apple's platforms. Google isn't bending over backwards making Nest devices work with Apple ecosystems and Microsoft doesn't offer an XBox SDK for the PlayStation. WhatsApp isn't opening their messaging for Apple to adopt. Companies compete with one another, making products and offering services to attract customers. Why is this unintelligent and narrow minded when it's Apple?
If there was no suitable standard then they should have created one. Either that, or support all major platforms.
>Companies compete with one another, making products and offering services to attract customers. Why is this unintelligent and narrow minded when it's Apple?
Because it's classic short-termism for the narrowest financial reasons, showing no creativity or vision whatsoever. They prioritised locking in some U.S based users at the cost of creating an oppportunity for the likes of Facebook to serve the overwhelming majority of users for whom Apple's offering is useless.
I have no problem in principle with proprietary software that is only available on a single platform. What I find unintelligent and even offensive as a customer is choosing this approach to create this specific type of software that so obviously requires a different approach.
For me, iMessage and FaceTime do not add value. It's preinstalled crapware that causes massive security issues.
> They created their own messaging system and let SMSes enter it.
Apple supported SMS before iMessage/Messages existed. Their Messages app didn't even support MMS until iOS 3. It didn't gain the iMessage functionality until iOS 5.
Apple supports the global standards of SMS/MMS. Their own Messages service can be disabled entirely so a phone will only send SMS/MMS messages. Just about any phone able to connect to an extant cellular network can receive these messages and send messages to an iPhone.
SMS and MMS lack a lot of capability that people want in messaging systems. SMS was born out of unused space in control messages in the GSM spec. That's why fucking everyone from DoCoMo (i-mode e-mail) to RIM (Blackberry Messenger) to Apple have added some over the top messaging system to phones.
SMS is a fallback because it's supported by essentially every carrier. Carriers have tiptoed towards a better messaging standard with RCS but they are at cross purposes with OS vendors and end users. They want a messaging system that allows them to charge per use and the ability to snoop on user messages. So they turned RCS into a mess of a standard and have bungled or slow walked it's rollout.
But no, I'm sure it's Apple that caused all the evil in the world.
A trillion dollar company should be able to easily figure out how to avoid "reaction" messages from dumping a screenful of text and destroying the messaging experience for everyone. I"m sure they can do it for less than "a billion dollars".
I'm not suggesting that Apple should be responsible for making cross-platform messaging 100% compatible, but someone at Apple has made conscious decisions to make the experience as infuriating as possible.
RCS is great. They should have done it ten years ago.
Sure, ten years ago it probably didn’t seem to matter, but the iPhone 5 already bumped the screen size from 3.5in to 4in the rear camera was already 1080p, and “phablets” were already a term in 2012. It was totally foreseeable that MMS size limits where going to be a problem, if they weren’t already!
What a great case of skating where the puck is, instead of skating where it’s headed. RCS existed as a spec, just not implemented by carriers. The fact that Apple, and even Google, are routing around their MMS servers is totally their fault.
And if everybody is on WhatsApp or Messenger or Telegram nobody really knows of you have an iPhone unless they look at you carefully when you use your phone. It becomes a commodity if we care only about messaging.
Oh it's real. It's very frustrating to text people who can't receive live photos, videos sent are reduced in quality by a significant degree, can't receive replies to specific comments, and can't receive link previews. People don't click links without a preview, period. So no use sending a video or live photo via icloud link either. I have absolutely minimized texting android users due to these issues. It probably helps that 80% of the folks I text regularly (or have at some point) are apple users.
>videos sent are reduced in quality by a significant degree
What is the purpose of this? It's an issue solely with apple phones, people sending me videos from Android phones come through fine in full quality but anything from an apple device comes in looking like a Minecraft video.
>can't receive replies to specific comments
Apple actually started having their phones start sending texts with the reaction a few years ago, see this from my girlfriend earlier today
MMS video and picture sizes are size constrained by the carrier in the profile. As many carriers already allow 4MB or even unlimited sizes it is purely an issue of carriers being cheap and lazy and leaving old limits on MMS. It would probably even be profitable for carriers as MMS already counts against data and RCS allows the larger sizes anyway. Yet Google prefers to roll yet another new protocol and complain instead of getting the carriers to just fix MMS configuration issues to solve the biggest ongoing complaints.
Just as a data point from outside the US: a 4MB MMS is about 5$ in Germany, even on a 30+$/mo base price package. Sending that to a group call multiplies the cost with the number of recipients.
MMS (and in all likelihood RCS) is a complete non-starter for this market.
That picture is the description of a reaction, not a reply. And the description is much worse than having the reactions on the message like in iMessage.
It doesn't matter whose fault it is. I mean its really users fault for not using messaging apps, but that's clearly by design. Apple crafted iMessage to be good enough that iPhone users overwhelmingly use it and it provides a much worse experience when texting non iPhone users.
RCS is an inferior anti-user unencrypted "standard" to iMessage; too little, too late, and driven by Google who effectively bribes carriers to get behind it by providing backend servers to them and sell out the user. No user wants additional say from carrier and potential opportunity for billing. The only reason RCS has even become a thing and Android is playing that game is Google intended to force Apple's hand by ganging up on them with carriers. They failed and now they whine. What they are asking iMessage is to basically fold their pocket ace hand and join and be a lower-class participant in a Google-controlled messaging world. No wonder Apple will always say fuck you.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Considering there are dozens of other chat apps with huge market shares on both platforms, is it inconceivable that they had a better product than most chat apps? (Until quite recently iMessage was the only widely distributed and usable end to end encrypted messaging platform out there, for example.) It is Google who controls the majority of smartphones, not Apple, yet they have not been able to effectively "abuse" their market position, mind you.
Personally, whenever I carry an Android, I'd very much prefer Signal or WhatsApp than Google Messages app.
Bundling and control of defaults are powerful levers. If users were presented a ballot on first use then perhaps these incumbents would have to compete on an even playing field.
Oh I agree completely. Not only should there a regulated standard for texts placed upon any company with 5% marketshare, there should be a similar standard places upon social media over 5% marketshare.
Ah yes the "standard" that the carriers have slow rolled, rolled out only partially, or rolled out in certain regions. Such a great standard Google themselves have proprietary extensions only available in their Messages app and only when using their back end.
Apple and Google don't want to play nice with one another. That's on both of them. The carriers are a third pole that don't want to play nice with each other or Google or Apple.
Google and Apple want value-add features on their platforms. Carriers don't want E2EE so they can mine text messages for advertisers.
You're not going to legislate or regulate a platform into existence. Apple and Google didn't appear on the scene yesterday. They both started at zero users amid a market full of competitors. They are the competitive upstarts that actually competed and and were successful.
Before the iPhone and Android there were a number of mobile platforms that all sucked in their own special ways. The mobile market was the incumbents' market to lose and they then lost of their own accord.
IMO Windows Phone was a superior alternative yet could not complete because the two incumbents were too entrenched. Network effects don't impact only users but developers as well.
> IMO Windows Phone was a superior alternative yet could not complete because the two incumbents were too entrenched.
Seriously? Windows Phone flopped because Microsoft couldn't get its act together. IE sucked and couldn't handle even mobile sites that iOS and Android had no problem with. The messaging and e-mail had anemic features. And Microsoft simply couldn't execute on a third party developer strategy.
For whatever interesting ideas the OS had it was a dumpster fire of execution. It didn't help them at all that Windows Phone 7 had no backwards compatibility with Windows Mobile so they burned anyone invested in that platform. They repeated the trick with Windows Phone 8 where Windows Phone 7 devices couldn't run 8. Being the third place platform and repeatedly burning your customers was just an asinine choice for Microsoft.
Windows Phone had interesting features and UI concepts. What killed it was Microsoft's absolutely terrible execution. It had little to do with Apple and Google being "entrenched". Microsoft wrapped a handful of interesting features or good hardware (Nokia phones) in layers of crap.
I had never heard of it either until I switched to an iPhone for unrelated reasons. Half my contacts suddenly were congratulating me on being "blue". It was... weird.
anecdata: I heard about it a lot. ESPECIALLY when i was in high school and college.
Definitely heard girls (with iphones) gossip and discussing prospective men and say "but his texts are green". Its not code for "he isn't rich" - I went to a private school and hung out with sorority girls so everyone was well off, but something more ambiguous. Something makes blue bubbles feel better.
Maybe its just that iMessage is a more rich form of communication vs SMS, and people hate needing another app to check for that one android user in their life.
> Maybe its just that iMessage is a more rich form of communication vs SMS, and people hate needing another app to check for that one android user in their life.
The user experience of conventional SMS is often terrible; it's not encrypted (I'm not even talking about E2E but simply in-transit encryption as mobile carriers are nasty and may want to snoop), vulnerable to number spoofing, delivery reports aren't supported on iOS (and even then it really depends on carriers) and is slower than iMessage.
Yeah, I use Signal for a few of my friends and I try to get others in so we can all be in the same chat group on PC and phone, the responses I get would make you think I asked them to feed their children to piranha.
Or perhaps we shouldn't trust apple with our communication data and move everyone to something lime signal
But yea, I wouldn't want to date someone who thinks like that anyhow. Their values are obviously too different from my own if they value iMessage over security, privacy, and the ability to modify my own devices
> But yea, I wouldn't want to date someone who thinks like that anyhow... if they value iMessage over security, privacy, and the ability to modify my own devices
Yeah. I think the sorority girls would agree that it may be a bad match.
> if they value iMessage over security, privacy, and ...
Its not source available, but iMsg has long been e2ee and with a focus on privacy - but i can imagine that their word isn't enough for you to trust them.
> Its not source available, but iMsg has long been e2ee and with a focus on privacy - but i can imagine that their word isn't enough for you to trust them.
This is a marketing lie fed to you by Apple. In reality, thanks to pressure from the FBI, if either you or your contact has iCloud backups enabled, iMessage is effectively plaintext. (Same with WhatsApp on iOS, but the situation is much better on Android.) https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/what...
Its not a lie, it can still be e2ee as a protocol - thats stored client side in plaintext. If that client uploads it unencrypted... that's their fault. (conceptually).
I think its only a lie in that apple has it upload by default (opt-out) which means as you pick it up from a store, its not e2ee, even though minor setting changes (one boolean button?) can make it real e2ee.
Everything is "effectively plaintext" if anyone can actually read it. You could screenshot your texts, and that ruins encryption. And obviously in a multi-person setting any weak link ruins it for all.
Personally, i'm disappointed its opt-out not opt-in, but i think plaintext backup and easy backups are a net-good for the users, even at expense of e2ee. Most customers don't need e2ee, but many will need backups. That said, i think most data, especially texts, could benefit with auto-deletion of old content. Some things don't need to live forever online.
These are all really weak excuses for the fact that the FBI applied pressure on Apple specifically to not add encryption to iMessage backups on iCloud, and there's documented evidence showing that it takes advantage of that.
Apple is acting in the FBI's interest, not in yours.
Besides its E2E, Signal has all the downsides of iMessage; it still relies on phone numbers as identity, is a centralized walled garden hostile to third-party clients and the desktop client is an Electron pile of shit.
Your list of complaints is valid, but iMessage has another major downside: it only runs on Apple hardware. Using Signal means almost everyone can participate in a group chat if they so choose.
On TikTok there's a lot of GenZ videos about green bubbles being ugh. It is definitely a thing with younger people. I got an iPhone after never thinking I'd buy one ever, but decided Apple is the lesser of 2 evils, and everyone I text that has an iPhone immediately recognized the blue bubble. Also, it sucks if you want to send a picture or video to a green bubble.
I saw a guy on tinder once say not to even bother if your texts are going to be green. It really rocked my world to realize there are real people actually like that out there
Honestly I wouldn't want to date someone who thinks like that anyhow, so good. It filters them out because their values obviously don't line up with mine.
You can't really have text conversations between iMessage and android because SMS is so slow. It's like having a conversation where each person can only say two sentences a minute.
This could actually work as a decent filter if you don't want to waste endless hours doing tech support and fixing up their stupid Android full of malware.
Can I just ask where you live? I know a lot of countries don't have proper Google Play stores so have to resort to sideloading. Obviously in western countries we don't have this issue so android malware is a non-issue but I'm interested in what country android phones are full of malware to the point where you're apparently wasting a lot of hours doing tech support.
Hours was hyperbole as I actually don't even bother to clean the device and just recommend getting a used iPhone and help them migrate the data, but technically cleaning a device after malware would've involved backing everything up, resetting the device, potentially updating the firmware (or installing a trusted third-party ROM like Lineage) and then reinstalling & configuring all the apps & accounts - I can easily imagine this taking hours especially on a slow internet connection.
I don't think it has anything to do with getting your apps from Play Store vs elsewhere. This is in the UK and despite Google Play being available, back when I worked in a phone store, customers bringing compromised Android devices was fairly common (in fact some of them didn't realize the bullshit ads or spam on their lockscreen/notifications was malware, they thought it was just normal and accepted it), and that was only the stuff I could see - technically there could be plenty more malware that chooses to remain stealthy.
I imagine blue-bubble FOMO is more popular within the US because most younger Americans use text messaging instead of WhatsApp/Telegram like you would find in Europe or South America (aside from occasional group chats or college teamwork)
Lol completely untrue outside of a demographic of people online. Maybe the people in computer science majors at universities, not
your average young American
Friends, yes, and family if they're on Discord as well. The IRC style of group communication genuinely works better than a ton of different group chats.
It gets talked about a lot (I've seen many articles talking about it over years), so I guess I think it must exist. Never ever heard of it in real life. Maybe just Wealthy Zoomers? People from New York? Teenagers? I have no idea, but things keep telling me it is real. Like, I know more people with android than not, I have an iphone, I think I've never been in a group chat that was "blue bubble."
MMS isn't as bad as it used to be, however. Less regions have service that is too poor for MMS to work but SMS works fine I think.
Green texts are objectively worse. It's hard to have text conversations with iPhone users as a none iPhone user because they refuse to use messaging apps and sms takes like 20 seconds. Not to mention degraded media quality and lack of all the other features iMessage has.
I have yet see a meaningful difference between Whatsapp and iMessage. The degraded media happens because Apple like to use non standard formats for media and the framework of iMessage is based around compatibility with MMS and SMS. MMS is pretty limited even in the age of 5g. Apple could easily allow iMessage to work on android but they don't because they know people will buy iPhones for iMessage.
It's "as good" except for Zuckerberg creeping around in the shadows and using Whatsapp as a backdoor to your contacts list to infer who you're talking to.
Apple has yet to do this and so far there's little indication they are going to. WA having terrible uptake in the US is a good thing.
In Europe not only Android is dominant but people use WhatsApp or Messenger. iPhone owners must use them too as their primary messaging app. I guess they have their iMessage full with SMS from banks and other notifications, like my Android SMS app.
Yes Or mms or rcs. Sometimes you could be texting another person on an Android that's just on a different carrier and for whatever reason you can't get the rcs status. And this applies to way more than just texting... Some carriers let calls that stay within their own network sound way better. Switch sims and boom, crap quality.
I use whatever The other person wants to use though. Telegram, discord, Skype, email, text, Twitter, whatever
It wasn't FOMO for me, but rather a exhaustion from interoperability between the two platforms.
Group chats become impossible with iphone users, so you stop being invited. Texts were constantly dropping, so people would think I was ignoring messages.
Just switched from android to iPhone after 12 years of owning and working with android as a developer. I just got tired of fiddling. Most of my social group and family uses iPhone and there's no way the non-technical folks in my life are switching, so... If you can't beat, join.
So now least you've now heard of it from someone other than these articles :shrug:
A success for Apple's strategy. It can't work in all the other countries were the primary messaging app even for iPhone users are WhatsApp or similar apps.
I was never an American teenager in this century. IDGAF what color my "bubble" is, and neither does anyone else I care to communicate with. That said, even in the olden days as a teenager there was a lot of social pressure for things that just don't matter.
Yes, it might not exist for you and your age group, but saying that it "doesn't exist at all" is just wrong. It does matter, and it is a factor for certain age groups.
You can disagree with it, but that doesn't make it not real.
There's no FOMO here but when iPhone users bitch about it like it's my fault and not Apple's, I think less of them. It's a shame so many people are allowing themselves to be manipulated by Apple to peer pressure their friends into buying Apple products.
~ Macworld.com
yeah, ok...
> Since Apple made that choice not to support Android, though, it’s probably safe to say that Apple never actually intended for iMessage to compete for instant-message domination over the rest of the world
apple has made exclusive decisions over and over and over again. and i think everybody outside of the apple bubble knows that its because Brand Prestige is a HUGE part of apples branding.