One trick Apple uses to make you think green bubbles are “gross”
uxdesign.ccThis seems to be mostly a US American thing, mainly because of the same reasons BBM was a thing: lots of chats over SMS used to be a thing, and then chats over iMessage, which like BBM, you can only join if you have a device from a specific vendor. That means that you can only be in a special social circle if you buy the same stuff. That won't change because of some colours, because it's not the colours causing the tribalism, it can exist perfectly fine without it.
In Western Europe, South America and Asia it's mostly just some specific app (WhatsApp for example, or Signal, or WeChat or LINE) and as a fallback SMS. And if SMS turns from one colour bubble to another colour it doesn't really do anything for users on either end. This deep integration with colours and status symbols does remain in specific areas like middle school where it is still seen as important to try to project wealth.
I agree that this is a middle school level analysis, but I've seen it a couple times in practice during my career.
1. In the dating scene, I have heard women remark that it was a red flag (Android users are stereotypically poor... despite a large number of techies using Android)
2. A manager at my old company was advised to get an iphone for communication with VCs. One of our old leaders had heard commentary from a VC at one point about the text message colors.
> 1. In the dating scene, I have heard women remark that it was a red flag (Android users are stereotypically poor... despite a large number of techies using Android)
This is a red flag against the women in question, not the Android user. That attitude/behaviour is a great indicator of a gold digger. You'd be dodging a bullet by avoiding these women.
The only other people that share that attitude are teenagers. So if you go along with this horseshit and buy an iPhone just to feel more comfortable dating, you're courting women with the maturity and intelligence of the average teenager.
I have 4 daughters. I hope they marry rich guys. I have other criteria, too, but rich is definitely on the list.
That sounds very strange to me. Where do you live? I'm from Belgium, and basically with any decent job you can afford everything you need to be happy.
I have 3 daughters and 1 son.
I hope your daughters all find love and live happy, fulfilling lives with partners that have no cases on their android phones.
Why? That's a very stupid criteria. You'd want them to marry smart and decent guys, regardless of their wealth...
"Smart" and "decent" are desirable qualities, but it is questionable whether or not they can provide a better life for a woman than wealth. Poverty is known to be a true killer of any kind of romance and love. It doesn't seem far fetched to agree that being wealthy and enjoying a stress-free lifestyle can be an aphrodisiac.
Also, I think that poverty is actually more correlated to stupidity and rudeness. I've read that stress can literally make your brain shrink from the excess of cortisol. Rich people are generally labeled with undesirable properties, which (at least in my case) often comes from a personal bias - it feels unfair to watch someone else have everything I want, so at least they're a bad person and I'm not, so I got that going for me, which is nice.
---
To sidetrack a little bit:
> That's a very stupid criteria.
This is completely redundant - your point would be perfectly conveyed without this sentence. HN guidelines phrase it this way:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."I guess I know whose daughters I won't be dating.
That's an odd way of proclaiming your lack of finantial assets.
one of the best comments I’ve read on here. kudos to standing tall in the face of disagreement
How rich?
iPhone rich.
so, only posing as rich is enough?
this is not indicative of a gold digger. holy hell.
this is indicative of someone with poor judgement AT MOST.
true, this is not indicative of a gold digger, it's indicative of stupid for sure
> Android users are stereotypically poor... despite a large number of techies using Android
I haven't lived in a country where text bubbles used to be a thing, but I noticed this. People, even people who are smart and kind in other aspects, still cling to the easiest social cues. Doesn't matter if you wear a Margiela t-shirt or what you drive; your tinder date or a person who you just met in a bar will look at your phone and take notice. Personally, I was quite happy with Samsung flagship phones, and then not less happy with pretty cheap Xiaomi ones — they literally do anything I want in a phone. But after getting frustrated with how people read social cues, I moved back to iPhones and simply got myself the most expensive one, just for the sake of being easier to read for other people.
Obviously, it would be nice to be so laidback and independent as to not care what other people care about your wealth, but sadly, I'm not on that level yet.
It's the opposite. You're now missing out on the valuable signal of whether someone is obsessed with wealth and class or not.
Women who are in their 20s or 30s and at least moderately attractive are deluged with male attention. It's not necessarily irrational for them to use quick and dirty filters, even if that often produces false positives.
its 2022 you can with a few minutes work probably figure out way more with his name and adress.
I have ascended to the even more-conceited plane of "I don't bother with social signifiers" (which ironically is a signifier in itself- but in my case, I mostly do not care). Then again, I'm not currently in the dating pool, so YMMV
I know you aren't the GP, but if you didn't care would you buy an iPhone for social reasons?
"social reasons" is too broad to say conclusively. If i was desperate to get an "in" with a specific circle, then perhaps? I'm pretty utilitarian, so the probability is low: my current peer circle probably uses cars as a social signifier, and unbothered in that area as well.
You assume that somebody who bases an opinion on somebody else on his wealth is obsessed with it. You would be right if and only if you were taking about conscious decision-making only. But people don't work like that. We're affected by a lot of biases that we might deny or not even aware of. It doesn't make sense to label somebody who is affected by this bias as a person necessarily obsessed with wealth; most likely, they are a very nice person who honestly thinks that they don't care for how much somebody else makes.
>But after getting frustrated with how people read social cues, I moved back to iPhones and simply got myself the most expensive one, just for the sake of being easier to read for other people.
I hope you're kidding.
I don't think people here in Europe think Androids are cheap. And in fact many aren't. I also doubt most people can correctly identify them.
It's kinda funny but I've had even Apple Watch owners thinking that I wear an Apple Watch even though it's an Amazfit GTS 2 mini. It's weird, it hardly looks like one. The one button is much smaller than the Apple's crown and it's smack bang in the middle. It's also a much smaller watch.
Okay let's overwhelm people by using foldable phone!
/s, ... but I start thinking that's why Galaxy Flip sold well than I expected.
Well, might as well get a BMW and Rolex now...
> despite a large number of techies using Android
I use an iPhone. Not for any philosophical reason. I tried switching to android 3 times over the years since the first iPhone came out. Same plan, same provider, grandfathered in, same house, same spot. Each android phone did not get the same level of cell service in my house as the iPhone. I have side gigs I do contracting for, I have had cases of missing calls where the androids have literally cost me $100's of dollars, phone didn't ring... just a voicemail notification showing up hours later.
After the 3rd attempt, last being a nexus 5, I gave up. I'm sorry but I draw a line when a device messes with my income regardless of my ideological stance on open source and not having a windows device or even an Apple laptop in the house for the last 13 years.
With that said the Pixel 7 Pro looks nice, and I would love to give it a try but I'll only do that if I have it on a separate dedicated line to try out besides my main one that have had for 20 years. Not sure it's worth the effort at this point.
> After the 3rd attempt, last being a nexus 5, I gave up.
coincidentally i think the nexus 5 was also my 3rd and final android. i actually really liked that phone. then i took an international flight and after landing it was suddenly bricked. wouldn’t turn on at all. so strange.
Its ever so fun to have to deal with middle school with green bubbles. Apple is directly responsible for some kids getting bullied, but I guess it works out for them since we had to buy some more Apple devices.
What? No. Apple is at best indirectly responsible.
Apple knows exactly what coloring the bubble differently will do. The bully is just a marketing instrument to the Apple executives. Normally, I would blame only the bully, but this seems willful on Apple's part. They want kids to feel bad and tell their parents they need an iPhone. They don't give a damn that they're just another point of friction in people's days.
Do you think there would be less bullying in a world without different coloured bubbles?
Do you think the bubbles cause bullying?
I'd imagine the bubbles are just an excuse, which would immediately be replaced with something else in their absence.
Do you think there would be less bullying in a world without different coloured bubbles?
If the Apple's own messages were the same color as SMS or other avenues and Apple made a best faith effort to make sure messages worked, then there would be one less avenue of bullying.
Do you think the bubbles cause bullying?
Yep. Its status and a lot of bullying comes from the world reaffirming your status over others.
I'd imagine the bubbles are just an excuse, which would immediately be replaced with something else in their absence.
Maybe, but it wouldn't be Apple's fault.
What? No. Apple is directly responsible, like the GP said.
Wouldn't the bully be the one directly responsible?
The modern bully demands all lunch money be submitted via Apple Cash, or else.
If the Android kid can beat the shit out of the Apple kid, I doubt anyone will bully him.
> a large number of techies using Android
This doesn’t match my experience. Almost everyone I work with has an iPhone.
Anyway, having a good income isn’t the whole story. It’s probably also about willingness to conform to subtle, arbitrary social norms. Plenty of women are more attracted to a guy who dresses well, despite the fact that plenty of techies wear free hoodies. I think that’s a better analogy.
Many of the best technical people I know use Android. Of course, they’re also not generally using SMS, they tend to use eg Signal.
I think using Android can be either a low income signal or a Grey Tribe [0] cultural signal, and people on dating sites might want to screen out either (or both).
Like you said, it’s about arbitrary norms, but we make assumptions about others all the time based on which norms we follow. An analogy from a different angle is that texting your Tinder match from an Android phone is a bit like applying for a tech job with a @hotmail.com email address.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
.. people use SMS on tinder ? I had overall a couple hundred matches and going through classic text has been exceedingly rare, 80% of the time conversations move on to instagram, and otherwise to fb messenger or whatsapp
Guessing you are not in the US? I am and all matches I have had on hinge have moved onto text and I have had a girl comment on the green bubbles. I don't even have fb messenger or whatsapp installed.
Yes, France (and Canada where I moved recently looks like the same so far)
US is all texting. Only foreigners use WhatsApp.
I've legit had 1 girl say "I don't know about these green bubbles" after we started texting...
How did it end? Was she worth an iPhone?
We ended up going on a date still but it did make me raise my eyebrows.
I would have raised one eyebrow, not 2.
Do you have a unibrow by any chance?
1. Joke's on them. I just got a new iPhone and now my net worth is even more negative than it was before!
A manager at my old company was advised to get an iphone for communication with VCs.
This doesn't seem very different from a Director of Sales telling the salespeople to upgrade their wardrobe.
Image is important in business. Some people may be uncomfortable with that, but it's a fact. Companies, and people, spend trillions of dollars a year to project an image.
It just happens that blue text bubbles are more in style than green text bubbles.
But Google fell into the same trap that all large companies do: If you can't innovate, litigate.
#1 is great. A gold digger (and a low intelligence one at that) waving their red flag at first contact.
No, #1 is "this is his burner number"
Even in the US the epicenter of apple market share there are as more androids than apples meanwhile few people even cheaters who have burner numbers.
Seems like premature analysis which would be better and easier done after more conversation rather than prejudging half the population.
> Seems like premature analysis which would be better and easier done after more conversation rather than prejudging half the population.
If she does not need to deal with people who might have a burner number, she would be stupid to deal with people who might have a burner number
If you wanted to keep a second "burner" phone. Your own prior generation phone would be substantially less suspicious option compared to buying a second device. iPhone users may well in fact prefer an iPhone either a relatively cheap model if they are of the affluent set or a used model purchased for cash. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this would eliminate all burner phones.
Lets do some speculation to firm up the idea. 55% of US users have an android, 45 an iphone and our overall probability of talking to someone who already has a girlfriend is on the overall pretty high say 50% with half of those having a second phone and 80% of those being cheap androids.
The overall percentages of users using each platform is actual the rest is speculation. I have actually probably WAY overestimated the numbers to prove that the strongest argument is basically still bad.
Take 1000 suitors. 500 are cheating bastards. Your chance are 50/50. You apply your first pass green bubble filter and filter out 550 including many good matches.
Lets look at how this effects the cheater pop. We start with 500. 250 aren't using a burner phone and 113 passed the green bubble test another 50 passed because their burner is an iphone.
Your first pass filter only reduced the cheating bastard percentage from 50% to 36%.
Now if we reduce the cheating bastard percentage to a hopefully more realistic 25% we are talking about it reducing the percentage from 25->18.
The worst thing about this algorithm is that it makes it impossible to bubble up especially good choices who nonetheless fail the green bubble test. It's also one that potential bad choices can trivially game by buying a 4 year old iphone on facebook for $90. It's the worst of all possible worlds.
> For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
Talk to people like human beings and you should be able to more reliably pick out the cheating bastards.
If she does not need to deal with someone might have a burner number, she is not going to deal with someone who might have a burner number. The end.
> Talk to people like human beings and you should be able to more reliably pick out the cheating bastards.
She does not need to talk to people who put themselves into a pile of "might have a burner number" because her deck would be more than full without those.
It's really weird to redefine buying the phone OS used by 80% of the planet and 55% of the US uses as a willfully suspicious act. It's not about how many people you have time to date its picking a deliberately substandard algorithm when there are seventeen more readily at hand. It's about being bad at the game of life and then justifying bad strategy with bad logic. I would advise your friend to pick a better strategy.
They do extremely well utilizing this strategy.
Which doesn't at all prove that its a good strategy. A moderately attractive female that is reasonable well put together has sufficient options that she could probably concoct an absurd strategy filtering by hair color and astrology and still do extremely well. This wouldn't prove that astrology is a great way to date. It proves that if you start far enough ahead of the game you can run the race by hopping on one foot.
The vast majority of women would rather have a successful man as a mate than the alternative.
Not in question. I guess the issue is that SMS bubble color is such a weak indicator of success that it should call into question somebody who regards it as noteworthy.
Yes, because Android is only for the poors and the rich universally use the iPhone without exception.
You're on HN. Half of us use Android.
The parent is saying that the choice of phone is a poor indicator of success (likely because Androids can cost just as much as the most expensive iPhone and vice versa, old iPhones can cost as little as the shittiest Android).
so probably a red flag if you are not successful
Not understanding that they've already been manipulated by Apple is a (slight) red flag to me.
Those VCs are the VCs you don't want money from anyway.
Both are good reasons to avoid such toxic people. VC's especially.
I think courting VCs already involves sacrificing your pride and doing a song and dance. Why not do a small easy thing to help close the sale?
Because a VC that is more concerned with the type of phone you use than your product/service/company is probably a VC you should stay away from.
Imagine explaining to investors in your VC - "You know that XYZ company that just IPO'd for several billion dollars? Yeah I passed on their series A because the founder didn't have an iPhone despite the business itself being really solid". If I was an investor in that VC I'd sue the partners into the ground over such trivial bullshit.
I completely agree with the sentiment, but i'm sure deals are made on less trivial factors all the time. They just aren't explicitly stated.
Yeah, but the whole point is that if it IS explicitly stated or even implied, then the whole concept of a VC's fiduciary duty to its investors gets thrown out the window because of some partner's personal biases that have no impact on a given company or product. That's unethical and dubious at best, and illegal or outright fraud at worst. All because someone didn't like that someone else was using a different kind of phone. That's nuts if you think about it.
If a VC finds importance in a specific song and dance you find silly, I would take that as a signal of their market and technology understanding.
Some topics can be deal breakers, you don't have to marry the first VC you talk to, or court them all.
> This deep integration with colours and status symbols does remain in specific areas like middle school where it is still seen as important to try to project wealth.
Are the kids wrong?
When I look at my app’s stats, Android users are worse in every way.
More expensive to develop for, pay less or none at all, and their halo effect is sometimes negative: they might word-of-mouth my app to more Android users instead of more iOS users.
> More expensive to develop for
As iOS developer i disagree, You can develop android app on any platform that support JDK you pay a one-time registration fee of €25, Google Play is faster at approving apps (anecdotal evidence from working on team that support both iOS and Android)
iOS apps have to be compiled on recent Mac with latest version of macOS, you pay a yearly fee of €100 and AppStore review process is more in-dept especially for new apps
Not saying Apple deserves the $100, am saying that's not the expensive part of app dev.
> pay less or none at all
Maybe because there is always a free alternative that is better than yours.
Whereas iOS users only has the App Store, and if they don’t pay they don’t get app.
I love how Anki is free on Android but paid on iOS. (Apple tax gets a totally new meaning here)
Keep telling yourself a paycheck has no affect on app quality if it makes you feel better.
You can make everyone equal (and thereby eliminate "status") by making everyone worse off. For a lot of things that's exactly the choice society makes.
All I can say is that there are dozens of us! who pay for Android apps.
> pay less or none at all
Maybe just make the app paid only?
Yeah, no one uses plain sms messages across the pond any more.
And sms group chats? I only know about sms group chats from US posters.
You can just assume everyone has Whatsapp here, and just message them over that.
Using Facebook to do messaging? No thanks! Sure, when communicating with international friends I use WhatsApp because that appears to be what the rest of the world uses, but here in the States? No. We don't trust Zuckerberg. And yes, iMessage group chats are very much a thing here in the States and SMS group chats in general. And also yes, there's always that techie friend with an Android and makes your whole conversation go "green." Thing is, only middle schoolers really seem to care. I just know it means the communication isn't secured end-to-end.
I didn't like FB well before it became fashionable, but I don't understand your logic here: what is that exactly that you can't entrust WhatsApp to send, but you can trust Apple, or your mobile carrier?
Apple's iMessage is secured end-to-end, your mobile carrier can't see the message. As soon as the box goes green then any intermediary, including your mobile carrier and your friend's mobile carrier, can read the message and/or make it available to law enforcement.
In a U.S. court of law Apple has stood up to authority and pointed out they can't provide the messages requested as they're locked even to Apple. Facebook on the other hand has acquiesced to U.S. law enforcement. That tells me that even if Facebook has secured end-to-end messaging, which I don't think they've ever claimed, they have backdoors.
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted. WhatsApp actually uses the Signal Protocol. Probably the best protocol they could use. It's described pretty detailed in a whitepaper publicly available on the WhatsApp website: https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security-Whitepap...
You got me to look into this further. I was seeing if there was a backdoor - and it appears there isn't. https://signal.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoor/
Given that I don't see why more of us Americans aren't using WhatsApp! :)
Ofcourse WhatsApp is not open source, as opposed to Signal (the app). You can never be truly sure if the protocol is implemented without backdoors because you can't verify the code. But I agree, WhatsApp is a pretty solid app.
WhatsApp definitely claims end-to-end encryption. There’s a bubble telling you so at the top of every new WhatsApp thread.
If that's the case how do they detect if a message has been forwarded too many times ?
It's all about metadata, PRISM et al
I don’t know.
I'm not really answering your question, but in the States, there is a lot more trust placed in Apple over Facebook. This isn't that surprising - Apple has a much stauncher stance on privacy than alternatives.
I wish Signal would be more popular, but it's just not. I can't really ask new people I meet to communicate over Signal because it's a burden to get others to install some new application.
DMing on Instagram is super popular in USA. Most of the people don't give a shit about privacy to begin with.
Im tired of super secure apps that ask for your phone number and even publish it to your contacts. Wake me up when Signal doesnt depend on a phone number any more.
I don't know about GPs logic, but my logic is pretty simple. I don't use any infrastructure that Mark Zuckerberg had his fingers on. That was clear to me after the first time I saw him.
Facebook's goal is to extract as much information from you as possible. Apple wants to sell you a new phone.
It's absolutely not like that. Apple extracts profits in a lots of ways, including those which rely on gathering personal data.
> We don't trust Zuckerberg
This is a common excuse I hear in college to not use FB messenger or Whatsapp. But those same people usually have no issues using Instagram DMs. For most people, it's just a cover story to mask the real reason: Facebook messenger and whatsapp are uncool in the US
Well, I would fear verizon or whatever much more than Zuckerberg, especially that sms is plain text (not iMessage though).
Nonetheless, it is a self-made problem in the US, which wouldn’t even make sense in the EU because we don’t have such a high percentage of apple devices.
> but here in the States? No. We don't trust Zuckerberg
Completely false. I have multiple group chats in Messenger. The people who “don’t trust Zuckerberg” enough to not use his messaging products are a tiny minority of people in the US.
Even iMessage is barely used. In The Netherlands, WhatsApp is king. And WhatsApp doesn't discriminate.
> You can just assume everyone has Whatsapp here, and just message them over that.
Yea but that's a problem too.
WhatsApp doesn't have anywhere near the same lockin as Apple. You can run multiple messaging apps even on a low end android phone.
Lock-in through the network effect is lock in. The fact that it’s the de facto standard outside the US is quite a network effect.
SMS by contrast is an open standard.
> Lock-in through the network effect is lock in.
Exactly. If your complaint is about being locked in but the platform you use is the one everyone has to use because of network effect or otherwise you yourself are locked in with that platform.
The network effect only results in lock-in if there's an obstacle to using multiple networks at the same time. Obviously no-one is going to carry around two phones, so that's how Apple achieves lock-in. By contrast, keeping two or more messaging apps running is trivial.
And SMS is irrelevant.
SMS is just terrible though, and is just not worth using. It is plain text, limited in size and simply has less features.
What anyone means when they say SMS post ~2010 is SMS/MMS
It didn't get better.
That's just like, your opinion, man. SMS/MMS is decentralized, open, and works on every modern mobile phone out of the box. No other text messaging technology does this yet.
Open for Verizon to read/modify, you have no way of knowing the other half’s identity (was their number given to someone else in the meanwhile), no encoding is specified/due to non-ASCII characters taking more SPACE (in 2022) so auto-SMSs still today will just force ascii text, making it often unreadable. Like, it is literally a single digit number of bytes difference.
Also, you need like.. a carrier plan to access, wouldn’t really call that open. Any network based messenger can work over my home or even McDonald’s wifi, without any third-parties
I get what you’re saying but your home or McDonalds wifi is decidedly a third party, although encryption may mitigate that.
I can run WhatsApp on my iPhone. I cannot get my kids' school parents-group not to use WhatsApp. It was a pain to get even my best friends in Europe to use anything except WhatsApp.
Well done that parents' group. Obviously something like Signal would be better, but that'll happen once there's enough social consensus.
Meanwhile, I am lighting a candle for every poor soul that has been pressured into installing Meta products.
What did you propose as the alterntive?
Did you mean WhatsApp doesn't have anywhere near the same lock in as the Messages app? I don't know what you mean by "same lock in as Apple". I also don't know what you would mean by lock in with the Messages app. What's locked in? I can use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, WeChat, or any number of communication apps on my iPhone effortlessly.
Apple's messages app isn't really an app; it comes preinstalled on the phone, you can't remove it or substitute it with another app, and you can't install it on non-Apple hardware.
The lock-in is obvious: if you're part of Apple-oriented chat groups you can't switch to Android without losing access to those groups, degrading the experience for everyone, or convincing each one of those groups to make the switch to a multi-platform alternative. Claiming not to see this is disingenuous.
> Apple's messages app isn't really an app; it comes preinstalled on the phone, you can't remove it or substitute it with another app, and you can't install it on non-Apple hardware.
I'm not sure, but I don't think you can actually uninstall the default SMS from Android phones either without having another app installed at a minimum and then I bet similar to Messages if you were to somehow uninstall that app then the default app would appear since it's probably part of the core operating system (similar to other basic functionality like settings or a phone app to receive calls).
I don't know what you mean by you cannot substitute Messages with another app. If I didn't want to use Messages I would just disable all settings and remove it from the home screen and use whatever I wanted instead just fine.
You are correct that you cannot install Messages on non-Apple hardware. Not all software is open source or available for all platforms. For example I cannot install Playstation software on my Xbox, nor can I buy a Nest Thermostat and install a competitor's software on it (without hacking both of course). There are games that are made that aren't created with support for macOS. Etc.
> if you're part of Apple-oriented chat groups you can't switch to Android without losing access to those groups
What is an Apple-oriented chat group?
> if you were to somehow uninstall [the Android SMS] app then the default app would appear since it's probably part of the core operating system
No. Why would it?
> I don't know what you mean by you cannot substitute Messages with another app.
On Android, if you don't like the SMS app you can replace it with another app that has all the same functionality (and more). Does Apple let you do that?
> What is an Apple-oriented chat group?
Please engage with the discussion. One that uses Apple's proprietary SMS extensions, obviously.
Is WhatsApp open? Are there alternative clients?
Even better: it's a player in a competitive market. So you can switch your chats one-by-one to Signal, Telegram or whatever floats your boat.
I am glad that the EU actually has another definition of letting people use what is floating their boat: Force big-tech player to open up protocols, so users can send messages from any messenger to any other messenger.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/24/dma-political-agreement/
As a user I cannot see any downsides.
What do you mean by switch your chats. You can’t have the chat in more than one client at a time?
Yes, that's why it's switching.
How do you message when you don't have wifi/data? I can SMS from more remote places than I can any internet-based service.
I've never been anywhere where I legitimately had signal but no data. When it seems to be connected buy isn't, sms mostly also won't go though. I also think there are less "remote" places in europe in general.
You just don't. Their adoption of Whatsapp(at least in Spain), seems to have been driven by a period in time when WhatsApp was coming up that the plans sold by cell service providers were near unlimited data, but only X amount of calls/texts allowed to be sent per month.
In the USA we had opposite plans during this time. Unlimited talk/text, but strict data caps.
Well, with imessage being on topic, apple seems to be really terrible at changing to sms when someone is not available online — I ran out of internet data once and tried to text my girlfriend on imessage assuming it will just send an sms, and it just waited for like 10 minutes before telling me it couldn’t be sent. The other side is even worse - I would have assumed apple checks whether the other half is expected to come online anytime soon and if not, send an sms instead. Nope, you just don’t get a message and are expected to long press and send as sms manually.
With 4G taking over, this will no longer be a differentiator, as on 4G SMS also goes over data (via VoLTE).
At least where I live, 4G got deployed on the low bands freed up by the digital TV switchover and hence has the best reception in remote areas.
In most of the world you do have either wifi or data coverage.
Usually, if you don't have data for signal (as opposed to run out of data in your plan) reasons, then you don't have signal at all, even for SMS, either...
And I have been to a number of islands across Polynesia and Micronesia where the cellular service simply does not exist; however, there is always Wi-Fi in hotels. SMS is of no use in such places.
You don't. But in the US I'm rarely in a place where I have no data but SMS still works. And Europe has more effective telecom service.
> Europe has more effective telecom service
Some of Europe has very effective telecom infrastructure, but that's far from universal.
Cries in Canadian :(
It could be worse. Service is so famously bad in Germany that they invented a word for it - Funklochrepublik, which basically means "radio hole republic."
You can just assume everyone has Whatsapp here, and just message them over that.
Trusting your private conversations to ~Facebook~ Meta is also a signal.
Id rather not exclude people who dont have an iPhone, either because they cant afford it or believe Samsung marketing.
Yeah all my group conversations in Ireland are on whatsapp now, but I think this is mostly due to the fact that carriers still charge extra to send photos over sms. It's just not worth it to use sms anymore.
> in specific areas like middle school where it is still seen as important to try to project wealth.
Surely it's not middle school when people try to project wealth the most.. kids care more about who has an iPhone than adults but adults project wealth _a lot_ more than kids overall: fancy cars, homes, holidays etc. More expensive things are also nicer than their cheaper counterparts but I think most people would be lying if they don't say having access to them also gives them some status boost, if only internally. Can't turn off the monkey in the head easily.
so its only an American thing because everyone in your continent agrees that SMS sucks too and should shun anyone using it
Yes, thats exactly whats going on in the US as well
(and yes, we know that Google has recently adopted some other open source messaging standard that now Apple hasn't.)
Absolutely but in US, you'll be surprised how much texting is still used
Whenever I see this iMessage/SMS, blue/green topic come up I descend into an internal debate that, as I get older, I am becoming increasingly familiar with.
The debate is that one where I am forced to reconcile whether I am too far removed from popular culture to see how this is a real issue versus accepting that the issue is entirely contrived.
It's certainly an issue with a lot of teenagers. Speaking broadly, social status and brands say a lot at that age, and you could miss out on friends or social occasions based on it.
As an adult of course the green/blue bubbles simply don't matter, we grow up and realise that, but it certainly is a significant issue if it's affecting young peoples lives.
So I'd say it's somewhere inbetween what you descibe, perhaps a bit contrived, but also could have a significant impact on some people.
Side note - I have heard of people saying they won't date green or blue bubble people, but of course if someone takes that point of view as an adult then it's a good indicator to show how they think.
> It's certainly an issue with a lot of teenagers.
> As an adult of course the green/blue bubbles simply don't matter
I disagree that the green/blue bubbles simply don't matter as an adult. I've had friend groups not include me in group messages because of it. Some have gotten visibly mad at me for having green bubbles and "breaking their chat". There is certain functionality that iPhones don't support in MMS chats that Android phones do (like adding a new member to the group chat).
It does indicate how people think when they buy into the stigma, but also I think it's a general lack of understanding around why Apple keeps iMessage so tightly coupled to its ecosystem and hardware. And many people aren't interested in gaining that understanding.
Social status is very important to many adults, and blue bubbles have become a way to display that social status.
> I have heard of people saying they won't date green or blue bubble people
But how many times, really?
It's like the missing iPhone headphone jack. The press and bloggers hammered away at it for years, making sure it was an ongoing meme in all coverage, but... do people really care? Some people, sure.. but enough for the coverage?
Same with bubbles.
Sidebar, but I care about the headphone jack issue and am still annoyed by it.
Bluetooth headphones just aren't very good, and we've all gotten in the habit of buying a new pair every few years because they either break, get lost, are unsupported, or have bad batteries.
I previously had the same pair of IEMs for almost a decade that had better sound quality, replaceable cables and eartips, and didn't ever run out of battery. Never did I complain about the cables being annoying or in the way, and never did I complain about the presence of the headphone jack, or the Bluetooth chip onboard.
Removing headphone jacks was a horrible misstep in my opinion and we're stuck with the path dependency it's created now. It's probably not long before we have laptops that omit 3.5mm audio jacks as well.
I'm down to just using a permanent audio jack to USB c dongle for phones and my computer. Very very silly.
USB-C is a waaaaay less stable connection than Micro-B or even a headphone jack. Having a phone in your pocket with an USB-C to P2 adapter is asking to have your sound stop every 5 minutes of walking.
This isn't the same.
Very otherwise upstanding people will absolutely talk behind people’s back about that person’s green bubble pollution.
People go on to mock the sales pitches android users use since everyone’s heard them ad nauseam for a decade
They are generally making deep assumptions about people’s decision making process if they have a choice in phone model, and making conclusions about that person’s socioeconomic class if they don’t have a choice in phone model
And it all ends with a laugh about how most android users live their life without knowing this is happening, but that reinforces the perception of a lack of self awareness and inability to pick up social cues
“mimicking robot but I love how much controllll I have over my phoooone”
“I dont want to be around anyone that cares about superficial things anyway” bro its everyone
In this experiment, they created identical dating profiles, with the only difference being the brand of phone displayed in photographs. The control was no phone shown in the image.
Featuring an iPhone increased the number of likes received by 82%. Featuring a Samsung increased the number of likes by 20%. That means if you display a Samsung instead of an iPhone in your profile, you will get 34% less likes
Other phone brands did even worse. If your dating profile displays a Oneplus phone, you will get 55% less likes than an identical profile featuring an iPhone
https://www.moneysupermarket.com/mobile-phones/features/mobi...
> But how many times, really?
Two people in the pub, I didn't know them well, but it comes up. What's interesting actually is the green bubble was not an issue for hook-ups, but it was an issue for long-term dating. I am talking about two people I've chatted to in a pub about this, and everyone else as well, so take it with a grain of salt.
Bring it up next time your in the pub! See for yourself.
I've cared about the missing headphone jack on a couple of occasions, when I wanted to stream some music off my partner's phone, but we had to listen to its tinny little speaker instead.
Of course Apple does not need to care what I think, as I am not likely to buy their products anyway.
Bluetooth will never replace wired because wired doesn't require yet another battery.
Convenience and security, too.
It's a really really really short article. Really short. Please.
It gets to the point in the second paragraph: the green bubbles have bad contrast. It mentions the design of the green bubbles rank as "very poor" by accessibility standards.
That's why it matters.
I get it. It should be noted that enabling the Increase Contrast accessibility option in iOS/iPadOS does correct the issue to an acceptable level. Whether that should be necessary is up for debate.
The green texts isn't just branding or aesthetics. iMessage with non iphones is a legitimately degraded experience and the green texts exist to remind you of that, but even if they weren't green the experience would still be bad because apple realizes that forcing people to buy their phone if they want to have texts that send in under 5 seconds is an incredibly successful strategy. Having long form conversations over SMS just doesn't work given the time they take to send, and tons of iPhone users refuse to get a messaging app.
The nice thing about getting even older is that you soon won't care about such reconciliation.
I appreciate this, but I will still cherish the joy of yelling at the children on my lawn, as I slowly descend into comfortable curmudgeonhood.
I would love to see a survey of mobile phone users to see if this matters to them. I’ll take a guess it doesn’t matter because Google would be flaunting the results.
As for negative effects on kids. There’s more than just phones. Clothes, cars, vacations, social media posts, tutoring, sports. Maybe we should put everyone in uniforms, don’t allow kids drive to school, ban sports, and forbid them from talking about their vacations. And everyone was equal.
It matters to me a little bit. A green bubble means the message is basically a postcard that the carrier can read. A blue bubble means the message is in an envelope that my carrier can’t read.
My school had uniforms, bullying doesn't stop. Kids are honestly just mean, and not idiots. You can dress a wealthy kid and a poor kid in the same clothes and you will not fool anyone in class about which one is the poor one.
In my uniformed school, decades ago, money didn't matter as much as size. The big popular guys kept the rich guys around to buy them things.
Edit: power came from physical strenght, attractiveness and sports proficiency. Very much an ancient greek ideal, lol.
Bullying is about power. Bullying can be about money when you don't normalize the population for money. Nowadays you would need uniforms and school provided phones, I suppose. Never in America.
But does it mitigate bullying? Going straight to “but bullying doesn’t stop” is an unconvincingly perfectionist stance.
Not really, no. If a kid wants to bully you theyll find a reason to do so. If you've ever been a third party watching that stuff, you'll see what people are actually being bullied for doesn't really make sense. Take away the shoes and the phone and it will just be your hair or your posture. Bullying is a targeted activity
> I’ll take a guess it doesn’t matter because Google would be flaunting the results.
I'm not sure how easy that would be - 'Apple will make you more popular if you use an iPhone instead of Android!'...'No no, that's bad, you don't want that, don't buy an iPhone!'
Google did an ad campaign recently that’s basically that line of thinking (plus trying to encourage them to adopt RCS): https://www.android.com/get-the-message/
Obligatory addition: Google’s version of RCS is just built on top of an open standard but is hardly more open then apple’s imessage so adopting that is not a solution either.
It reminds me how MacOS has the icon for any networked Windows PC as a “blue screen of death” monitor
I had to check to see if you were kidding. You're not. That's hilarious. Petty, and hilarious.
That's almost as good as the Windows Vista/7 icon for "Network" -- computers connected to a pneumatic tube (referencing Senator Ted Stevens and his "series of tubes" comment).
I found it especially funny that it still uses that icon for Linux machines with Samba shares.
Unless you enable fruit vfs then it thinks it's a mac but doesn't not what model you so get a big question mark.
Actually love this one lol
they want to prepare you :)
...which suggests that the notion that some designer at Apple subtly decreased the contrast on green bubbles to make them look "gross" is ridiculous -- if they really wanted to make SMS messages look bad, they could be much less subtle about it...
Google offered several times to work with Apple to get full compatibility with their messages. Apple refused every time. This is Apple's deliberate choice.
Be less subtle? Serving what purposes? Getting slammed by the EU and the like?
They have to be very, very subtle, and ride the fine line between effectiveness and outrage, never going too much on a side or the other. The best and most enduring conspiration theories have originated from such deliberate and surgical manipulations. The goal they are after: most people will unknowingly abide and be manipulated, while the minority will go nuts proclaiming they know the truth.
Welcome to propaganda 101, aka destructive marketing.
I have just compared the “gross” bubble from the article with my “real” bubble. Made a screenshot of both and used the ios color picker.
“Gross”: #7EC170
Real from the bottom of the message reel: #65C466
Real from the top: #73E173
No issues with contrast in either case. Also keep in mind that those color hexes will slightly vary depending on where exactly you decide to pick since bubbles are filled with gradients.
Not sure where author gets his bubble from but in real life they look as “good” bubbles at the bottom of the screen that makes me think the article itself is gross.
It’s worth pointing out that text message bubbles were always green from the first iPhone as well. Coloring iMessages as blue was done so you knew whether you were getting billed for that text or not.
I'm not so sure, I just looked at some chats in iMessage, both to other iPhones and Android phones, and there's no doubt to me that the blue bubbles give much better contrast and readability, even comparing only messages at the bottom of the screen.
Yeah seems really far-fetched. The whole idea that Apple did the green bubbles with the purpose of branding kids with Android phones as poor as some way of bullying them into getting an iPhone is borderline conspiracy theorist, possibly stemming from some anti-capitalist sentiment.
It's kids being kids and seems like an exclusively US thing.
This is a clickbait. On my iPhone the green color is much darker than what the author shows in the article. Here are some images with the hex color codes for example:
It's actually really cherry-picked samples. All messages (blue and green) in the Messages app fade out slightly as you scroll. The author picked a blue message from the bottom of the screen and a green one from the top. If only they scrolled around a bit... they would have noticed.
Also the article doesn't mention that the iMessage blue also fails the same WCAG test. I just ran it myself.
As shown in the image, the blue at least passes the test for "large text"
Great point. I just now confirmed that as well. The bottom message is much darker than the one on top
A comparison between blue and green bubbles on your phone would be more relevant. Color space handling makes direct comparisons between screen grabs (from different devices) tricky.
The author used the screen grabs from different places too. On iPhone you can't have the blue and green bubbles side by side
A reasonable start would be screen grabs of both blue and green bubbles, grabbed from the same phone in the same way. (And vertical placement; see the other comment.)
Here are the results for your image. Contrast still fails on WCAG guidelines.
Your hex value was sampled from a screenshot taken in dark mode, and actual color values are slightly different between dark and light mode.
This is not true. I just sampled green bubbles from both dark mode and light mode iOS and macOS and got the same hex of 34c759.
Ah you’re right. I stand corrected.
Besides the cherry-picked colors of green from the top of the screen, the author assumes turning up the screen brightness reduces contrast in the same way that applying a brightness filter in photoshop does. That’s obviously not true - a given colorspace has less dynamic range if you make everything brighter in photoshop, but turning up your screen backlight brightness makes everything brighter by a constant factor, which doesn’t change the dynamic range.
Assuming a perfect screen, yes. But at some point the brightest pixels on the screen will get no brighter, but all the other pixels will. So the dynamic range decreases. Similar happens when dim enough.
I just checked and there's a significant difference between full brightness and a little less than full brightness so I'll just assume the screens Apple is using are pretty good at that
Does a blank white screen not get brighter on your phone when you turn up the brightness?
I have a pixel 6 pro, and it does look like I can't wash out the brightest.
However on a grey scale test image I can lose the bottom 1/3rd of the range by going too dark. Maybe the brightness cap is to save battery.
A large problem with this whole idea is that there is no one single blue or green involved.
iMessage shades the bubbles depending on position, and shows both the blue and green bubbles as darker at the bottom of the screen, and lighter at the top.
So, then compare them at a similar position?
A side-by-side screenshot of iOS 7, when this design was introduced:
https://i.insider.com/5df902c5fd9db27769749a5f?width=1300&fo...
That's definitely not iOS 7. Those screenshots are from a notched device, which means at least iOS 11, and based on the app drawer on the bottom it looks more like iOS 12 or above.
Should have been "the design introduced with iOS 7".
This seems super cherry picked and disingenuous.
The colors of both blue and green messages fade as they scroll up. Looking at my phone right now, the lighter contrast the author seems to be calling out is only shown on a message that is scrolled up. This is the same with blue imessage bubbles, they also fade and have lower contrast when scrolled up.
Ermmm. Wasn’t it green for sms way before iMessage was launched?
Yes, but the contrast was good.
iOS 4, green Aqua-ish bubbles with black text: https://d2bs8hqp6qvsw6.cloudfront.net/article/images/750x750...
iOS 5, introducing blue iMessage bubbles (still good contrast in both colors): https://images.anandtech.com/doci/4956/IMG_0907.PNG
The change in contrast came with Ive's "flat" iOS 7:
https://i.insider.com/5df902c5fd9db27769749a5f?width=1300&fo...
Read this as "I've OS 7" for a few seconds lol
Yes. From the article: "To be clear, it is not that green is gross. It is the low color contrast of the green Apple picked and used against white text is gross." The original design used black text, for one thing.
Yes and no. It used to be black on green (with imo a way worse green).
https://www.oreilly.com/api/v2/epubs/9780133016529/files/gra...
Funny to see even Jobs hit `return` to send the message initially.
But black text
It's not the color or contrast of the bubbles that make me think negatively, it's the fact that once I see a green bubble in a group text, I know it's going to be a bad experience.
Any photo, video, or reaction gif that people send will be compressed down a couple of pixels and replies will often be out of chronological order.
I take so much shit for 'ruining the group chat' when it's always the complainants devices that is blocked from sending high resolution pics to poor people. Drives me fucking bonkers when I point out that their reactions to it are precisely why it's not being fixed.
At the time the green/blue distinction appeared in Messages, it was widely reported that the green color for SMS messages represented the fact that most cellular plans in the US at the time charged a fee for each SMS message sent, or had a higher monthly rate for "unlimited" texts. It would seem that very few people remember the days before "unlimited data/text/minutes".
(US currency is typically associated with the color green in a way that probably doesn't apply elsewhere in the world. Also, the actual color of green on US paper currency is quite different from the green bubbles... but I digress.)
On my iPhone the green bubbles are much more saturated and legible than in the posted article.
Same here. https://imgur.com/a/7k5dMtm
I checked those background colors with this contrast calculator [0] against white:
- Contrast of your iPhone: 2.21:1 (#35c759)
- Contrast that's "poor": 2.17:1 (#65c466)
- Contrast that's "good": 2.93:1 (#3bac3c)
- Contrast of the blue: 3.95:1 (#367bf5)
Based on this I would say that the Contrast of your green and the "gross" one from the article are actually pretty close, both being very far from the contrast that blue provides.
Not even the good green from the article does match the contrast of the blue. They are being lenient I'd say, not misleading.
Exactly - the author fictionalized some examples for his phony thesis.
phony... I see what you did there.
Might it might it not also be just conditioning? Users have learned to associate green messages with all of the limitations that SMS impose. Hence they perceive it as bad. If that was true, they could’ve picked a higher contrast version instead, and people would still feel the same way.
Correct. Users don't need any color tricks to associate SMS with reduced functionality.
A few weeks ago I went over my SMS history, going back several months.
About 99% of the SMS I get is bots. The vast majority was spam (making me wish I could disable SMS altogether), then some alerts (e.g from my bank) and 2SV codes.
The other 1% were delivery people.
Exactly 0.0% were people in my contacts.
This article is weird to me. On one hand, it’s interesting science about color perception. Good stuff.
But on the other hand, it assumes an unsubstantiated motive for why it is as it is. I’ve worked with designers a bunch, and they have all kinds of reasons for why they choose as they do. I would not put this past apple at all. But given there’s no quotes from the original designers, I’d go with “Do no attribute to malice that which you can attribute to incompetence.”
> Do not attribute to malice that which you can attribute to incompetence.
IMO this is only good advice there's no obvious motive for malice.
When big corporations are involved, cynicism is absolutely warranted.
Interesting that reducing contrast is the exact 'nudge' Hacker News uses to inform us that a comment is less credible.
Although this comment leads me to think that either this has changed in subsequent iOS releases, or the author has issues with telling the truth:
in HNs case, I suspect it's deliberately intended to lower interaction with grayed out text (to avoid pile-ons and low-quality/flamey discussions rooted on such comments)
I dislike most Apple software even if I like their hardware.
From Itune and podcast that always try to sell me something instead of just letting me use my library to mail or safari to iCloud.
Seems to me they are good at pushing the boundaries in hardware and integration, but the software make me run in the other direction.
Is there value in their software?
Summary: the green bubbles have lower contrast than the blue bubbles. Lower contrast is associated with lower accessibility, according to published Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Tricks, purpose, and grossness are speculative.
If Google didn't have so many messaging apps, they could counter by putting messages from non-Android users in comic sans.
As a counterpoint to everyone saying they've never heard of anyone caring about the bubbles; back when I was in college my fraternity sent out big group messages via iMessage only.
If you wanted to know about events and didn't have an iPhone, you needed to check your email or hear about it second hand. No one wanted to deal with broken MMS, formatting, etc, so that's how things were handled.
Some folks with Android phones were annoyed, but the official stance is that your email should be the place you check for this stuff anyways.
The bubble chat interface itself is gross. Terrible. Disgusting. Unusable. Distracting. Eye-hurting. Illogical. Counterproductive. Log-unfriendly. Code-offensive. Intolerable. Since day one.
Serious question: What would be better? What would that look like?
(I think the current one is perfect for 1:1 conversations .. Multiple people is more of an issue visually)
A lot of people won't be happy until their phone is just a bash terminal.
No, I'm not one of those either. :)
I'd love to write an article, but currently have no platform (server, site, blog), time and physical power to do so, sadly.
I would propose full-width scalable interface with basic formatting (like Telegram has), without wasted space... but it has to be drawn, words can't show. (
There's more to it, unfortunately. As if it wasn't obvious, I've seen private studies confirming that balloon/bubble/whatever comic-like interface was carefully invented to limit people's attention timespan and granulate thoughts.
For example, on your average phone you have 3-4 short messages and TONS of empty space around. You don't have the whole line of conversation before your eyes, you have ridiculous limits to text width and height, etc.etc. which makes it irritating to read and write something longer than "Hi", forcing you to write very short messages. (I won't go deep into this, to not to be instantly labeled a conspiracy theorist, but it has enormous psychological impact, not just UX).
Interesting .. I guess it comes down to preference
I think the white space is awesome .. It helps show the conversational nature of the messages .. I personally do not want long SMS messages .. If the conversation is long, then I typical switch over to audio as it is much more efficient .. Additionally, I don't want to type that much without a keyboard
I guess I also look at is "pick the right tool for the job" .. If you want a long convo, use e-mail .. I mean it has called SHORT messaging service from the jump .. I guess I want my mobile convos to be more back and forth and not structured more formally .. Again, I see this all as preference
Yeah, short messages are one thing, but it was cloned to more "heavy" messengers like whatsapp, telegram or even xmpp. It's part of the "let's clone something from Apple" trend, I think. But regardless, I'd still want to see more lines of a conversation whithout having to scroll too much.
I've never heard an actual human express noticing or caring about the color of the bubble.
The main annoying thing when added to a mixed group of SMS and iMessage group chats is that you cannot leave them, or add anyone after the fact without creating an entirely new chat with all the contacts from scratch.
It was commented on frequently when I was online dating, to the point that it got annoying. I've had a few friends mention it and jokingly tell me to give in and get an iPhone. I'm mid-thirties.
Me either, and the adults I know, don't even seem to know the difference.
I often get people trying to send me videos or files via SMS (I have an Android, and I guess it normally works for them when sending to other Apple users).
(I say adults, because I often hear kids use it as a status symbol or way to exclude other kids from group messages. I will have to ask the kids I work with what they think about message color bubbles.)
Kids do it, I've heard it, it's an actual thing in that age group, adults don't care. It's like having a collection of gobots instead of transformers if you're an 80s kid.
I care, and I’m an adult. I don’t care a lot, certainly not so much that I’d exclude someone from a social group, but I do get slightly annoyed when I have to communicate with someone via SMS because it’s so much slower, less reliable, less featureful etc. than iMessage.
I really hate this conspiracy. Before iMessage all messages on iPhones where green. And when they needed to differentiate they chose to make the new ones blue.
As noted in one of the article comments: One of the first settings I change on my iPhone is "Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Increase Contrast" for this very reason. It darkens both the blue iMessage and green SMS colors, but I mostly do it because I do find that green color "gross" and annoying/distracting.
I disagree with two things here. Green IS traditionally an off-putting color, when we're talking about light: aliens, x-files, goo, and everything witchy.
But in this context the thing that's harder on the eyes is the bubble itself. So the lighter one is easier for me. Although I'd rather see no bubbles at all.
> Green IS traditionally an off-putting color
I don't think that's true for the reasons you put up.
Our eyes are specialized to distinct more shades of green from each other than with other colors. That's a useful evolutionary feature when you are an animal and have to hunt in the wild.
For humans that leads to the point that we're rather good in picking "unnatural" shades of green (gooish ones and self-emitting shades of green).
Absolutely, I'm referring to emission of green light, which is unnatural.
Texts have been green before iMessage came out though
Nature is green though...
That's why I said green light, which is unusual in nature. Sure, it's a little green when it filters through leaves, but that's very hard to perceive because the yellow of the sun or the blue of the sky usually cancels that out. It's almost never enough to light up another object with green.
At first, it sounded like a stretched out conspiracy theory. When I looked at the "correctly" contrasted green in the first image that was darker, it made more sense.
The lighter greyish green gives off a lower standard, almost as if the Android user was a guest user or in free trial mode.
If I were at Apple and my job was to make non iMessage messages bad I would also make them a little bit off center. Maybe even randomly off center. I vuess people like me with OCD would never again message someone without an iPhone LOL
Solution: The EU should mandate that all chat messages be yellow with black text. (Coming off the success of USB-C, now is the time for them to maintain their momentum!)
Nice theory, but the reality of how these decisions get made is usually far less interesting.
Some product owner probably wanted the iMessage enabled texter to "pop" and the designers usually take that and roll with it usually through some combination of boldening one, and deemphasizing the other to give the overall desired effect. It's a good call out for them to improve the color contrast, but you can adjust the contrast yourself through the accessibility options.
You don't have unlimited text messages on your mobile plans?
I've never ever heard anyone care about, discuss, or even mention chat bubble color. All of this sounds like something that only US American teens and kids would react to, like they judge people by their skin color or what kind of clothes they're wearing.
White / green, blue / black, are the hardest combinations to read due to distribution of cone cells in the retina (though fine if it is light blue / black, or dark green / white). This is compounded even more by pentile on certain Apple phones once they moved to OLED.
I don’t know. The green always looked like the Android logo green back in the day. Less about contrast.
> This segmentation has then evolved into discrimination against green bubbles, especially among young smartphone users in the U.S¹.
The footnote is a link to a WSJ article that doesn’t back up that sentence at all, i.e. makes no claim that the issue is most prevalent in the US.
This article is absolute nonsense from start to finish. If this was remotely true, they'd have done a side by side of a low contrast blue with good contrast green, but they didn't, because everyone would have seen exactly how wrong the article is.
Also, I suspect the association of blue as modern and green as outdated might also stem from LEDs. Early LEDs were green or red. It took many years until blue LEDs became available, and those, at first, were much more expensive.
What are the chances that the EU will come in a year and mandate that “all messages must have the same color” and use it as an excuse that having some blue bubbles and some green colors is harming the mental health of children?
The contrast between your perception of the EU and their actual positions is pretty entertaining to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/eu-digital-markets-act...
So you mean my perception that the EU is run by a bunch of bureaucrats who don’t understand technology, stymie innovation and don’t think about unintended consequences? Do you think there may be a reason that hardly any successful technology companies come out of the Eu?
maybe 'perception' was the wrong word, moreso attacking them on imagined grounds of legislating trivialities of message color instead of commenting on the actual (highly publicized) sweeping changes they are already making to attempt to address the problem.
That worked out really well with the 99 section 11 chapter GDPR. All it got us was cookie consent banners.
Have a good one
Very slim, as this is appears to be a very american problem. It's normal for teenagers (and people in general) to have an Android phone in Europe. It isn't anymore in the US.
But yet, the EU is mandating the USB C “standard” without going into details about which part of the standard is required still requiring you to know whether the USB C cable will actually transmit data and at what speed will it transmit video (something that USB required iPads already do and is a standard), etc
More than likely it would start in California. I say we start a petition that the colors be indistinguishable. Be the change that you want to see, I'm looking at the man in the mirror.
I have a problem with the thesis statement that people think green bubbles are "gross", which uncritically parrots Google's "Get the Message" PR campaign.
I know that iPhone-using teens don't care about this in SoCal, the virtue signalling capital of the world. Their group chats with friends are all green, so if anything's "gross" it's the blue bubbles of their parental conversations.
In the meantime, RCS is missing really basic capabilities. For example, RCS encryption only works for 1:1 conversations, so things like family chats are not private. Even Android publications are asking if RCS is too little, too late.
https://www.androidpolice.com/android-iphone-rcs-give-up-mes...
> which uncritically parrots Google "Get the Message" PR campaign.
You're misunderstanding the order of events here. "I don't talk to green bubbles" has been a thing for at least five years now, which Google has very recently used in an ad campaign.
> "I don't talk to green bubbles" has been a thing for at least five years now…
Almost always as a joke. And if you search HN, nearly all conversations about this PR-manufactured "green bubbles" outrage have happened since the launch of Google's campaign.
Nearly all the conversations about the PR have been since the PR? I don't doubt it. I'm saying the green bubbles thing has existed since long before that. Google ticked it up a bit, but come on. Let's not give Google PR too much credit here:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Have you ever actually used Messages? “I don’t talk to green bubbles” can’t be a thing because your own messages are the ones that are blue or green.
The bubbles for everyone else (the people you are talking to) are always all the same color: dark grey.
> In the meantime, RCS is missing really basic capabilities. For example, RCS encryption only works for 1:1 conversations, so things like family chats are not private.
As opposed to iMessage, but certainly not as opposed to SMS which is what RCS would actually be replacing on the iPhone. Apple would rather have EVERY conversation with an android user unencrypted rather than work towards a solution.
Apple is not standards-resistant, if that's what you're suggesting. Given their history of supporting standards (and occasionally leading a standard's adoption), that's clearly not the case.
RCS is not a slam dunk. Juniper Research says RCS-capable subscribers represent less than 13% of global mobile subscribers in 2022. (They project that that will double to 40% by 2026, FWIW.)
End-to-encryption is not part of the RCS standard, but is instead a Google-proprietary layer on top of that. I assume that Apple can't seriously consider adopting RCS until that omission is fixed. It would be crazy for Apple to create a Google dependency for something as critical as messaging, especially given Google's long history of failures in this area.
fwiw I completely agree, RCS is completely dead outside of Google dragging it forward and thats a huge problem, I just don't think the largest company on the planet shrugging their shoulders and saying "maybe your grandma should buy an iPhone" is acceptable.
Their historical position has hurt their own customers, android users, and the standardization process itself. RCS (or a different standard) would be in a completely different place if Apple in their US market leadership position had made an effort.
They could open the iMessage spec, they could publish an iMessage app for Android, or they could just contribute in good faith to the standardization process. Their hostility to this particular standardization process (I don't contest that Apple is happy to support many standards efforts, such as USB) is driven by profit to the detriment of pretty much everyone else.
It's because the plebes that can't afford iphones are gross. /s
But I want to know is, who cares? I have yet to find a single person who says to me that they think it’s unfair that their text messages come across as a green bubble on my iPhone instead of blue.
Why is this even an issue?!?
The author is just overthinking things here. If anything, green is the color used to indicate “go”, a positive sign that has been etched into our minds. The reason is very clear as already mentioned “it doesn’t support messages”. Why isn’t that explanation enough?
EDIT: to clarify here, the author does explain his point about the color and the contrast of the text. He may have a point there but IMO, the main issue was that it’s not messages. The thing I should have added is that back when it was implemented people had to pay real money per message to send as a text message. That means everyone in the group had to feel uncomfortable sending frivolous messages when it costs someone money. I think that is the real reason for the bifurcation and not the color choice.
The article elaborates, however. It's not a problem that green is used. It's that Apple chose a lightness/shade that is less accessible.
Given their attention to detail in design (see the rabbithole of their Human Interface Guidelines - https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...), I agree with the author in that this was an intentional design choice that Apple made.
I don't mean to sound like an asshole here but did you read the article? The author outlines that the contrast applied to the green is less readable than the blue, to the point where it falls below accessibility guidelines.
I personally am not convinced by the theory that Apple is doing this deliberately (though it doesn't sound impossible to me either!) but either way it's something they should change.
The author's example of the green text looks pale compared to what it really is.
Well seeing that every one of the authors images don’t jibe with reality - ie his images aren’t what are actually on iPhones in terms of saturation - it kind of makes his entire thesis moot
Yes and no: a screenshot of an iPhone isn't really a great representation of what you see when you're outdoors in daylight, for example. The general point still stands that the contrast is better in the blue than it is in the green and Apple could normalize them with no issues.
If you don't think Apple had the same thoughts OP did during the design process, you don't know Apple.
Seeing that the change in saturation happened when Ives took over the iPhone UI when iOS 7 was introduced, it was just one of many poorly thought out decisions that were made under Ives leadership.
The author should’ve included an example of a green with great contrast.
It's in the first image, the one that says "Good".
It's there, in the first image of the article.
If it doesn't pass an accessibility suite, that's fine. Point it out, mock, and so on. Perhaps a shame into action. But that word choice ...
Low contrast is now "gross." Yikes!
why does this even matter? As a european i just don't get it, i use a iPhone have in the past used Android most of my friends and family use Android no one cares.
Basically US teens/kids assume you're poor and not cool if you have a green bubble. It really is as simple as that. It's exactly as shallow as it sounds and is not actually as big of a deal as the article makes it out to be.
Where i live Schools have banned both phones and social media because it greatest source of bullying/harassment. The kids have iPad's in class for educational purposes https://www.rte.ie/news/munster/2018/0419/955622-kerry-schoo...
The problem for us was not the color of the bubbles but the issue of android users not being able to join imessage group chats. My family solved the problem by using whatsapp.
I wonder if kids will grow out of bubble tribalism as they get older the same way youth ditched FB.
I don't think I've seen this much speculation without a single source in a long time...
Ye article is complete bullshit and makes-up some fictional examples: for instance the bubbles supposedly on a “brighter screen” are shown as totally desaturated and ‘blown-out’ but unfortunately for the author’s thesis, screen brightness does not affect UI elements in this way, at all.
Edit: Haha thx for the downvotes but the article is still lying with phony made-up images.
It does affect your visual impression in the eye, though. If you're using a bright screen in a dim environment, your eyes will be hurt by the bright light, you flinch and that will reduce the perceptive contrast.
> It does affect your visual impression in the eye, though. If you're using a bright screen in a dim environment, your eyes will be hurt by the bright light, you flinch and that will reduce the perceptive contrast.
See a few posts above where someone did the hard work of taking real screenshots instead of the totally bullshit fictional ones the author has in the article.
It would be an interesting test to make the green bubble dark and the blue bubble light.
I wish Apple accessibility let you change the colors.
At this point the fact they're using this as a product differentiator is so blatant they may as well make a fart sound when they appear if they're green.
Given all this swirling cultural context, doesn’t it seem odd that the icon for the Messages app is still green?
No one here read the article, it has nothing to do with it being green but with it being low contrast.
I'm not sure if you're imploring us not to read the article because the title sucks.
Or admonishing us for not reading the article, because we've misunderstood it based on the title.
Title is kind of on point too because it is indeed a trick - a dark pattern - which is part of the topic of User Experience which the website uxdesign.cc specializes in. Also, it would have been hard to put the explanation inside title without making it too long.
Or it's interesting to discuss the fact that Apple deliberately makes SMS message UX and UI worse than iMessage.
Author had zero proof of that and speculated the entire time.
Feel free to downvote me, but everything I said was true. It -was- speculation with zero proof. Prove me wrong downvoters.
To be fair, he could’ve cut to the chase sooner. Since it was a UI UX article, HN readers probably aren’t aware that it’s a contrast between fonts and background, not blue vs green or green vs dark green.
It opens with an image of two green bubbles, one higher contrast than the other. The higher contrast one is labeled "Good" and the lower contrast "Gross".
After a two sentence paragraph expressing how the green/blue technical differentiation has become a social one, it then asks the question "Why is green worse than blue?" The next line: "The answer is color contrast."
What could they have realistically done to cut to the chase sooner in a meaningful way? The only real thing is ditching those two context building sentences. But it's two short sentences, providing relevant context.
Doesn't really feel like a valid criticism IMO.
He could have cut to the chase sooner than the header to paragraph 2?
HN readers are aware about poor contrast. Eg, your comment (which seems tame) is downvoted and has some lovely light color on light background combo.
What a weirdly snide comment.
They could sum it up in the first paragraph and then extrapolate, but like most of these things they stretch it out until the bottom.
Green is not a negative color in all cases. Green also signifies good to go
The fine article makes no mention of green being a "negative color", it's not even about the color, try giving it a read.
They also flash "Android Sucks" in large Arial letters on the screen for 30ms once every 5 seconds when you have green bubbles.
Subliminal messaging work better than poor contrast.
Green was the original color of text messages when the iPhone was introduced. When Apple introduced iMessages four or five years later they made iMessages Blue.
This isn’t some great conspiracy.
Did you RTFA? It's not about the colour, it's about the contrast.
I wonder if the contrast has changed over the years. It could be a worse green today than originally.
Have you thought that screen technology used in iPhones may not be the same since 2007?
The original iPhone had a resolution of 320x480 with much worse color reproduction.
I have no idea why this comment is downvoted. This is exactly the question you should be asking if you care about Apple's intent as the article claims.
But the text was black
And the screen had much worse color reproduction, a lower resolution, and much worse text rendering. There are a million reasons to change the color than to make your kids feel bad.
mmm I really doubt that was the real reason why you "dislike" the green message and that it was purposefully designed like so by Apple.
I think this is a case of learned significance, for which you know that a green bubble means a message sent via SMS rather than the "smarter" message. Added to the fact the blue is often used by tech companies due to its fresh and modern connotation, you have the full picture on why your brain prefers the blue to the green message.
That being said, I think Apple should have been more careful about making their message bubble pass contrast tests. But I doubt there was an "evil designer" carefully planning to make that bubble with lower contrast on purpose to make you dislike it.
When will people realize that the point of differentiating between Android/iOS bubbles isn’t about discriminating against teenagers, but rather it’s about security. If my messages are being sent through an insecure protocol that leaks my messages to the police, carrier, and skids with a rtl-SDR (SMS) rather than a secure encrypted protocol (iMessage), I want it to be obvious.
They have every reason to make “green bubbles” look toxic and off putting, because unencrypted SMS is genuinely hazardous.
RCS has end to end encryption.
When I text other android users, my messages are encrypted. When I text an iPhone, they are not.
Stop supporting closed protocols and bad-faith actors.
RCS isn’t anywhere nearly as widely adopted as SMS, depends entirely on the carrier setting it up properly, and didn’t get end to end encryption until relatively recently. Many years after this whole green vs. blue debacle started.
Once 99% of phones and carriers support RCS then maybe you could make this argument, but it won’t be for several years.
anecdotally, in the US/Canada, everytime I text someone running android, I get e2e encryption.
Most US carriers have rolled it out by now (or can be completely circumvented by using Android Messages app) and the green bubble teasing seems like a USA specific phenomena.
Anyhow, so what you mean to say, is that it's not about security (because it's present and accessible), but it's about appearances. And worst, the platform perpetuating the the appearances is not making any moves to secure it's messaging to non-Apple devices. Unacceptable.
The shade of low-contrast-y green is similar to the one used by some browsers not too long ago when an EV TLS certificate was used, to underline the security of the connection.
If it's the goal to implicate danger, this strikes me as a weird colour choice for dangerous messages, to be honest.
This whole "thing" around "bad" green vs blue message bubbles appears a bit, for the lack of a better word, insane to me as a non-american. The bubbles are fine. IMO, the problem is very obviously that kids can be cruel jerks and "not having an iPhone" is a social stigma for US teenagers, just like "not having a flashy cell phone with Bluetooth and MMS" was 15 years ago. Changing the colour will not fix this stigma, there still isn't an Apple on the back of the Android phones.
If they put a more fitting skull or danger icon on the bubbles instead people would really lose their shit.
That makes very little sense. If it's for security it does a terrible job of conveying that, nor would it help anything since you're already in the conversation with that person.
The point is to make non iPhones uncool.
No, it’s to indicate when you are texting someone over an insecure protocol.
This is just like saying the colored HTTPS symbol in the browser toolbar on websites that support SSL was designed to make websites without SSL look uncool.
Yeah no. The iMessage white-on-blue isn’t a significantly better contrast ratio. I would actually prefer black text here.
Low contrast UI elements are the calling card of Alan Dye’s design team. The iMessage and SMS contrast ratio doesn’t rank because there are so many other UI issues that have crept in from this team over the years. If the blue provides a slightly better contrast ratio, it is bound to be incidental and if I were a betting man, I would bet that someone actually likes the green used for SMS.
This entire message style by the way is a direct descendant of iChat AV where you could actually choose your message color. When Apple developed SMS and then iMessageS for iPhones, they chose basically iChat’s design, and picked their favorite bubble colors and what we have today evolved from that.
E.g.: [1] https://osxdaily.com/2011/02/14/prevent-annoying-im-text-sty...
(note the drop-down menu with “Lime” selected, you can Google around for other colors).