This spontaneous anti-green-bubble brigade is an interesting example of how sometimes very subtle product decisions in technology influence the way culture works. Apple uses a soothing, on-brand blue for messages in its own texting platform, and a green akin to that of the Android robot logo for people tweeting from outside its ecosystem.
Believe it or not, these are people going batshit crazy because they are texting with someone who doesn’t have an iPhone. And people espousing a certain pride over this shallowness.
These are probably the same shallow people who threatened to kill their parents or kill themselves when they didn’t get an iPhone for Christmas. For once, I’m glad everyone in The Netherlands uses WhatsApp because we’re an 85% Android country.
I’ve encountered some of these people before, and it’s not just texting. There are seriously people who will refuse to use anything but FaceTime for high-quality calling. Even if they have a Skype account for example, they refuse to use it now because well everyone should have FaceTime and you’re a lower class of human if you don’t. For me that was just an excuse to never deal with these individuals again, but I had a tough time believing it when I first encountered it. Amazing what some people choose to value.
Are you sure it’s not Skype hate? I just uninstalled it from my phone again, because i wasn’t even signed in and it had 60% of the battery consumption in the past 24 hours. About halved my normal battery life.
Quite sure. Skype was simply an example readily at hand but many of them reacted even more nastily to another solution since it would mean yet another account. Most of them at least had Skype accounts.
Still recall the person i ran into online that got into a rant of how much better the resource fork system was when the zip file he tried to send me lacked a .zip in the name…
I had no idea Whatsapp was so big in the Netherlands. My only issue with it (well apart from it now being under Facebook’s control) is that it has no provision for multiple devices connecting to the same account. It’s kind of annoying to always have to pull my phone out to deal with Whatsapp when, with other systems such as Skype or Hangouts, I can reply from whatever device I happen to be using at the time.
Oh, how I hate that zoo. Ten years ago it seemed that either all services would become federated “soon” or at least multi-protocol messengers would solve the problem of having thousand IM applications installed and running. Once in a while ICQ changed their protocol so that third-party applications became incompatible, and that was regarded almost as a criminal activity. And now every messenger, as indistinguishable as they all are, tends to protect its network from third-party clients with DMCA takedowns and account lockouts, and the biggest problem one sees with such messenger is that it doesn’t allow access to single account from multiple clients…
Edited 2015-02-12 22:24 UTC
Yep. One may say many things about SMS/MMS, but at least they are standard and present on just about every mobile phone out there (at least SMS, MMS seems to be a bit more hit or miss).
This is why the internet can’t match proper telecom any time soon. Every company is trying to build their own silo. Until there is some kind of mandatory interoperability, and that is unlikely given the kind of ranting we see from people in expensive suits when term regulation comes up, it will be a mess and a half.
I remember some hand ringing in osnews comments when BlackBerry’s CEO made similar assertions – that iMessage should support other platforms (an over specific appeal for a standard).
Maybe one day we’ll figure out as a people that texting is as worthy of regulation as telephones and cable television.
And one day some people will learn that regulation is not a solution for everything. Imagine that.
You _do_ know how stupid you sound right? Would you like to abolish standards? Do you think standards are just holding back the market?
You know what amazes me? The hate coming from people who think we all need to be controlled. Extreme lefters have the nastiest dispositions when their groupthink is questioned. As religious and “hateful” as the other side is supposed to be, I have never encountered more vitriol than I have from the left.
Could you make an argument that engages with mine?
Email is the best federated service in the world.
To bad because it’s so cheap that spam almost killed it.
And now a very large part of the email users is all on Gmail.
Your email address should be the identifier used for making Internet calls, sending texts and logging into website. Everything else is just stupid.
Edited 2015-02-16 10:05 UTC
So that spammers could reach you everywhere just from seeing your email on some public list?
I have 2 statistics for you: the Netherlands is a country which is near the top of the list of countries with the most expensive SMS/texting.
The Netherlands has the highest penetration of WhatsApp use.
These are probably related.
People these days are so desperately to be part of a group, to be “special” in some way, that their value system got completely corrupted beyond salvation.
Now, every popular product got his own personal self-sprouting Ku Klux Klan.
Shallow americans!?!?! Oh wait, it’s not news.
This is ridiculous! Apple used green for text messages from the very first iPhone, and adopted blue for iMessages when they introduced iMessage.
There was no conspiracy to subtly “influence culture” or to embarrass anyone who happens to send messages to non-iPhone users.
This is rewriting history right here. Look for the first iPhone introduction, which predates any generally available device. Clear as night and day, you can see it using green “bubbles” for text messages sent out, with “grey” bubbles for messages received.
The blue thing is useful for people to know when they are sending or receiving iMessages, especially if, as some of us do, you send text messages abroad, and iMessages are basically free to send, while text messages sent internationally are not. If someone’s iMessage isn’t working, then you know that it is costing you money.
Apple made a joke in a product introduction, and people just run with it. People need to learn to take a joke.
And everyone uses WhatsApp, iPhone users, Android users, Symbian users and Windows Phone users.
I wish people would stop writing such rubbish, and I wish the editors on this site would at least bother to sense check article submissions.
This Apple hate is getting beyond ridiculous.
Edited 2015-02-12 19:35 UTC
It didn’t sound like anyone was talking about conspiracy. Quite honestly, lately it’s the Apple fans who seem desperate to see conspiracy in everything. To me, it came across more as a commentary on how subtle differences can impact the way people react, even in something so simple as texting, not a deliberate conspiracy.
The irony? Google Android devices have this “Hangouts” thing pre-installed, which has clients for Chrome browser (desktop version), Chrome OS, iOS and Android. iMessages has clients only for iOS and OS X.
So, apple users are taking pride on how much isolated their preferred messaging platform is, and how much incompatible it is with the dominant de-facto standard (Hangouts).
Google’s mistake was that they didn’t actively push hangouts, altough it’s been in Android since forever (as google talk and google voice). The AOSP SMS-only app should have gone the way of the “AOSP browser” app since 4.0 ICS or so.
Anyway, the mistake is fixed by Google now, since Hangouts is the default for texts on all new Android devices.
Which means iOS users will have to install google’s hangouts to send messages to other people without SMS charges, just like in the 90s they had to install Office for Mac to exchange documents with other people.
De-facto standards are a bitch.
Edited 2015-02-13 00:30 UTC
SMS Charges?
I’ve not seen any for at leady 10 years.
Even my £10.65/month plan has unlimited Text/SMS messages.
I’m not a smartphone user so all this Google hangouts stuff does not apply to me but one colleague who does use it gets frustrated as his team regularly get to the max user limit that the free version allows. Have you seen the cost pre device of the non-free version?
Edited 2015-02-13 07:34 UTC
Depends. I haven’t seen domestic SMS charges for about that long but, depending on your carrier and plan, international texts can still cost you quite a lot here.
Must be nice. What does that have to do with everybody else?
Being default doesn’t mean you have to use it. I don’t. In my world SMS is still a basic phone function, which I want to be able to use without any added “feature” if I want to. No logging in to anything. I don’t mind if it’s there, since it can be useful sometimes, I just don’t want to have to use it.
Does this Hangouts thing come with a mandatory FREE profile on Google+? Do you have to choose by what name you want to be known on YouTube to use it?
The grass ain’t greener in that camp…
Probably. You do have to create a Google Plus profile to use it these days anyway. Another problem is it’s in no way as integrated as FaceTime and iMessage are. If you send a text to someone’s phone number who has hangouts, it’ll still go via SMS unless you tell it to go via Hangouts in a lot of cases and it will not fall back to SMS when that person is unavailable to receive a hangout. So you have to put even more of your details out there via a social network you may not want to use what is, in some ways, a substandard product.
Actually, when you start a new thread, it defaults to Hangouts for online users and to SMS for everyone else. With my usage pattern I never had to switch between SMS and hangouts. (The app tends to overuse MMS though, and I intentionaly leave it unconfigured, so I still have to touch transport icon once in a while.)
I don’t know where you’re from, but Hangouts is far from a de facto standard here in the states. If anything, our de facto standards are, unfortunately, those pushed by Apple. Here it’s rare for someone not into computers to have even heard about Hangouts, let alone know what it is or even that you can chat with it.
FYI, hangouts is not the default on all new android phones. Google resurrected the old Messages app, under pressure from carriers that didn’t want users transitioned away from sms. So, some phones come with something else ( messages) as the default SMS.
I do have to say that I absolutely hated hangouts in its first couple of iterations. I used google chat with a few of my friends, and I had google voice set up. So anyone that I had google chatted with, I had a hard time sending SMS to. I also accidentally sent SMS from my google voice number to a few of my friends, who didn’t have the google voice number. So they were really confused and just ignored the messages from an unknown number. Plus, once I had done this it was almost impossible to figure out how to switch sms for these contacts to use the phone’s number. I did switch back to a third party SMS solution for a while to keep my sanity. By far the worst google experience I have ever had.
I think you have to remember Apple users actually pay to be in the Apple bubble/cloud. (They pay for similar products)
They think it’s some kind of privilege.
Some of them want to feel superior.
Like they are one of the rich kids or something.
No just the smart ones that have to get their work done.
If you buy a macbook new for $1500 and use the hell out of it for 3 years, guess what? It’s still worth $1000 on the used market. You are 2/3 of the way to a new one.
Plus it probably worked flawlessly in those 3 years, and all of your data and apps will easily migrate to a new macbook, so why not get a new one?
The funny thing is — Apple users just work, just do their thing, be themselves, make their stuff, live their lives. We used to be denigrated by geeks because our platform was so simple and slow and unpopular. Now it’s UNIX and fast and ubiquitous and we are denigrated by geeks for being followers. You can’t have it both ways. Apple is still a small subset of the overall market. Perhaps because they don’t ship crap you think they are elitist?
if you were using Apple’s in the 90’s you weren’t a follower. You went against the masses. It hasn’t been until the last 5 years that you could even find people using Apple’s because it is what’s in style.
What it was in the past is less relevant to what it is now.
I’m just going by a large portion of the Apple users in the streets I see in my country, the Netherlands.
Which, at least to me, seem to have an attitude of:
“Look at me, I’m an Apple user !”
– which seems to imply: I’m better than you.
But have to admit, that portion got a lot smaller. After more ‘average’ people got an iDevice.
Edited 2015-02-16 15:36 UTC
sounds like a problem you have, not about someone else’s purchase.
i don’t think i’ve ever worried about what some guy on the street has, or how it makes me feel about myself, or what i think it means about him.
i have a lot of 3-5 year old apple products. can i be a snob if i’m using something from 4 generations ago?
I only see people snob that buy every new/latest Apple device that comes out.
Understood. Those people are rich and would be snobs no matter what brand they chose.
Most americans can’t afford such an upgrade schedule and we use our apple products for 2-5 years. Even if your company is making money and keeping you in good machines they will wait 2-3 years for most employee upgrades these days.
Apple usually finds some way to force you to upgrade after about 6 years. I use them as long as I can, and lots of people I know keep them for many years. I was at a meeting just the other day with 3 other iPhone 4 devices, which is pretty old, 2 generations back.
On most platforms, Google Hangouts has mostly been moved to WebRTC.
WebRTC is an Internet and Web standard. Your browser probably already supports it:
http://iswebrtcreadyyet.com/
This was the state when they first did that:
https://webrtchacks.com/hangout-analysis-philipp-hancke/
There is a summary in the ‘Hangouts is mostly WebRTC?’
-section
Completing the work on standards and building the infrastructure in the browsers and libraries for apps might mean widespread use is possible by the end of this year.
Edited 2015-02-16 10:24 UTC
Are people really that awesomely stupid? Hahahahaha
This must be a dream. I think I’m still sleeping and dreaming about some batsh*t crazy alternate universe with some really far gone people
I’ve heard a lot of stories about people selling their organs or their house to get an iPhone and I’ve always dismissed them as urban legends. I suppose is was invented as a form of marketing or sentionalist stories to sell some news.
I know many people with iPhones and none of them would act like this. But those stories make them feel like they need an excuse to get an iPhone. A few week back, a friend of mine got an iPhone 6 (the very expensive one) which is pretty nice but he had to tell people that he didn’t buy it to look cool, that he didn’t pay the full price of it and almost apologized for buying it. He just didn’t want to be associated with the fanboys in the stories we hear about the iPhone, whether they are real or not. This is getting ridiculous.
If I was an iOS user, I could see myself making such posts and for people who can’t see my sense of humor (and also machines doing a dumb keyword count) the self-irony in those posts may not be evident.
IOW, are sure not an important part of those posts are just propagating a meme?
….trendy young dudes have are demanding they be killed by air-strike or rocket-propelled grenades. They say death by kalashnikov or beheading is sooo cheesy and cliche.
Wow, 5 people on twitter post a likely joking thing about the different color of texts vs iMessage and suddenly it’s a “brigade” and a worthy of an article. You’re really digging deep these days Thom to find your stories.
Edited 2015-02-15 02:55 UTC
When I switched away from Apple to Windows Phone I had a terrible time fixing the issue of iMessage blocking SMS. I could send but not receive, eventually I found the super secret Apple site that allowed me to turn iMessage off.
Now that I have an iPhone again I tried to stop iMessage taking over my phone but am yet successful. I prefer using SMS like an earlier poster I have had unlimited SMS for years. At least there is now an easy to find website to turn off iMessage if I go back to Windows phone.
My iPhone using friends did whinge about having to send SMSs to me.
After enquiring about them having unlimited SMS or not it was as others noted they did not like the green bubble.
Care factor zero.
When I switched away from Apple to Windows Phone I had a terrible time fixing the issue of iMessage blocking SMS. I could send but not receive, eventually I found the super secret Apple site that allowed me to turn iMessage off.
Now that I have an iPhone again I tried to stop iMessage taking over my phone but am yet successful. I prefer using SMS like an earlier poster I have had unlimited SMS for years. At least there is now an easy to find website to turn off iMessage if I go back to Windows phone.
My iPhone using friends did whinge about having to send SMSs to me.
After enquiring about them having unlimited SMS or not it was as others noted they did not like the green bubble.
Care factor zero.