But I think it's because when a message uses iMessage, then there are reactions and other features available, where messages from Android are regular SMS and will lack those
I asked a bunch of teen to 30+ year old friends and family, and every one would say that for the purposes of dating, they would require iOS usage due to the perceived probability of an Android user being an incompatible match being too high.
It literally does. I'd imagine the kind of people that they don't want to associate with are exactly the kind of people who wouldn't like them anyway. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What on Earth would drive that perception? Do iOS users prefer dating other people who will spend lots of money on a status symbol? This sounds like nothing but a thinly-veiled attempt at discrimination based on an assumed level of wealth. (Which, if you've priced out Pixels lately, is not at all accurate.)
Ok but the point still stands. My impression of iOS users is they simply feel they prefer the UX, whereas you feel, as an Android user, that you’re making an ideological choice. As someone who cares little for the ideology of consumer choices, I don’t think we’d get along, which reinforces the original point about personal compatibility.
Cheap in the US perhaps. Here in Spain even the SE is 579€ and you can get a great budget or midrange Android for much much less. Which will have lot of mod cons the SE doesn't have like a modern bezelless design, amoled and in-screen fingerprint. Usually even a 3,5mm Jack.
Most people carry Redmi phones and use wired headphones here. It's absolutely about wealth.
A message from an Android user is no different to a spam text message. I expect in Europe most people use WhatsApp anyway so it’s less of an issue.
But in the US, communication with Android users on iOS sucks. Garbage quality media, none of the usual features like reactions or groups or sharing things works well.
Yes, meaning that if all you knew about someone is that they have an iOS device, you would not be able to tell what their wealth/income status is (other than maybe they are not in the bottom 10%).
The cheapest Pixel is $499, so it’s not like Apple users are paying more than the market will bear — and even if you get the Walmart discount phone you’re paying more than the savings in service pretty quickly, so this is a pretty democratic competition compared to all of the other ways people buy things they enjoy or signal affluence: people pay many tens of thousands more for premium SUVs, high end clothing costs considerably more than that iPhone, etc. Half the people here have the same phone as actual billionaires, and we don’t spend any time in their circles otherwise.
Your comment history suggests you have a personal identification with Android, which I think is making it hard to evaluate it rationally. I’d suggest considering whether that’s really a lot of money for something people use so much every single day, and whether your position might be one of the goals of the intense PR play Google has been making to get the EU regulators to make them less of an also-ran in the messaging space - they know it depends on convincing the regulators that Android users are being discriminated against, which is why you hear so many stories about that which turn out to be sourced back to Google and the phone companies.
Compare it to all of the other things people use as status symbols: it’s a tiny fraction of a car, less than a decent suit, and wouldn’t go that far at a nightclub or nice restaurant. Google has been intensely marketing this idea that green bubbles are discriminatory as part of their PR push but I’m skeptical that even if Google got everything they wanted from the EU, the shallow people wouldn’t instantly move on to some other signifier.
Group threads in one manufacturer-provided chat program get annoying.
Venturing outside the defaults by using Signal or WhatsApp (or Threema or Messenger or...) would mitigate this. I suspect the root of the problem is folks accepting defaults unquestioningly, resulting in de facto manufacturer lock-in.
iPhones are popular. I grew up when almost nobody had cell phones or even pagers, and remember the exact same thing happening for having the wrong shoes, jacket, Trapper-Keeper, Walkman, bike, skateboard, etc. or, in high school or later, car. This is why there’s such a booming industry in counterfeit clothes or rapid knockoffs because certain people really prize being able to fit a trend.
If Google gets everything they ask for, the shallow people will instantly move on to something else because that’s how people like that work.
Sending video from iPhone to Android generally gets hypercompressed