[meepmorp]

Do most Android users actually care one way or an another?

IMO, it seems like there's a small, if vocal, minority of folks with a deeply weird inferiority complex around blue bubbles and most people don't care at all. None of my Android using friends seem to give a shit.

[gizajob]

Android users don't, but apple users do. Part of Apple's "moat". It might seem trivial to you, but people do care about such things.

[acdha]

It’s an Android thing – Apple users are just getting on with their lives, most people outside of the US use an app like WhatsApp, WeChat, or Telegram (iMessage isn’t even in the top 5 globally). Google is pouring millions into a big marketing campaign trying to get people to think of green bubbles as inferior because they’ve accepted catastrophically botching their messaging play and are hoping to get the EU to bail them out. The more they can get Android users to feel insecure about iOS using the same color it’s always used, the more likely that play is to succeed.

Consider that if Google’s goal was actually interoperable messaging they could have opened up their own services at any point since they shut down federation for XMPP, and they could right now be offering E2EE as a free community standard rather than something carriers pay Google to get. They spent money buying Jibe and are hoping to use RCS adoption to make that more profitable.

[FalconSensei]

IMHO, you can tell that Google's also at fault because there's no Android messaging besides SMS. Android users outside of US (where SMS is not used) have to rely on Whatsapp/Line/Kakaotalk/Facebook Messenger.

If Android had invested in that, they would have something that's very commonly used in everywhere except US.

[olyjohn]

Well fuck those people. Glad I don't know any of them. They sound shallow as fuck.

[theodric]

In Europe - NL/CH/IE, specifically - everybody I know uses WhatsApp and Signal (except the Swiss who sometimes insist on Threema), even between iPhones-- iMessage never even comes up. I don't think anybody's sent me an SMS in literally years, bar one North American-based guy I used to work with.

(I'm sure someone out there knows a clique of European iMessage partisans, but that someone is not me!)

[wkat4242]

Yeah same here in Spain and I have a lot of Dutch friends. Nobody has sent me an SMS in years and I don't have iMessage. Some of my friends have iPhones but they just use WhatsApp or telegram like everyone else (for Dutch friends WhatsApp is the main thing, here in Spain it's more telegram but also because its group chats are infinitely better and I'm involved in a lot of groups)

[SushiHippie]

I've only seen iMessage get used in familes where everyone has an apple device for family chats and stuff.

[quantified]

My kids both got social shit and low-level exclusion for being green, with stories of the same for their peers. It's like being seen as dressing in hand-me-downs. Shouldn't make a difference, and doesn't to the wearer, but it does to the others. All stupid yet thanks to the way people are socialized, true.