[hedora]

The blue bubble thing isn’t about iMessage as much as it is about android messages sucking so hard it affects iOS users. SMS/RCS don’t support large files, (There’s no practical limit with iMessage) and video / images look like garbage. It intentionally corrupts the shit out of gps coordinates. It can’t even make decent audio or video calls. It’s tied to a phone number, and there’s no way to know if the recipient number even supports sms without sending one.

Also, green bubble messages are not e2e encrypted, and their contents are sold en masse to (or simply slurped up by) surveillance organizations.

iMessage has none of those issues. Signal only has a few of those problems. Its bubbles are blue (not by Apple’s doing, but still, blue bubbles, cross platform, and it is not intentionally a royal pain in the ass like android messaging).

Since you are in Europe, you probably don’t use SMS, and are therefore shunning the green bubbles just as much as any iOS user.

[Hugsun]

My impression was that you could send SMS through iMessage but when it's between iphones it doesn't use old school phone tech at all and just goes through the internet like other web based messaging apps. But only between apple devices of course.

[hedora]

Yes. It auto upgrades to a decent protocol when you are sending to an apple device. You can associate any combination of phone numbers and email addresses with it, so you don’t need a phone number to send iMessage messages.