[hylaride]

It's been that way for awhile, though they do use instagram and/or tiktok for consumption.

iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.

The kids have been taught the dangers of sharing things on the internet, so the risk is minimized sharing in private chats (though obviously still there).

[FireBeyond]

> iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.

Craig Federighi fought against supporting iMessage on Android and RCS for a long time saying, quote, "It would remove obstacles towards iPhone families being able to give their kids Android phones."

[handfuloflight]

> iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.

Are kids really that simplistically divided?

[dcchambers]

100%.

iMessage is THE number one thing selling iphones these days, and has been for a long time.

[theshackleford]

Maybe in your neck of the woods, I see no evidence for outside of that. iMessage is completely irrelevant where I live. SMS/MMS full stop is irrelevant.

[kube-system]

In the US, people overwhelmingly use SMS/MMS/iMessage by default. It works with every phone, it's the one platform that people won't say "I don't have that" to.

[theshackleford]

I've no doubt it may be the case in the US, I did not mean to suggest it's not. It simply doesnt have the same sway everywhere.

I don't know literally a single person who uses SMS/MMS/iMessage where I live. And it's been this way for years. It's easily 99% whatsapp/messenger/discord etc. It's pretty openly joked about that the only thing SMS is still for these days is spam/marketing/political messaging.

[tristor]

> I've no doubt it may be the case in the US, I did not mean to suggest it's not. It simply doesnt have the same sway everywhere.

You're correct, of course. WhatsApp was significantly more popular than SMS in the majority of Latin American and European countries before iMessage even really picked up steam in the US. But it doesn't matter, because the US, by revenue share, is the world's largest market, full stop. One of the lessons we can learn from the social media business model is that you can get incredibly large entirely off the US market before it even makes sense to engage in the rest of the world.

The person you're replying to is correct in context of the US market, which if you're Apple is basically the only market that matters other than China, since in the rest of the world most people use Android, usually due to cost differences (flagship Android models sell extremely poor volumes compared to iPhones, even globally).

[zifpanachr23]

Yep, and I like it this way.

[handfuloflight]

But why does it matter if the majority of cellular plans provide unlimited texting?

[tmpz22]

Its about the extra features iMessage has because of Apple's superset of the underlying SMS/MMS functionality. Its also about having a blue bubble (not-poor) versus a green bubble (poor).

It defies belief how much some demographics care about this stuff, I didn't believe it when I first heard either. Some of it is improving with RCS but its got a ways to go.

[dcchambers]

Exactly this. Even if RCS does everything iMessage does, you still have a dreaded "green bubble" in iOS messaging which is a huge (anti) social signal to teens.

Does it justify their reason for hating on Android/green bubbles? Of course not, but that's 100% the reality of the situation.

[frollogaston]

Teens care about silly things like that, but a real thing I care about as an adult is group chats working properly. Like, I was looking for a realtor last year when buying a house. One of them had Android, and I really thought about it, do I want to take a nonzero chance of that somehow screwing the plans up on closing?

That's not the main reason I went with another one, but I still paid attention to how many group iMessages we were in with lenders, seller's realtor, or just me + wife + realtor. Things really did come down to the hour during negotiating and closing, so it might've mattered.

[baggachipz]

Apple's implementation of RCS is such hot garbage that I disabled it and revert to regular SMS to text with Android people. I'm sure the shoddy RCS support is just a terrible mistake and not by design...

[pirates]

Would you mind listing a couple issues you’ve seen with it? You’ve got me curious if they affect me and I just don’t notice it what. I don’t have all that many contacts though, so it may be just be a numbers game.

[frollogaston]

It doesn't matter so much for 1:1, but SMS group chat is a mess (or MMS? RCS? idk).

[tristor]

Because people like sharing photos and videos and MMS is hot garbage? My phone can record 4K60 video and take 48 megapixel photos, but MMS can only handle 0.72 megapixel photos under 300KB and 240p video capped at 30 seconds. Why would /anyone/ in 2025 want to use SMS/MMS when they could use iMessage or RCS, or even WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger, Discord, et al?

[te_chris]

Only in the US, the rest of us aren’t that petty and just use WhatsApp or signal

[procinct]

I see this line of thinking online a lot, with people mentioning kids are excluded because they have green bubbles as if it’s some sort of highly superficial exclusion based on only wanting to talk to Apple users.

The main issue is that including a non-iMessage user changes the protocol of the group chat from iMessage to SMS and SMS can basically make group chats unusable.

I also don’t like that kids who don’t have an iPhone can’t participate in iMessage group chats, but when we make out like it’s just kids being cruel and not an actual functional incentive to not include those kids then we are losing sight of where the pressure should be applied.

[zifpanachr23]

The pressure should obviously be applied on the underage children with the Apple products, or better yet on Apple. Perhaps the children should be punished and have their iPhones taken away and replaced with budget android phones or flip phones.

This is good in the long run since the behavior they were engaging in puts them at odds with nearly half the population. Not only is it anti-social behavior, it's mind numbingly stupid and likely to backfire in ways that make their lives worse.

~43% of the cell phones out there in the US are Android phones. To follow their conviction against Android at all convincingly and thoroughly, they would be missing out on a lifetime of opportunities and would live a significantly diminished existence.

iPhone is not even close to being a dominant enough platform to be able to enforce this kind of social pressure against anyone but people significantly under the age of 18. Shame them, make sure they feel bad and spoiled (they should feel spoiled for being a child with an iphone), and watch them grow out up to be pro-social adults.

[GuinansEyebrows]

it's just a new version of "preps don't hang out with goths"

[frollogaston]

Adults too

[serial_dev]

Whenever I hear this iMessage thing I’m surprised. Is that a US / Canada thing?

Here in Europe, everybody uses WhatsApp and/or similar products for chat and they are all multi platform.

[hylaride]

iOS/iPhones are the majority of phones in Canada and the US (~60%). However, if you take the upper half of household incomes that number skyrockets to 80-90%. Comparatively, in the UK it's 50/50. In the rest of europe android mostly has a 60-75% market share (tends to drift more towards android the more eastern you go - signalling wealth has a lot to do with it).

The reasons why are varied (everything from wealth signalling to switching being a pain and iphone mostly had a first mover advantage for quality and availability for the first several years), but it's only in the last two years that I've seen people start to use multi-platform chat apps here. Most of my peer group with other parents all default to imessage group chats for sharing photos, stories of our kids.

I am also starting to notice a loosening on apple's services. Spotify is used by more people than Apple music even amungst the apple households I know.

[Der_Einzige]

Kids are ruthless about anti green bubble discrimination and it’s part of the reason for the rise of incels. The overwhelming majority of incels are android users, and the mainstream cultural media likes to make clear that one of the reason for being incels is them using a “poordroid”

https://leafandcore.com/2019/08/24/green-bubbles-are-a-turn-...

https://outsidethebeltway.com/the-dreaded-green-bubble/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...

https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-o...

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241473453/why-green-text-bub...

https://www.fastcompany.com/90391587/why-we-dont-want-you-an...

[aucisson_masque]

> The overwhelming majority of incels are android users

Seriously ?

I have read your links, it shows that some kids are stupid and discriminate over what phone brand one is using.

First of all, that’s purely a USA issue.

Secondly, it says nothing about incels.

A phone brand doesn’t make you more charismatic, in fact in my experience I have seen more iPhone user being insecure than Android user.

Especially the one who invest heavily into Apple « ecosystem », they are more often than not (in Europe) nerds.

Just to be honest, I write that from my iPhone. Really got no bias.

[djeastm]

If I remember my teenage years, perception feels a lot like reality.

[zifpanachr23]

Lmao. Don't pay any attention to the thing about incels, which whether true or not, so obviously does not establish that android was a causative factor. Look at the percentage of US people that have Android. iPhone is not nearly as dominant in the US as spoiled brat teens seem to think. Nearly half the population is Android users. I'm sure we are all incels.

[hylaride]

Yeah, 99% of incels (at least the ones I know about, mostly because they hit the news) have an obvious mental health tick or manifestation that turns off potential romantic partners. These people are being excluded (rightly or wrongly) because of that, not because of Android.

[oenton]

Whoa hold on. I was with you until “the overwhelming majority of incels are android users.” How did you draw that conclusion?

[Der_Einzige]

The countless myriad number of TikTok’s, reels, etc from women calling out how using an android is a dealer breaker. The community made polls of “incels.us” about this exact question, and the other links I cited showing green bubble social discrimination.

My original post has enough receipts. If you don’t believe me you’re free to remain wrong. But here’s more anyway:

https://www.joe.co.uk/life/sex/owning-an-android-is-official...

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/android-relationship-iphone/

https://www.studentbeans.com/blog/uk/the-biggest-student-dat...

https://archive.thetab.com/uk/2020/10/16/girls-are-sharing-w...

These memes posted on short video sites also have parallel ones of women making fun of guys who try to do the whole “hold on let me pirate this movie and HDMI connect it to the TV thing” instead of having Netflix.

[frollogaston]

I don't doubt that some women make fun of men for green bubbles, but this doesn't mean the vast majority of incels are Android users. If that were true, wouldn't they just get an iPhone?

Also the HDMI thing is hilarious because it's exactly what my wife would say about me.

[bluGill]

WhatsApp never caught on in the US since cell phones and SMS were a great deal for keeping in touch. By the time WhatsApp arrived US carriers were not raping their customers for phone calls or SMS messages (in the early days of cell phones they were - be very careful responding as the state of the world has changed many times over the years and so it is quite possible you remember a time where your country was better than the US for reasons that are no longer true!). Note in particular calls and SMS to a different state is included, and typically Canada is included as well. As such we never developed the WhatsApp habbit as it didn't give us anything.

[frollogaston]

Yes. WhatsApp isn't nearly as popular in the US as in many other countries.

Idk what the stats are on this, but anecdotally, all my friends use FB Messenger if they want cross-platform group chat, but that's slowly changing to some fragmented list of alternatives. And usually it's not for semi-important things like get-together plans.

[herbst]

This. In 98% of all cases I get away with only having telegram (no phone number even) most people have one or multiple IMs

[kjkjadksj]

It literally works seamlessly though? Just converts to MMS and you don't notice outside the "liked BLABLABLA" sort of messages that trickle in without the imessage emoji system.

[AlecSchueler]

I don't think seamless integration with MMS is enough to outweigh being different/not having "the real thing" or the full experience in the eyes of a young teenager. This reads as the HN version of the "but we have iMessage at home" meme (I mean this humourously, not as snark).

[kjkjadksj]

We are past peak iphone. The actual cool phones of this era like the folding screen phones are all android.

[devmor]

iMessage chats also include rich media that is either degraded in MMS (photos, videos unless you have RCS support) or just doesn't exist (like multiplayer games, invites, apple cash, etc).

This may not seem like a big deal to you, but if you remember what it's like to be a kid, you should get it. The smallest friction can be a reason to exclude someone socially.

[kjkjadksj]

Imessage already compresses it to hell enough. You need another protocol for fidelity.

[mckn1ght]

Even that has been fixed by now in my chats with android friends. The only reason to display green bubbles anymore is to indicate lack of E2EE. But that will be coming to RCS interop soon as well.

[frollogaston]

In theory it's ok. In practice, MMS group chats are broken. It's not even an iPhone thing, as evident in Android-dominated areas still relying on WhatsApp instead.

[KeplerBoy]

That's not why WhatsApp took over. WhatsApp rose to popularity back when texting (especially internationally) was not unlimited and free.

[frollogaston]

Internationally maybe, but if someone in the US is using WhatsApp, it's because of the group texting problem. My family included.

[futuraperdita]

Non-iMessage chats are also segregated by color, a visual affordance that identifies you as a member of the non-Apple outgroup. The other.

[kjkjadksj]

God forbid