The problem that I have with the way Apple does this has nothing whatsoever to do with me. It’s their device, it is not possible for me to care any less about it.
No, the problem I have is that it becomes a severe bullying / exclusion tactic among kids. Now, kids will always find something to bully other kids about, but this one seems to hurt a lot because of the source of the ire and the inability to do anything about it (short of purchasing an Apple device).
My eldest was excluded from group chats with friends because they “ruined” the quality of pictures and videos by being in the group chat. These are friends mind you, not the sort of bullies the rest of us might’ve had. It’s devastating to kids when their friends exclude them like this. What do you do? You can’t complain about the technology not mattering, you can’t reason with it, you can’t say: “it gets better”.
Kids these days have a very different relationship to technology. That relationship can seem weird or “wrong” to folks who remember a time before these ubiquitous devices. Crap patterns like this creating artificial walled gardens are not “novel” or “creative” ways to increase sales.
Hell, adults and “friends” of mine really seem to care that I have an android. They constantly bring it up as if they think bullying another adult into buying their specific product will somehow work or maybe they think that it bothers me or something. I could not care less. Start a new chat without me and the other android users? Cool, go ahead. Spoiler: they won’t.
Or they have and haven’t told you, as I’ve experienced multiple times now (as an adult in my thirties, no less). It’s why I fell out of my bar trivia group, they slowly forgot to send us Android users (aka my partner and I) texts separately, so we just drifted out of that circle.
It’s comical how petty so many adults get about the bubbles too, and absolutely refuse to consider using anything else. Luckily my partner was on the Pixel train like me before we met, so it’s not an issue there, but suggest Signal, Telegram, or hell, even Facebook Messenger (which they all have as well), and you just get befuddlement in response. Even my mother, who is in her fifties and is a department director at her job, gets perpetual shit from her coworkers re: the staff group chats that just can’t go into Slack for whatever reason, as she’s the lone Android user in that whole bunch. None of these people even grew up with cellphones of any type, and yet they’re just as petty about messaging as any socially-obsessed teen.
Oh well, no skin off my back, and if anything this petty behavior from a subset of iOS users is basically an anti-advertisement to me.
Not to make light of your kids situation, but sending pics/videos over mms is horrible they aren’t being metaphorical when they say it ruins the chats. Imagine compressing a video to < 1MB and you would get something unseeable. Now i would recommned they all switch to snapchat, its very popular and wont mess with the group chat no matter the device used :)
Is it just me that has literally never heard anyone bring up the colour of bubbles irl? Like I’ve seen people talk about it on the internet from time to time but never in the real world.
It’s more of a thing amongst the newer generations.
I am the newer generations though
In that case, congrats on having a good group of non-petty friends!
All these text and emoji features that are being added into apple but are not compatible with Android: this seems like a problem…
Until you download signal.
It has great features for group messaging, video calling, emojis and is generally feature rich.
And it’s end-to-end encrypted when messaging other signal users.
It’s available on iOS and Android.
Does it offer SMS?
Because I’m not going to ask someone to download an app so I can talk to them.
It used to, but no longer.
Not anymore… which is dumb
So pissed they removed it… grrr, there goes the wife acceptance factor
The hard part is getting others to join. If all of your fam has iPhones and you are the one Android person, getting them all to join Signal just for you is a tall order.
Yeah I know.
Exactly, who is using bog-standard texts and phonecalls in this day and age? Do they also use internet explorer because that’s the default too? Even if you’re not on Signal, everyone and their mums has WhatsApp, I don’t see how this is even an issue!
So many people use standard clear text messaging and calling.
When I try to explain encryption, I usually get the line
" I’ve got nothing to hide!"
Reading through the comments in this thread, I’d just like to mention how amusing it is to see so many people in the fediverse arguing in favor of walled gardens and vendor lock-in. Like, do you even know where you are?
The EU is already legislating to solve this. They are forcing open APIs on iMessage with the DMA.
The solution is to just use something like Signal.
Unfortunately most of the US user base would rather cling to any sort of elitism than actually search for a solution to an invented problem.
This does seem to be a US centric problem, I don’t know anyone who still uses SMS, everyone seems to use Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal here
So… here’s a hot take I guess (disclaimer: i am an iphone user): People who are actively complaining about Apple having features that are unique to its platform don’t know how products work. Apple created this technology and design themselves and other companies want to leech off the features. We should want competition like iMessage vs whatever Android uses. For anyone to basically say Google doesn’t have the ability or resources to create an actual competitor is silly. They absolutely can make an alternative, but they choose not to. Google becomes complacent and progress slows or completely stops. I’d rather have a product that is FEATURE-FULL than feature-less. Additionally, this contact feature thing is neat, but I wouldn’t call it a “game-changer” or revolutionary. It’s similar to the super old ability that some cellular providers had/have where you could play a specific song instead of the calling tone.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. 😒
The issue is that if Google does create a competitor, or an open standards competitor is created, like RCS vs iMessage, Apple isn’t going to implement that, or in any way interoperate with it. So even if Google or someone else made a better system that worked beautifully on Android and any hypothetical alternatives, but Apple only implemented their own system and refused to share, things would remain shit. Which is exactly where we are.
Apple doesn’t want to live in a world where multiple brands and types of mobile phones operating systems exist harmoniously. They want to intentionally make life difficult for anyone who didn’t buy an iPhone. In the process they make it intentionally difficult for people who did buy an iPhone, because their communications with non-iPhone friends are hampered.
They’re also egging easily influenced teenagers on to shame other teenagers for having “worse” phones and creating unnecessary divides and unhappiness among friends. All so kids will bully other kids into buying iPhones.
None of these features are difficult to invent or implement. They should all be open standards and iPhone users and Android users should all together be angry at Apple for putting a malicious profit motive above the creation of a smooth and universally interoperable user experience.
The issue is that if Google does create a competitor, or an open standards competitor is created, like RCS vs iMessage, Apple isn’t going to implement that, or in any way interoperate with it. So even if Google or someone else made a better system that worked beautifully on Android and any hypothetical alternatives, but Apple only implemented their own system and refused to share, things would remain shit. Which is exactly where we are.
If Google had a popular competitor to iMessage, Apple users would feel left out, and that’s what would force integration.
All they had to do was add sms to one of their chat apps, and people would have migrated over word of mouth for the extra features slowly overtime.
This is uniquely an issue in the U.S. because there are plenty of popular cross-platform competitors that are widely used in Europe: WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram.
iMessage is unpopular in Europe precisely because it’s not interoperable and your friend group will look at you funny if you want to use some stupid system that only works on iPhones.
Nobody uses SMS for anything here, aside from notifications from businesses and such.
I am in Europe and I use SMS for things like birthday wishes with the people who insist on doing everything in WhatsApp or some other technology I don’t care making an account on. But then I never really understood what people liked about phone only messaging systems in the first place.
All they had to do was add sms to one of their chat apps, and people would have migrated over word of mouth for the extra features slowly overtime.
You just described “Google Hangouts”.
Nobody except nerds like us care about RCS.
Hang on … I set a picture on MY phone and then anyone I call sees MY picture? Oh yeah, can’t see how this’ll go wrong. How long before dick picks are sent, or advertisements, or someone finds a way to use it to hack someones phone.
I can see this could be useful, especially folks with eye sight issues (but how would this affect blind folks?), but it’s just another way to tell someone who is calling. I don’t answer my phone unless they’re in my contact book already.
This seems eh to me, but I’m not an Apple person anyway.
especially folks with eye sight issues
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t some phones already call out the name of the caller for blind people? Heard it on a train once, maybe a feature I can’t seem to find on my phone.
Yep, this is also a common feature for phones for seniors.
My old feature phone from 2010 had this.
This was the first thing I thought too. I got to find that comic about “time-to-penis” stats.
A similar feature already exists on iOS, when having a conversation over iMessage you can optionally share your name/profile picture. The reason this hasn’t been abused with spam or porn is because it’s tied to your identity and Apple ID. I would imagine it will be the same for this new feature.
It’s not much different than a profile picture on most social media networks, is it? You could have done all of this with your Lemmy profile picture as well.
Phones are a bit more ubiquitous for older folks though. Imagine a vulnerability that allows me to post my “pic” as pulling from your phone and it comes up with a picture of your cousin or something. Or if I’m targeting you, you’re an old person that doesn’t understand technology and you see your granddaughter show up in the picture and don’t look at the number or anything. There seems to be a lot of ways this can be abused. I hope I’m wrong and we’ll never see a story about people abusing it, but people pretty much always abuse these things.
Owh dammit what now. I haven’t read it yet but I’m already tired of it
TBH I don’t really want want to anything to do with people that see me as less because I don’t have a fancy calling animation anyway.
I think this could’ve great if it was an open standard but that’s not the apple way.
Don’t forget, FaceTime will be an open standard, aaaaany time now https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/07/apple_announces_open_standard_facetime_video_chat_for_iphone_4
Unfortunately this is what makes iPhones “iPhones”
They bring out features that generally make the phone part of the smartphone better to use.
RCS is still a mess on androids. And calling on iPhones is about to feel very modern while android phones will still be calling people the same way people did 20 years ago.
When you say RCS is a mess on Android, what do you mean? I personally have not had issues.
I have 2 friends with different samsungs and both my parents with newer samsungs. Neither one of them have RCS. Idk if you have to enable it or anything.
Who the fuck is using their phone to call people? ;)
Tbh Only spammers and scammers lol
Is there even a difference between how iPhone and android calling ‘feels’? They’re both the exact same as 20 years ago lmao its a phone call, it’s been replaced by like a thousand apps by now
Most iphone users facetime, and if its another iphone it’ll be clearer than an android.
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wanting everyone in your own walled garden is standard corporate fuckery, but Apple deliberately making the color contrast lower for green messages is just dark.
https://uxdesign.cc/how-apple-makes-you-think-green-bubbles-gross-e03b52b12fed
Just use signal. In general.
The problem with Signal is there is no way to backup your messages on iOS. I’m a very pro-privacy and used Signal for a while but stopped. Being able to have backups of my conversations with loved ones is more important than having the utmost privacy to me.
Thats a feature…
The inability to backup your own data is a feature now? That’s some Stockholm Syndrome bullshit.
No, there is no backups because you shouldn’t have secure information laying around unsecured as a backup. Stockholm syndrome is WhatsApp or Apple Message where its not secured at all.
Backups can and should be encrypted.
Who said the backup needs to be insecure?
You can literally encrypt the backup itself and use a pass phrase for unlocks. WhatsApp already does just that. Also WhatsApp uses Signals encryption and last time it was audited it passed with flying colours.
It’s possible they can push an update that would do client side scanning of messages while typed or that have been sent but this would be trivial to find out about and has never been reported on.
The issue isn’t the data directly, it’s the metadata.
Also, if a recipient decides to flag a message on Whatsapp, that message gets copied and sent to Facebook.
