New Google site begs Apple for mercy in messaging war

Google is tired of losing so badly to iMessage, so it wants Apple to adopt RCS.

Read the whole story

 

[Publius Enigma]

I keep hearing about this, but I have never, ever met a single person who cares what color my texts are. And until today, I never knew this was an issue. And I work in an office with 20 other people, at least 15 of which use iphones. (I use android).

I mean seriously, are there really people out there who actually give a shit if your texts are coming through imessage or SMS? Are there really people out there who are making fun of others because "their texts are green and mine is blue"?

This sounds to me like a whole bunch of people who are blowing a complete non-issue out of proportion. I am willing to bet that 99% of users couldn't give half a shit less.

I have the opposite problem: I own an iPhone and I often specifically want to send my texts as “green” texts (ie SMS), because I often change my SIM between phones and if someone tries to reply to an iMessage I’ve sent before switching phones, I won’t get the reply. Sending all messages from my iPhone as an SMS would solve the problem, but iMessage doesn’t offer that option.

 

[PetterOfCats]

so it looks like Google is basically crowdsourcing bullying to get their agenda - or lack there of - pushed out.

 

[lalaltcdata]

In the USA... In the rest of the world this problem doesn't exist, apps like whatsapp and telegram are 99% of messaging traffic.

 

[Hopefully Smarter]

there once was a message from google
whose recipient thought it to be a bamboozle
the bubble was green
they left it unseen
because those folks in mountain view keep abandoning shit and nobody trusts them anymore, man

The haiku meets beat poetry.
Outstanding!!

 

[Daniel]

I don't really care about the text color thing at all, I use android, it's fine, I also don't make a holy war out of phone OSes either so whatever works and I've used both.

That being said, my main issue, and not "mine" exactly because I'm GenX and not in tons of chat groups, but the imessage chat group can't seem to invite anyone outside of Apple/iMessage users without remaking the group as I'm told. This does become an issue, often, in the US, for kids. I've seen within my own family kids get bullied because they can't join the chat group with the rest of their class, they'll have a bunch of kids chatting together all day, but not those couple kids. Correct or not but it's often painted as "they're poor and can't afford an iphone" and the kids get further picked on. Even if the bubbles were a different color in group chat, at least it would work.

 

[Bongle]

I was a hangouts user and have been dumped into Chat and ... it's actually pretty OK.

In ~15 years of Googley chat-app changes, it's the first time it's actually been an improvement. You can even see faint glimmerings of them trying to integrate meet (there's a meet button and it instantly sends a meet request). Video calls wow! Ya know, like Hangouts had 10 years ago...

But very few people are on it obviously. And Google probably doesn't have the patience to wait for their gmail dominance to very slowly grow the system's active users.


Also, Ron, you forgot another Google messaging service: Google Photos has a very hangouts-like chat system built into it, and it's very easy to accidentally send someone a photo in Photos instead of Chat in Android and then be like "where the hell did that picture go?".

 

[mikus42]

XKCD on Standards:

https://xkcd.com/927/

 

[SPCagigas]

Too little too late. Outside the US, Android users have already moved on from Google's messaging to other messaging platforms. Inside the US, you're either using an iPhone or desperately pleading with the people you know to use a different messaging platform like WhatsApp before you give up & get an iPhone.

Maybe I am just too old (40), but I've never heard this topic discussed anywhere but on Ars Technica. I don't have lengthy conversations over text with friends. Out of town friends I call or zoom with. I know some of my friends have iPhones, but it's really not something I pay very close attention to.

53 and the same. I had only vaguely heard about this "bubble color" thing. Now I have an understanding of it at least - and I still could not possibly care less. Some of my friends also have Android, some have Apple phones - it's about 50:50. I have been Android since the Nexus 5 came out, currently using a cheapo Moto G Power and perfectly happy with it for <$200. Sending texts to and fro works just fine, never a problem that I know of. I just use whatever the default app for it is, simply not something I even think about, because it just works. I certainly could not possibly care less if a video sent to me a text is of slightly lower quality! That is the very definition of a "first world problem".

People get WAY too invested in phones. It's a *phone* that has some convenience computing ability. If I want to do something more than the most basic things, I own about a dozen actual computers that will do it better.

So, what type of onion do you guys recommend tying to your belts? Vidalia? Plain old yellow? Please advise ASAP!!

 

[adamsc]

Why doesn't Google just pay Apple to do it? They pay Apple like $15bil/year to keep Google as the default search engine.

Google’s poor management has damaged Android’s reputation considerably, keeping it in the “what you buy if you can’t afford a $400 iPhone” category for many buyers. Apple would want a lot of money but also an end to things like using all of their web properties to push Chrome on Safari or Firefox users, and I doubt they’d be willing to give that up.

 

[buecker]

In a corp environment I've had the "you can't use WhatsApp for business" conversation so many times now. Sorry, corp does not have a data agreement with WhatsApp/Facebook and we know they are mining the snot out of everything you send through them.

Love or Hate Meta (hate) it is what it is. In the Caribbean it's almost all WhatsApp all the time. Even US based tech businesses like HP are using WhatsApp. The convenience of WhatsApp having a virtual monopoly outweighs everything else. Keep in mind there are lots of little countries all with different services and bad pricing so when you can have one service that everyone can use for free then why not take advantage of it.

With that said my primary messaging service with close family is not WhatsApp.

 

[fyo]

Apple does need to fix messaging. Their conflation of SMS and iMessage is a problem.

For me, personally, I'm just going to say that Apple is still hijacking messages meant for me without my, or the sender's, consent. I used an iPhone for a week while my phone was getting fixed and ever since I've had messages from Apple users routed via iMessage on and off, instead of text messages. It's a completely silent fail (other than the blue bubble color denoting iMessage) and from the sender's point of view, I'm ghosting them.

It happens with multiple iPhone users (one of which is my daughter), but not all (e.g. it hasn't happened with my son yet), across multiple phones and reboots (one suggestion by Apple was to reboot the affected iPhones - which is stupid, since I cannot ask every person who has ever sent me a message "hey, do you have an iPhone? In that case, could you reboot it before sending me a text?" - and anyway doesn't work. It also assumes this only happens with people who have messaged me before, which is not a given.)

Yes, I have "deregistered my number with iMessage".

Yes, I have contacted Apple (numerous times) and had them deregister my number.

(No, the phone I used not connecting to Apple and "refreshing" the iMessage state.)

Both fixes work for a while, then stop working again.

It's *infuriating* and there's apparently nothing I can do about it.

I have absolutely no problem with Apple having their own messaging protocol. I may personally find closed messaging protocols annoying, but I still use them and will likely continue to do so. The problem is that Apple's "Messages" conflates multiple protocols (with widely varying features). It also leaks information on whether you have an iPhone or not, which may be a really minor thing, but still something I find annoying on principle.

 

[fknuckles]

For the record, my current rates on O2 UK are 2p/SMS and 55p/MMS. That’s a tariff no longer available to new customers. The tariff you can get today is 30p/SMS and 55p/MMS. These kinds of rates are not uncommon on pay as you go tariffs (in recent years the main networks have been desperate in trying to get people to pay for a monthly bundle, even on prepay, and jacked up their per-minute/per-SMS rates to punitive levels)

I have never sent an MMS. At this kind of pricing I have no confidence that anything touched by carriers won’t be subject to similar kinds of extortion.

(do networks who offer RCS charge for it like the above?)

RCS are not billed per message. They use your data connection, and will fallback to SMS/MMS as needed.

Pay as you Go is no longer a money-saving move, in almost all cases, you're better off getting a sim-only contract. You can get some as cheap as £6 a month if you are not a heavy mobile data user, and unless it's a sim you intend to stick into an IOT device that barely uses any data, it will be cheaper than trying to do pay as you go.

Mobile data is basically the *only* thing I use.

I hate talking on the phone, and I hate voicemail, because I'm significantly hearing impaired. It's the worst for me.

What I do use are mobile data, or preferentially wifi if available (and then the phone goes on Airplane Mode), Signal, and email (Protonmail ftw) for communications. I'm happy to pay for a data plan, but I have essentially zero use for SMS/MMS. 2FA? I have the TOTP keys to generate them locally or I can get an email from everyone I visit. Media? More data.

Also someone said that basically everyone is using Whatsapp and you *have* to have it. No, no I don't. I don't have Facebook, I don't have Whatsapp, I don't have GMail..

And yet, somehow, my family, friends, co-workers, government, and businesses can all interact with me just fine.

Good for you. I'm a much simpler person, I use and enjoy using whatsapp, skype, signal, Google duo/meet even Twitter DMs. Basically, I meet the people in my life wherever they are, and I don't judge people anymore about their communication preferences.

My response to you was just explaining how I experience RCS, as I had assumed you asked the question in order to learn. I didn't realise you were merely expressing your principles.

 

[pedro-pierre]

An important bit of information that will change things in the coming future, the GSMA has included RCS as the mandatory messaging system for voice-over NR. This is voice over 5G networks. So, it seems the much-expected replacement for SMS/MMS will be coming.

 

[Boskone]

It's OK, next time the wind changes direction Google will drop support for RCS in favor of...

Squirrel!

You may be on to something.

What if, as a community, we paid someone to wander through the Google messaging development area daily and do something distracting? Jingle their keys one day, put squeakers in their shoes the next, take a poll on the name of the next messaging product, etc?

 

[dignan915]

I've been wanting to give Threema a try. I had Google Play credits and decided to buy it. I allowed for family sharing so my significant other can install it. We'll give it a try.

 

[Sulla]

Given that WhatsApp is owned by Meta, an alternative would be nice. That is of interest to me. I don't really care if my non iFriends have a green or a blue texting bubble.

It's annoying when you're in a group text with both though and the incompatibility causes extra messages when someone "likes" a text: "X liked Text Y."

 

[Daniel]

Given that WhatsApp is owned by Meta, an alternative would be nice. That is of interest to me. I don't really care if my non iFriends have a green or a blue texting bubble.

It's annoying when you're in a group text with both though and the incompatibility causes extra messages when someone "likes" a text: "X liked Text Y."

I'm a google voice user, this is most definitely an issue. I have some friends that mostly seem to communicate through likes/dislikes/laughs/etc type reactions. It's like every message I send gets a pile of text back with what they did.

 

[crepuscularbrolly]

I keep hearing about this, but I have never, ever met a single person who cares what color my texts are. And until today, I never knew this was an issue. And I work in an office with 20 other people, at least 15 of which use iphones. (I use android).

I mean seriously, are there really people out there who actually give a shit if your texts are coming through imessage or SMS? Are there really people out there who are making fun of others because "their texts are green and mine is blue"?

This sounds to me like a whole bunch of people who are blowing a complete non-issue out of proportion. I am willing to bet that 99% of users couldn't give half a shit less.

I have the opposite problem: I own an iPhone and I often specifically want to send my texts as “green” texts (ie SMS), because I often change my SIM between phones and if someone tries to reply to an iMessage I’ve sent before switching phones, I won’t get the reply. Sending all messages from my iPhone as an SMS would solve the problem, but iMessage doesn’t offer that option.

Settings -> Messages -> iMessage (toggle it off)

 

[Chemical Tribe]

I keep hearing about this, but I have never, ever met a single person who cares what color my texts are. And until today, I never knew this was an issue. And I work in an office with 20 other people, at least 15 of which use iphones. (I use android).

I mean seriously, are there really people out there who actually give a shit if your texts are coming through imessage or SMS? Are there really people out there who are making fun of others because "their texts are green and mine is blue"?

This sounds to me like a whole bunch of people who are blowing a complete non-issue out of proportion. I am willing to bet that 99% of users couldn't give half a shit less.

I have the opposite problem: I own an iPhone and I often specifically want to send my texts as “green” texts (ie SMS), because I often change my SIM between phones and if someone tries to reply to an iMessage I’ve sent before switching phones, I won’t get the reply. Sending all messages from my iPhone as an SMS would solve the problem, but iMessage doesn’t offer that option.

Settings -> Messages -> iMessage (toggle it off)

When i made a new apple id when i got an iPhone 11, that option wasn't there. It was there when i used an old one. Why, who knows.

 

[Chemical Tribe]

OMG. the bullying nonsense. I actually had a 35+ year olde student tell me he disliked Apple because his friends teased him about not having an iPhone. I told him it sounded to me like the problem was his friends. He just looked at me.

People. If your friends tease you because it is slightly harder to talk to you over texts and you can't give that same shit back to them about being unlocked, paying less, or whatever your reason for being on Android is. And then you all laugh about it because it is BS. They are not your friends.

Also, being lightly mocked is not bullying. And if it is anything more than someone lightly mocking you to get you off your high horse, they are not your friend, so who the fuck cares?

Ok, this is totally yelling at kids to get off my lawn, but I was literally hunted by drunk mullet heads, because I had the audacity to yell back at them after they yelled insults and threw eggs at me (because of the way I looked). As in there were 5 of them in a car and I was by myself in a small town at 1AM. They spent 30-45 minutes looking for me. This wasn't a one time occurrence. It happened on a regular basis. I still get shit screamed at me on a fairly regular basis (because I don't look or dress normal).

Does it suck that someone says, man, all of my group texts work and everyone gets my emoji, except you, you android freak? yes! But if you can't come right back at them and say, well my android and everyone I know on android can do XYZ (X being customize your screen layout exactly how you want it, Y being able to automate all the things that iPhones still lag at, and Z being thrifty), then maybe you shouldn't be on Android, cause you have no clear idea why you are. And also that is not bullying, in the way I have understood it.

To be honest that is true about a lot of things. I grew up poor in the late 80’s. Kids were cracking on me because I wore old army/navy surplus or thrift store clothes (seriously a WWII Eisenhower jacket was plenty warm and I always thought looked cool.) and Converse all stars to school. Where they were spending $150-300 on Air Jordan’s.

The point is we were all growing. I grew 18 inches between 8th and 11 grade. My parents were both working and struggling to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table.

The best day ever was when I realized that I really didn’t care what my idiot peers thought. The second best day was when a guy at my new school thought he could bully me just because he was bigger than me. Sure he gave me a black eye. But it took him 25 minutes to fight me because I wouldn’t quit, he ripped up clothes and got a broken nose for his trouble. All because I followed the don’t start a fight, but finish it every time. Over time, they learn not to mess with me.

Being a bully is wrong. Being bullied is horrible. Don’t do it around me. But if you tell me that you are being bullied because your message bubble is green on some obnoxious idiots phone, I humbly suggest you reevaluate your priorities because that is some weaksauce right there.

If you got made fun because you wore cheap used clothes, why wouldn't those who use cheap Android phones not be made fun of? When the iPhone x came out, I saw young children using his own iPhone x at a restaurant. I was blown away parents are stupid enough to do that.

You going to tell me that child with a thousand dollar phone isn't going to make fun of the child with a $50 one?

 

[Chemical Tribe]

Do green bubble people even have opinions??? Lol. Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

Seriously though, Google should have bought what’s app when they had the chance.

You do know they tried, right?

I disagree. They offered 10 billion. Facebook offered 16. Of Google really wanted WhatsApp, they would have WhatsApp. Ostensibly a messaging platform that is number 1 in most places could have been theirs for as little as $17 billion.

They weren't worth 16, let alone 10 billion. And besides, they would have ruined it in a few years.

I agree with both your points. However I submit that the fact that they would have killed it eventually means that it was worth more.

In the circle of life for business you either develop your own strategy, you buy someone else and use theirs, or you get bought.

Google can’t do the first two very well and they are too big for option number 3.

But outside of Google, would you pay $17 billion in 201whatever for a platform that 80-85 percent of the world uses? What would the market cap of whatsapp be by itself now?

The platform isn't worth it, period, because whatsapp won't generate what facebook paid for it, ever. Unless of course facebook can via their vast marketing platform and knowing all your contacts.

 

[FoolAutonomy]

I am going to personally solve texting for Google, by getting rid of my Android device and moving over to an iPhone. I am tired of supporting a company that doesn't care about its customers' privacy, or any personal investment they may have built in the countless services Google has unceramonially cancelled over the years.

Android had a lot of potential, so it is unfortunate that Google MBA'd itself to this extent over the years, but I am not suffering for their shortsightedness any longer.

I was big into google. I had a Pixel, Google Play was my music, I used gmail pretty much exclusively (via Inbox), and was on GoogleFi. This was 2016. Now I am on iPhone and use Apple Music and am doing everything I can to de-Google myself. Well done Google!

Same. From changing its cloud storage plans to screwing with messaging and pay and being decidedly slow on addressing privacy concerns, I (mostly) abandoned the Google ecosystem.

 

[effgee]

... I think a better startegy for Google would be to treat Apple to a dose of their own medicine. Make Google searches and Gmail and Google Maps worse on iPhones and Macs and have them appear is some odd color to denote that you're having a degraded experience because Apple products are not compatible with Google. ...

Nice, loving that comedy bit there. That is a good one. You do realize 'Google pays Apple' roughly $15,000,000,000.00 per year to stay the default search engine on iOS, do you?

That bold part up there is the textbook definition of 'zero leverage'.

 

[Publius Enigma]

I keep hearing about this, but I have never, ever met a single person who cares what color my texts are. And until today, I never knew this was an issue. And I work in an office with 20 other people, at least 15 of which use iphones. (I use android).

I mean seriously, are there really people out there who actually give a shit if your texts are coming through imessage or SMS? Are there really people out there who are making fun of others because "their texts are green and mine is blue"?

This sounds to me like a whole bunch of people who are blowing a complete non-issue out of proportion. I am willing to bet that 99% of users couldn't give half a shit less.

I have the opposite problem: I own an iPhone and I often specifically want to send my texts as “green” texts (ie SMS), because I often change my SIM between phones and if someone tries to reply to an iMessage I’ve sent before switching phones, I won’t get the reply. Sending all messages from my iPhone as an SMS would solve the problem, but iMessage doesn’t offer that option.

Settings -> Messages -> iMessage (toggle it off)

Problem with that approach is that there are some people I communicate with exclusively via iMessage. Apple’s approach is either all or nothing, and automated. There’s also quite a few bugs related to threading that can cause messages to be sent via the wrong medium (for example, if I have an iCloud address associated with iMessage, and a mobile phone number not associated with iMessage, if a sender has both of those addresses stored against my contact and initiates a new message to my mobile number, iMessage will associate the mobile number with my contact, then pull up the existing iMessage thread and send it via iMessage , despite my mobile number and iMessage not being linked. Being able to directly control the medium would be useful).

 

[mrsilver]

I see a lot of dismissive comments about the color coding, but I find the green ones hard to read due to the significantly worse contrast ratio. I’m all for distinguishing SMS. I also find it overwhelmingly likely that Apple went with a poor presentation intentionally for non iMessage. Darkening that green slightly to improve readability would have been pretty darn obvious.

Why are you reading messages you've sent? Shouldn't you be reading the ones you get back?

Oh wait, this is just anti-Apple FUD, never mind. If this were Apple wanting Google to make changes to their messaging platform, you jerks would be all over it and you know it. Just get over yourselves.

Apple also intentionally degrades the quality of mms videos as well vs what every other phone sends. Try explaining that away.

Apple follows the MMS 1.3 specification, which defines a maximum video size of 600KB.

Some carriers will accept larger sizes, but not all. To ensure delivery to every carrier worldwide, Apple sticks to the MMS specification.

 

[Chemical Tribe]

This article reads more like an advertorial for Apple, than a serious analysis of the issue. Sure Google may be dreaming that Apple would ever do this, but there is a value to having a universal standards. People, around the world, still often have to fall back on SMS. Not everyone is on the same third party messaging platforms. It would be good if that standard could be updated.

And one of the big reasons, amongst several, that the universal standard is still SMS, from 1986, is because of Apple. If Apple embraced some form of RCS and came to the table with Google and the GSMA, maybe that fall back could be something a lot better than SMS, even if not up to the standards of Signal and other messaging apps.

Instead, Apple would rather use iMessage as a way to confuse their own users into thinking that iMessage "just works" and there something wrong with Android, because they really don't understand that what iMessage does is an entirely proprietary, backend Apple service, and has nothing to do with SMS. Honestly, almost no iPhone user I know understands this, they think the reason texts from Android phones look crappy on iMessage, is because something is wrong with Android phones, not because iMessage is mainly a closed system for iPhone users and purposely refuses to use RCS. At least with Signal and Whatsapp, etc., people understand that those are just separate messaging platforms.

I think a better startegy for Google would be to treat Apple to a dose of their own medicine. Make Google searches and Gmail and Google Maps worse on iPhones and Macs and have them appear is some odd color to denote that you're having a degraded experience because Apple products are not compatible with Google. Or show more and more obnoxious ads on iPhones and Macs, when using Google, Gmail, GMaps. Apple is essentially leveraging their closed ecosystem to make Android look bad, Google can play the same game.

How about returning to the Google of 2010 or so when they gave a shit about their products.

 

[weilawei]

I keep hearing about this, but I have never, ever met a single person who cares what color my texts are. And until today, I never knew this was an issue. And I work in an office with 20 other people, at least 15 of which use iphones. (I use android).

I mean seriously, are there really people out there who actually give a shit if your texts are coming through imessage or SMS? Are there really people out there who are making fun of others because "their texts are green and mine is blue"?

This sounds to me like a whole bunch of people who are blowing a complete non-issue out of proportion. I am willing to bet that 99% of users couldn't give half a shit less.

I have the opposite problem: I own an iPhone and I often specifically want to send my texts as “green” texts (ie SMS), because I often change my SIM between phones and if someone tries to reply to an iMessage I’ve sent before switching phones, I won’t get the reply. Sending all messages from my iPhone as an SMS would solve the problem, but iMessage doesn’t offer that option.

Settings -> Messages -> iMessage (toggle it off)

Problem with that approach is that there are some people I communicate with exclusively via iMessage. Apple’s approach is either all or nothing, and automated. There’s also quite a few bugs related to threading that can cause messages to be sent via the wrong medium (for example, if I have an iCloud address associated with iMessage, and a mobile phone number not associated with iMessage, if a sender has both of those addresses stored against my contact and initiates a new message to my mobile number, iMessage will associate the mobile number with my contact, then pull up the existing iMessage thread and send it via iMessage , despite my mobile number and iMessage not being linked. Being able to directly control the medium would be useful).

This is one reason I really appreciate open source. I don't frequently want to inspect/audit the source or fix something that's really driving me crazy, but it does happen from time to time.

I mean, sometimes it's a pretty trivial change.. (I will admit to being terrible about sending pull requests back to OSS projects, but it is what it is, and I also don't necessarily have time to engage in every developer's specific political process to get changes adopted if I'm fixing my own annoyance.)

 

[gijames1225]

Eh, I'm fully with Google on this one. Given how important reliable, modern text messaging is for people, they really should be willing to work with Google to make iPhones interface better with Android.

We had a terrifying scare where we thought my mother had cancer because her iPhone messages totally dropped a middle, qualifying part of a multipart message, and it was fucking terrifying. I know Apple wants scenarios like the above to convince me to buy an iPhone, but if anything it's just reinforced that Apple (like most corporations) only cares about the user experience in as much as it can make money off of them and a 'eff you attitude towards myself as long as I don't own an iPhone.

 

[Chuckstar]

I keep hearing about this, but I have never, ever met a single person who cares what color my texts are. And until today, I never knew this was an issue. And I work in an office with 20 other people, at least 15 of which use iphones. (I use android).

I mean seriously, are there really people out there who actually give a shit if your texts are coming through imessage or SMS? Are there really people out there who are making fun of others because "their texts are green and mine is blue"?

This sounds to me like a whole bunch of people who are blowing a complete non-issue out of proportion. I am willing to bet that 99% of users couldn't give half a shit less.

I have the opposite problem: I own an iPhone and I often specifically want to send my texts as “green” texts (ie SMS), because I often change my SIM between phones and if someone tries to reply to an iMessage I’ve sent before switching phones, I won’t get the reply. Sending all messages from my iPhone as an SMS would solve the problem, but iMessage doesn’t offer that option.

Settings -> Messages -> iMessage (toggle it off)

When i made a new apple id when i got an iPhone 11, that option wasn't there. It was there when i used an old one. Why, who knows.

You have to have your phone number selected as one of your addresses for Messages (in the setting right below that toggle), since turning off iMessages switches it to exclusively using SMS/MMS. Doesn’t make sense to be using SMS/MMS is you’ve told the app not to use your phone number as your address.

 

[Chuckstar]

I keep hearing about this, but I have never, ever met a single person who cares what color my texts are. And until today, I never knew this was an issue. And I work in an office with 20 other people, at least 15 of which use iphones. (I use android).

I mean seriously, are there really people out there who actually give a shit if your texts are coming through imessage or SMS? Are there really people out there who are making fun of others because "their texts are green and mine is blue"?

This sounds to me like a whole bunch of people who are blowing a complete non-issue out of proportion. I am willing to bet that 99% of users couldn't give half a shit less.

I have the opposite problem: I own an iPhone and I often specifically want to send my texts as “green” texts (ie SMS), because I often change my SIM between phones and if someone tries to reply to an iMessage I’ve sent before switching phones, I won’t get the reply. Sending all messages from my iPhone as an SMS would solve the problem, but iMessage doesn’t offer that option.

Settings -> Messages -> iMessage (toggle it off)

Problem with that approach is that there are some people I communicate with exclusively via iMessage. Apple’s approach is either all or nothing, and automated. There’s also quite a few bugs related to threading that can cause messages to be sent via the wrong medium (for example, if I have an iCloud address associated with iMessage, and a mobile phone number not associated with iMessage, if a sender has both of those addresses stored against my contact and initiates a new message to my mobile number, iMessage will associate the mobile number with my contact, then pull up the existing iMessage thread and send it via iMessage , despite my mobile number and iMessage not being linked. Being able to directly control the medium would be useful).

This is one reason I really appreciate open source. I don't frequently want to inspect/audit the source or fix something that's really driving me crazy, but it does happen from time to time.

I mean, sometimes it's a pretty trivial change.. (I will admit to being terrible about sending pull requests back to OSS projects, but it is what it is, and I also don't necessarily have time to engage in every developer's specific political process to get changes adopted if I'm fixing my own annoyance.)

“I don’t always audit OSS source, but when I do, I drink Dos XX.”

 

[crepuscularbrolly]

I keep hearing about this, but I have never, ever met a single person who cares what color my texts are. And until today, I never knew this was an issue. And I work in an office with 20 other people, at least 15 of which use iphones. (I use android).

I mean seriously, are there really people out there who actually give a shit if your texts are coming through imessage or SMS? Are there really people out there who are making fun of others because "their texts are green and mine is blue"?

This sounds to me like a whole bunch of people who are blowing a complete non-issue out of proportion. I am willing to bet that 99% of users couldn't give half a shit less.

I have the opposite problem: I own an iPhone and I often specifically want to send my texts as “green” texts (ie SMS), because I often change my SIM between phones and if someone tries to reply to an iMessage I’ve sent before switching phones, I won’t get the reply. Sending all messages from my iPhone as an SMS would solve the problem, but iMessage doesn’t offer that option.

Settings -> Messages -> iMessage (toggle it off)

Problem with that approach is that there are some people I communicate with exclusively via iMessage. Apple’s approach is either all or nothing, and automated. There’s also quite a few bugs related to threading that can cause messages to be sent via the wrong medium (for example, if I have an iCloud address associated with iMessage, and a mobile phone number not associated with iMessage, if a sender has both of those addresses stored against my contact and initiates a new message to my mobile number, iMessage will associate the mobile number with my contact, then pull up the existing iMessage thread and send it via iMessage , despite my mobile number and iMessage not being linked. Being able to directly control the medium would be useful).

Switch to Android.

I mean, you already have contacts that you sometimes use iMessage with and sometimes use plain SMS with depending on whether you switch SIMs. You want a per-message manual setting in the messaging app to switch between iMessage and SMS. Good luck with that.

Or, switch to Signal/WhatsApp/WeChat/Kakao/etc: that's OS-independent (phone, tablet, PC).

My friends in another country have been on the same WeChat group for literal years.

ETA On iOS, Settings→Messages→ Send & Receive (under "iMessage"): You can select/deselect phone numbers and Apple IDs which are attached to iMessage. You can decide which phone number or Apple ID to start new conversations with.

You really didn't look at the Settings, did you?

 

[loki679]

Just to nitpick

Google's head of messaging also quit last month, so there's no telling what the future of Google messaging holds until someone takes the reigns.

This should be 'takes the reins'.

 

[gijames1225]

I keep hearing about this, but I have never, ever met a single person who cares what color my texts are. And until today, I never knew this was an issue. And I work in an office with 20 other people, at least 15 of which use iphones. (I use android).

I mean seriously, are there really people out there who actually give a shit if your texts are coming through imessage or SMS? Are there really people out there who are making fun of others because "their texts are green and mine is blue"?

This sounds to me like a whole bunch of people who are blowing a complete non-issue out of proportion. I am willing to bet that 99% of users couldn't give half a shit less.

I have the opposite problem: I own an iPhone and I often specifically want to send my texts as “green” texts (ie SMS), because I often change my SIM between phones and if someone tries to reply to an iMessage I’ve sent before switching phones, I won’t get the reply. Sending all messages from my iPhone as an SMS would solve the problem, but iMessage doesn’t offer that option.

Settings -> Messages -> iMessage (toggle it off)

Problem with that approach is that there are some people I communicate with exclusively via iMessage. Apple’s approach is either all or nothing, and automated. There’s also quite a few bugs related to threading that can cause messages to be sent via the wrong medium (for example, if I have an iCloud address associated with iMessage, and a mobile phone number not associated with iMessage, if a sender has both of those addresses stored against my contact and initiates a new message to my mobile number, iMessage will associate the mobile number with my contact, then pull up the existing iMessage thread and send it via iMessage , despite my mobile number and iMessage not being linked. Being able to directly control the medium would be useful).

Switch to Android.

That's a philosophical victory, but not a practical one. Sure, you'll have a great texting experience with Android users, but then be in the same boat but with iMessage users. You basically have to choose who you want the superior messaging experience with, but it can't be both platforms until Apple can be convinced to open up iMessages or improve it to work better with Android.

 

[weilawei]

I keep hearing about this, but I have never, ever met a single person who cares what color my texts are. And until today, I never knew this was an issue. And I work in an office with 20 other people, at least 15 of which use iphones. (I use android).

I mean seriously, are there really people out there who actually give a shit if your texts are coming through imessage or SMS? Are there really people out there who are making fun of others because "their texts are green and mine is blue"?

This sounds to me like a whole bunch of people who are blowing a complete non-issue out of proportion. I am willing to bet that 99% of users couldn't give half a shit less.

I have the opposite problem: I own an iPhone and I often specifically want to send my texts as “green” texts (ie SMS), because I often change my SIM between phones and if someone tries to reply to an iMessage I’ve sent before switching phones, I won’t get the reply. Sending all messages from my iPhone as an SMS would solve the problem, but iMessage doesn’t offer that option.

Settings -> Messages -> iMessage (toggle it off)

Problem with that approach is that there are some people I communicate with exclusively via iMessage. Apple’s approach is either all or nothing, and automated. There’s also quite a few bugs related to threading that can cause messages to be sent via the wrong medium (for example, if I have an iCloud address associated with iMessage, and a mobile phone number not associated with iMessage, if a sender has both of those addresses stored against my contact and initiates a new message to my mobile number, iMessage will associate the mobile number with my contact, then pull up the existing iMessage thread and send it via iMessage , despite my mobile number and iMessage not being linked. Being able to directly control the medium would be useful).

This is one reason I really appreciate open source. I don't frequently want to inspect/audit the source or fix something that's really driving me crazy, but it does happen from time to time.

I mean, sometimes it's a pretty trivial change.. (I will admit to being terrible about sending pull requests back to OSS projects, but it is what it is, and I also don't necessarily have time to engage in every developer's specific political process to get changes adopted if I'm fixing my own annoyance.)

“I don’t always audit OSS source, but when I do, I drink Dos XX.”

Well played

I firmly admired the TempleOS guy, for working directly with his machine as much as possible. Perhaps it's not practical for everyone's life, but there's a Platonic ideal in there somewhere.

 

[Chemical Tribe]

You have to have your phone number selected as one of your addresses for Messages (in the setting right below that toggle), since turning off iMessages switches it to exclusively using SMS/MMS. Doesn’t make sense to be using SMS/MMS is you’ve told the app not to use your phone number as your address.

But that's just it - I had no toggle. Every tutorial about this setting was just absent for me.

 

[seelive]

If only Google could include a single messaging app preinstalled on all their phones so that they could organically grow their user base over time, and users could "hang out" with each other, if you will...

 

[nvfx]

If google had stuck with hangouts they would have been WhatsApp big

100%. Everyone and their mother used Hangouts because it was the lineal descendant of GChat (or whatever the original chat client in Gmail was called). I even remember having a 10-person video chat on Hangouts back in 2011 or so that worked surprisingly well.

And now they killed it for…reasons.

The main problem with Hangouts was that Google didn't force it upon OEMs as the default messaging app (as they should have), so most OEMs shipped the old "Messages" SMS app from AOSP as the default messaging app (which they could customize to match their own theme and icon set). Some OEMs even tried to push their own messaging platforms (for example Samsung ChatON), because of course they did.

After Hangouts predictably failed to catch on, Google made the mistake of blaming the software (which quite honestly was fine) instead of blaming the lack of critical mass (which was the real problem) and created several new chat apps attempting to "get it right", before realising their mistake and creating a generic-named app using a (mostly) generic protocol that they could comfortably force on OEMs without the OEMs complaining too much and without causing any raised eyebrows on antitrust regulators. The problem is that all the above cost Google 10 years of iMessage dominance in the US.

 

[Chemical Tribe]

I see a lot of dismissive comments about the color coding, but I find the green ones hard to read due to the significantly worse contrast ratio. I’m all for distinguishing SMS. I also find it overwhelmingly likely that Apple went with a poor presentation intentionally for non iMessage. Darkening that green slightly to improve readability would have been pretty darn obvious.

Why are you reading messages you've sent? Shouldn't you be reading the ones you get back?

Oh wait, this is just anti-Apple FUD, never mind. If this were Apple wanting Google to make changes to their messaging platform, you jerks would be all over it and you know it. Just get over yourselves.

Apple also intentionally degrades the quality of mms videos as well vs what every other phone sends. Try explaining that away.

Apple follows the MMS 1.3 specification, which defines a maximum video size of 600KB.

Some carriers will accept larger sizes, but not all. To ensure delivery to every carrier worldwide, Apple sticks to the MMS specification.

It's not even about file size.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/commen ... ch_higher/

 

[tigas]

If google had stuck with hangouts they would have been WhatsApp big

Just XMPP. If they had just stuck with the fucking standard and then made a good client it would be bigger than WhatsApp.

Once upon a time I had my company Cisco Jabber integrated with Google Talk.

Yeah. The thing they killed to introduce Hangouts. I haven’t used a Google chat service since they killed Talk.

Brings me to the idea for Apple. Just fucking make an integration plugin for this, display the messages in a different color and then put up a banner about how it’s insecure and iMessage is better.

Can't silo, monetize and wall-off XMPP.
Even Facebook Messenger started as XMPP, and back in 2011 the Nokia N9 had a "Messages" app that supported SMS, and Gtalk/FBMessenger through XMPP as first-class citizens.
Then the XMPP gateways were closed.
Use the official app or get lost.
Oh, we don't make an official app for your platform? Sucks to be you.