People with iPhones use iMessage for texting which turns their bubbles blue (green for any other type of phone) and with iMessage there are a whole slew of features that people enjoy like chat bubbles to show active typing, read receipts, sending over Wi-Fi, etc. Often there's one member of a group chat with an Android who can't take advantage of those features and it limits the group chat features since they use SMS/MMS/RCS protocol instead. Here's an article about it:
Android to iPhone uses SMS or MMS: bland, boring, and unsecure
Why you ask, Apple won't let anyone else use the iMessage protocol and also won't add RCS to their phones so they just use a protocol from the 90s instead
It's very common here in the states actually. Not really by choice though. Around the time many messaging apps were taking off iMessage kinda established itself as "the" way to do stuff like group chats. I hear in the rest of the world apps like Whatsapp are way more common but they're more of a niche thing here overall
That's so weird to hear, but I guess it makes sense. I think I've heard people say that across the pond you never really had to pay for texts? Internet-based messengers really took off on phones because you'd have to pay 10p per text back in the day!
Yeah back before most plans did "unlimited" data, many of the deals were for unlimited texts. I remember texts costing about that much at first then we moved my family to an unlimited texting plan and never thought much about it again
I think that was the case here too, but even with limited data you can send pictures, videos, and attachments as well as have group chats, whereas SMS never evolved beyond text (and MMS probably still costs 50p a message to this day!)
So basically the expected experience of literally any non sms/mms messaging protocol? But somehow designed to cause weird elitism? We had those features when we would hop onto whatever popular messenger on the pc after elementary school... or the coloured translucent all in one apple computer before it was cool to have apple products.
To be truthful the FCC should have forced apple to move off iMessages. Especially due to them registering numbers which they shouldn't have control over. Friend got a new number recently when they changed providers, the new number of course didn't work for any messages that came from iPhones because it was previously used by an Apple user.
So essentially someone buys a service from Company A. Puts it in their hardware from Company B, yet company C is dictating their ability to recieve messages. The user did this ~June 15th, didnt figure out iPhones weren't able to send her messages to June 20th. So her birthday was June 18th, the same day as fathers day. Most plans almost fell through because her dads iPhone just lies and says the iMessage is read immediately.
There really should just be a class action lawsuit against Apple that requires them to stop hijacking services from users that are not their customers.
Sidenote: Apple's first solution they provide for this is to move your sim card to one of their products to deregister from their services. That is so fucking disgusting to me. Thankfully the site now has a "No longer have your old device option" to de-register from the servoce you never signed up for... on a product you never owned.
As an ex apple support, this scheme is an absolute bullshit. You cannot imagine how many times it doesn't even work, and when you contact your seniors because of it, nobody knows why and we had to tell customers to just try in a few days (for the X number of times already). I was never a huge fan of apple, but after working for them, I just physically won't ever be able to buy their products.