Or admonishing us for not reading the article, because we've misunderstood it based on the title.
After a two sentence paragraph expressing how the green/blue technical differentiation has become a social one, it then asks the question "Why is green worse than blue?" The next line: "The answer is color contrast."
What could they have realistically done to cut to the chase sooner in a meaningful way? The only real thing is ditching those two context building sentences. But it's two short sentences, providing relevant context.
Doesn't really feel like a valid criticism IMO.
Subliminal messaging work better than poor contrast.
This isn’t some great conspiracy.
I wonder if the contrast has changed over the years. It could be a worse green today than originally.
The original iPhone had a resolution of 320x480 with much worse color reproduction.
I think this is a case of learned significance, for which you know that a green bubble means a message sent via SMS rather than the "smarter" message. Added to the fact the blue is often used by tech companies due to its fresh and modern connotation, you have the full picture on why your brain prefers the blue to the green message.
That being said, I think Apple should have been more careful about making their message bubble pass contrast tests. But I doubt there was an "evil designer" carefully planning to make that bubble with lower contrast on purpose to make you dislike it.
They have every reason to make “green bubbles” look toxic and off putting, because unencrypted SMS is genuinely hazardous.
When I text other android users, my messages are encrypted. When I text an iPhone, they are not.
Stop supporting closed protocols and bad-faith actors.
Once 99% of phones and carriers support RCS then maybe you could make this argument, but it won’t be for several years.
If it's the goal to implicate danger, this strikes me as a weird colour choice for dangerous messages, to be honest.
This whole "thing" around "bad" green vs blue message bubbles appears a bit, for the lack of a better word, insane to me as a non-american. The bubbles are fine. IMO, the problem is very obviously that kids can be cruel jerks and "not having an iPhone" is a social stigma for US teenagers, just like "not having a flashy cell phone with Bluetooth and MMS" was 15 years ago. Changing the colour will not fix this stigma, there still isn't an Apple on the back of the Android phones.
Low contrast UI elements are the calling card of Alan Dye’s design team. The iMessage and SMS contrast ratio doesn’t rank because there are so many other UI issues that have crept in from this team over the years. If the blue provides a slightly better contrast ratio, it is bound to be incidental and if I were a betting man, I would bet that someone actually likes the green used for SMS.
This entire message style by the way is a direct descendant of iChat AV where you could actually choose your message color. When Apple developed SMS and then iMessageS for iPhones, they chose basically iChat’s design, and picked their favorite bubble colors and what we have today evolved from that.
E.g.: [1] https://osxdaily.com/2011/02/14/prevent-annoying-im-text-sty...
(note the drop-down menu with “Lime” selected, you can Google around for other colors).
This is just like saying the colored HTTPS symbol in the browser toolbar on websites that support SSL was designed to make websites without SSL look uncool.
Most US carriers have rolled it out by now (or can be completely circumvented by using Android Messages app) and the green bubble teasing seems like a USA specific phenomena.
Anyhow, so what you mean to say, is that it's not about security (because it's present and accessible), but it's about appearances. And worst, the platform perpetuating the the appearances is not making any moves to secure it's messaging to non-Apple devices. Unacceptable.
The lighter greyish green gives off a lower standard, almost as if the Android user was a guest user or in free trial mode.
Some product owner probably wanted the iMessage enabled texter to "pop" and the designers usually take that and roll with it usually through some combination of boldening one, and deemphasizing the other to give the overall desired effect. It's a good call out for them to improve the color contrast, but you can adjust the contrast yourself through the accessibility options.
I've never ever heard anyone care about, discuss, or even mention chat bubble color. All of this sounds like something that only US American teens and kids would react to, like they judge people by their skin color or what kind of clothes they're wearing.
The footnote is a link to a WSJ article that doesn’t back up that sentence at all, i.e. makes no claim that the issue is most prevalent in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/eu-digital-markets-act...
I know that iPhone-using teens don't care about this in SoCal, the virtue signalling capital of the world. Their group chats with friends are all green, so if anything's "gross" it's the blue bubbles of their parental conversations.
In the meantime, RCS is missing really basic capabilities. For example, RCS encryption only works for 1:1 conversations, so things like family chats are not private. Even Android publications are asking if RCS is too little, too late.
https://www.androidpolice.com/android-iphone-rcs-give-up-mes...
Why is this even an issue?!?
EDIT: to clarify here, the author does explain his point about the color and the contrast of the text. He may have a point there but IMO, the main issue was that it’s not messages. The thing I should have added is that back when it was implemented people had to pay real money per message to send as a text message. That means everyone in the group had to feel uncomfortable sending frivolous messages when it costs someone money. I think that is the real reason for the bifurcation and not the color choice.
Given their attention to detail in design (see the rabbithole of their Human Interface Guidelines - https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...), I agree with the author in that this was an intentional design choice that Apple made.
I personally am not convinced by the theory that Apple is doing this deliberately (though it doesn't sound impossible to me either!) but either way it's something they should change.
Low contrast is now "gross." Yikes!
Edit: Haha thx for the downvotes but the article is still lying with phony made-up images.
See a few posts above where someone did the hard work of taking real screenshots instead of the totally bullshit fictional ones the author has in the article.
You're misunderstanding the order of events here. "I don't talk to green bubbles" has been a thing for at least five years now, which Google has very recently used in an ad campaign.
Almost always as a joke. And if you search HN, nearly all conversations about this PR-manufactured "green bubbles" outrage have happened since the launch of Google's campaign.
The bubbles for everyone else (the people you are talking to) are always all the same color: dark grey.
As opposed to iMessage, but certainly not as opposed to SMS which is what RCS would actually be replacing on the iPhone. Apple would rather have EVERY conversation with an android user unencrypted rather than work towards a solution.
RCS is not a slam dunk. Juniper Research says RCS-capable subscribers represent less than 13% of global mobile subscribers in 2022. (They project that that will double to 40% by 2026, FWIW.)
End-to-encryption is not part of the RCS standard, but is instead a Google-proprietary layer on top of that. I assume that Apple can't seriously consider adopting RCS until that omission is fixed. It would be crazy for Apple to create a Google dependency for something as critical as messaging, especially given Google's long history of failures in this area.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Their historical position has hurt their own customers, android users, and the standardization process itself. RCS (or a different standard) would be in a completely different place if Apple in their US market leadership position had made an effort.
They could open the iMessage spec, they could publish an iMessage app for Android, or they could just contribute in good faith to the standardization process. Their hostility to this particular standardization process (I don't contest that Apple is happy to support many standards efforts, such as USB) is driven by profit to the detriment of pretty much everyone else.
In Western Europe, South America and Asia it's mostly just some specific app (WhatsApp for example, or Signal, or WeChat or LINE) and as a fallback SMS. And if SMS turns from one colour bubble to another colour it doesn't really do anything for users on either end. This deep integration with colours and status symbols does remain in specific areas like middle school where it is still seen as important to try to project wealth.
1. In the dating scene, I have heard women remark that it was a red flag (Android users are stereotypically poor... despite a large number of techies using Android)
2. A manager at my old company was advised to get an iphone for communication with VCs. One of our old leaders had heard commentary from a VC at one point about the text message colors.
This is a red flag against the women in question, not the Android user. That attitude/behaviour is a great indicator of a gold digger. You'd be dodging a bullet by avoiding these women.
The only other people that share that attitude are teenagers. So if you go along with this horseshit and buy an iPhone just to feel more comfortable dating, you're courting women with the maturity and intelligence of the average teenager.
I haven't lived in a country where text bubbles used to be a thing, but I noticed this. People, even people who are smart and kind in other aspects, still cling to the easiest social cues. Doesn't matter if you wear a Margiela t-shirt or what you drive; your tinder date or a person who you just met in a bar will look at your phone and take notice. Personally, I was quite happy with Samsung flagship phones, and then not less happy with pretty cheap Xiaomi ones — they literally do anything I want in a phone. But after getting frustrated with how people read social cues, I moved back to iPhones and simply got myself the most expensive one, just for the sake of being easier to read for other people.
Obviously, it would be nice to be so laidback and independent as to not care what other people care about your wealth, but sadly, I'm not on that level yet.
I use an iPhone. Not for any philosophical reason. I tried switching to android 3 times over the years since the first iPhone came out. Same plan, same provider, grandfathered in, same house, same spot. Each android phone did not get the same level of cell service in my house as the iPhone. I have side gigs I do contracting for, I have had cases of missing calls where the androids have literally cost me $100's of dollars, phone didn't ring... just a voicemail notification showing up hours later.
After the 3rd attempt, last being a nexus 5, I gave up. I'm sorry but I draw a line when a device messes with my income regardless of my ideological stance on open source and not having a windows device or even an Apple laptop in the house for the last 13 years.
With that said the Pixel 7 Pro looks nice, and I would love to give it a try but I'll only do that if I have it on a separate dedicated line to try out besides my main one that have had for 20 years. Not sure it's worth the effort at this point.
This doesn’t match my experience. Almost everyone I work with has an iPhone.
Anyway, having a good income isn’t the whole story. It’s probably also about willingness to conform to subtle, arbitrary social norms. Plenty of women are more attracted to a guy who dresses well, despite the fact that plenty of techies wear free hoodies. I think that’s a better analogy.
This doesn't seem very different from a Director of Sales telling the salespeople to upgrade their wardrobe.
Image is important in business. Some people may be uncomfortable with that, but it's a fact. Companies, and people, spend trillions of dollars a year to project an image.
It just happens that blue text bubbles are more in style than green text bubbles.
But Google fell into the same trap that all large companies do: If you can't innovate, litigate.
Are the kids wrong?
When I look at my app’s stats, Android users are worse in every way.
More expensive to develop for, pay less or none at all, and their halo effect is sometimes negative: they might word-of-mouth my app to more Android users instead of more iOS users.
As iOS developer i disagree, You can develop android app on any platform that support JDK you pay a one-time registration fee of €25, Google Play is faster at approving apps (anecdotal evidence from working on team that support both iOS and Android)
iOS apps have to be compiled on recent Mac with latest version of macOS, you pay a yearly fee of €100 and AppStore review process is more in-dept especially for new apps
Maybe because there is always a free alternative that is better than yours.
Whereas iOS users only has the App Store, and if they don’t pay they don’t get app.
> pay less or none at all
Maybe just make the app paid only?
And sms group chats? I only know about sms group chats from US posters.
You can just assume everyone has Whatsapp here, and just message them over that.
Yea but that's a problem too.
Trusting your private conversations to ~Facebook~ Meta is also a signal.
Surely it's not middle school when people try to project wealth the most.. kids care more about who has an iPhone than adults but adults project wealth _a lot_ more than kids overall: fancy cars, homes, holidays etc. More expensive things are also nicer than their cheaper counterparts but I think most people would be lying if they don't say having access to them also gives them some status boost, if only internally. Can't turn off the monkey in the head easily.
Yes, thats exactly whats going on in the US as well
(and yes, we know that Google has recently adopted some other open source messaging standard that now Apple hasn't.)
The debate is that one where I am forced to reconcile whether I am too far removed from popular culture to see how this is a real issue versus accepting that the issue is entirely contrived.
They have to be very, very subtle, and ride the fine line between effectiveness and outrage, never going too much on a side or the other. The best and most enduring conspiration theories have originated from such deliberate and surgical manipulations. The goal they are after: most people will unknowingly abide and be manipulated, while the minority will go nuts proclaiming they know the truth.
Welcome to propaganda 101, aka destructive marketing.
“Gross”: #7EC170
Real from the bottom of the message reel: #65C466
Real from the top: #73E173
No issues with contrast in either case. Also keep in mind that those color hexes will slightly vary depending on where exactly you decide to pick since bubbles are filled with gradients.
Not sure where author gets his bubble from but in real life they look as “good” bubbles at the bottom of the screen that makes me think the article itself is gross.
It's kids being kids and seems like an exclusively US thing.
iMessage shades the bubbles depending on position, and shows both the blue and green bubbles as darker at the bottom of the screen, and lighter at the top.
A side-by-side screenshot of iOS 7, when this design was introduced:
https://i.insider.com/5df902c5fd9db27769749a5f?width=1300&fo...
The colors of both blue and green messages fade as they scroll up. Looking at my phone right now, the lighter contrast the author seems to be calling out is only shown on a message that is scrolled up. This is the same with blue imessage bubbles, they also fade and have lower contrast when scrolled up.
iOS 4, green Aqua-ish bubbles with black text: https://d2bs8hqp6qvsw6.cloudfront.net/article/images/750x750...
iOS 5, introducing blue iMessage bubbles (still good contrast in both colors): https://images.anandtech.com/doci/4956/IMG_0907.PNG
The change in contrast came with Ive's "flat" iOS 7:
https://i.insider.com/5df902c5fd9db27769749a5f?width=1300&fo...
https://www.oreilly.com/api/v2/epubs/9780133016529/files/gra...
Any photo, video, or reaction gif that people send will be compressed down a couple of pixels and replies will often be out of chronological order.
(US currency is typically associated with the color green in a way that probably doesn't apply elsewhere in the world. Also, the actual color of green on US paper currency is quite different from the green bubbles... but I digress.)
- Contrast of your iPhone: 2.21:1 (#35c759)
- Contrast that's "poor": 2.17:1 (#65c466)
- Contrast that's "good": 2.93:1 (#3bac3c)
- Contrast of the blue: 3.95:1 (#367bf5)
Based on this I would say that the Contrast of your green and the "gross" one from the article are actually pretty close, both being very far from the contrast that blue provides.
Not even the good green from the article does match the contrast of the blue. They are being lenient I'd say, not misleading.
About 99% of the SMS I get is bots. The vast majority was spam (making me wish I could disable SMS altogether), then some alerts (e.g from my bank) and 2SV codes.
The other 1% were delivery people.
Exactly 0.0% were people in my contacts.
But on the other hand, it assumes an unsubstantiated motive for why it is as it is. I’ve worked with designers a bunch, and they have all kinds of reasons for why they choose as they do. I would not put this past apple at all. But given there’s no quotes from the original designers, I’d go with “Do no attribute to malice that which you can attribute to incompetence.”
IMO this is only good advice there's no obvious motive for malice.
When big corporations are involved, cynicism is absolutely warranted.
From Itune and podcast that always try to sell me something instead of just letting me use my library to mail or safari to iCloud.
Seems to me they are good at pushing the boundaries in hardware and integration, but the software make me run in the other direction.
Is there value in their software?
If you wanted to know about events and didn't have an iPhone, you needed to check your email or hear about it second hand. No one wanted to deal with broken MMS, formatting, etc, so that's how things were handled.
Some folks with Android phones were annoyed, but the official stance is that your email should be the place you check for this stuff anyways.
(I think the current one is perfect for 1:1 conversations .. Multiple people is more of an issue visually)
I often get people trying to send me videos or files via SMS (I have an Android, and I guess it normally works for them when sending to other Apple users).
(I say adults, because I often hear kids use it as a status symbol or way to exclude other kids from group messages. I will have to ask the kids I work with what they think about message color bubbles.)
But in this context the thing that's harder on the eyes is the bubble itself. So the lighter one is easier for me. Although I'd rather see no bubbles at all.
I don't think that's true for the reasons you put up.
Our eyes are specialized to distinct more shades of green from each other than with other colors. That's a useful evolutionary feature when you are an animal and have to hunt in the wild.
For humans that leads to the point that we're rather good in picking "unnatural" shades of green (gooish ones and self-emitting shades of green).
As an adult of course the green/blue bubbles simply don't matter, we grow up and realise that, but it certainly is a significant issue if it's affecting young peoples lives.
So I'd say it's somewhere inbetween what you descibe, perhaps a bit contrived, but also could have a significant impact on some people.
Side note - I have heard of people saying they won't date green or blue bubble people, but of course if someone takes that point of view as an adult then it's a good indicator to show how they think.
> As an adult of course the green/blue bubbles simply don't matter
I disagree that the green/blue bubbles simply don't matter as an adult. I've had friend groups not include me in group messages because of it. Some have gotten visibly mad at me for having green bubbles and "breaking their chat". There is certain functionality that iPhones don't support in MMS chats that Android phones do (like adding a new member to the group chat).
It does indicate how people think when they buy into the stigma, but also I think it's a general lack of understanding around why Apple keeps iMessage so tightly coupled to its ecosystem and hardware. And many people aren't interested in gaining that understanding.
Social status is very important to many adults, and blue bubbles have become a way to display that social status.
But how many times, really?
It's like the missing iPhone headphone jack. The press and bloggers hammered away at it for years, making sure it was an ongoing meme in all coverage, but... do people really care? Some people, sure.. but enough for the coverage?
Same with bubbles.
It gets to the point in the second paragraph: the green bubbles have bad contrast. It mentions the design of the green bubbles rank as "very poor" by accessibility standards.
That's why it matters.
As for negative effects on kids. There’s more than just phones. Clothes, cars, vacations, social media posts, tutoring, sports. Maybe we should put everyone in uniforms, don’t allow kids drive to school, ban sports, and forbid them from talking about their vacations. And everyone was equal.
I'm not sure how easy that would be - 'Apple will make you more popular if you use an iPhone instead of Android!'...'No no, that's bad, you don't want that, don't buy an iPhone!'
coincidentally i think the nexus 5 was also my 3rd and final android. i actually really liked that phone. then i took an international flight and after landing it was suddenly bricked. wouldn’t turn on at all. so strange.
Imagine explaining to investors in your VC - "You know that XYZ company that just IPO'd for several billion dollars? Yeah I passed on their series A because the founder didn't have an iPhone despite the business itself being really solid". If I was an investor in that VC I'd sue the partners into the ground over such trivial bullshit.
Some topics can be deal breakers, you don't have to marry the first VC you talk to, or court them all.
Seems like premature analysis which would be better and easier done after more conversation rather than prejudging half the population.
If she does not need to deal with people who might have a burner number, she would be stupid to deal with people who might have a burner number
You're on HN. Half of us use Android.
Do you think the bubbles cause bullying?
I'd imagine the bubbles are just an excuse, which would immediately be replaced with something else in their absence.
However on a grey scale test image I can lose the bottom 1/3rd of the range by going too dark. Maybe the brightness cap is to save battery.
In the USA we had opposite plans during this time. Unlimited talk/text, but strict data caps.
At least where I live, 4G got deployed on the low bands freed up by the digital TV switchover and hence has the best reception in remote areas.
Usually, if you don't have data for signal (as opposed to run out of data in your plan) reasons, then you don't have signal at all, even for SMS, either...
Some of Europe has very effective telecom infrastructure, but that's far from universal.
Edit: power came from physical strenght, attractiveness and sports proficiency. Very much an ancient greek ideal, lol.
Bullying is about power. Bullying can be about money when you don't normalize the population for money. Nowadays you would need uniforms and school provided phones, I suppose. Never in America.
Like you said, it’s about arbitrary norms, but we make assumptions about others all the time based on which norms we follow. An analogy from a different angle is that texting your Tinder match from an Android phone is a bit like applying for a tech job with a @hotmail.com email address.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
If the Apple's own messages were the same color as SMS or other avenues and Apple made a best faith effort to make sure messages worked, then there would be one less avenue of bullying.
Do you think the bubbles cause bullying?
Yep. Its status and a lot of bullying comes from the world reaffirming your status over others.
I'd imagine the bubbles are just an excuse, which would immediately be replaced with something else in their absence.
Maybe, but it wouldn't be Apple's fault.
I hope you're kidding.
It's kinda funny but I've had even Apple Watch owners thinking that I wear an Apple Watch even though it's an Amazfit GTS 2 mini. It's weird, it hardly looks like one. The one button is much smaller than the Apple's crown and it's smack bang in the middle. It's also a much smaller watch.
/s, ... but I start thinking that's why Galaxy Flip sold well than I expected.
I'd love to write an article, but currently have no platform (server, site, blog), time and physical power to do so, sadly.
I would propose full-width scalable interface with basic formatting (like Telegram has), without wasted space... but it has to be drawn, words can't show. (
For example, on your average phone you have 3-4 short messages and TONS of empty space around. You don't have the whole line of conversation before your eyes, you have ridiculous limits to text width and height, etc.etc. which makes it irritating to read and write something longer than "Hi", forcing you to write very short messages. (I won't go deep into this, to not to be instantly labeled a conspiracy theorist, but it has enormous psychological impact, not just UX).
I think the white space is awesome .. It helps show the conversational nature of the messages .. I personally do not want long SMS messages .. If the conversation is long, then I typical switch over to audio as it is much more efficient .. Additionally, I don't want to type that much without a keyboard
I guess I also look at is "pick the right tool for the job" .. If you want a long convo, use e-mail .. I mean it has called SHORT messaging service from the jump .. I guess I want my mobile convos to be more back and forth and not structured more formally .. Again, I see this all as preference
Bluetooth headphones just aren't very good, and we've all gotten in the habit of buying a new pair every few years because they either break, get lost, are unsupported, or have bad batteries.
I previously had the same pair of IEMs for almost a decade that had better sound quality, replaceable cables and eartips, and didn't ever run out of battery. Never did I complain about the cables being annoying or in the way, and never did I complain about the presence of the headphone jack, or the Bluetooth chip onboard.
Removing headphone jacks was a horrible misstep in my opinion and we're stuck with the path dependency it's created now. It's probably not long before we have laptops that omit 3.5mm audio jacks as well.
Very otherwise upstanding people will absolutely talk behind people’s back about that person’s green bubble pollution.
People go on to mock the sales pitches android users use since everyone’s heard them ad nauseam for a decade
They are generally making deep assumptions about people’s decision making process if they have a choice in phone model, and making conclusions about that person’s socioeconomic class if they don’t have a choice in phone model
And it all ends with a laugh about how most android users live their life without knowing this is happening, but that reinforces the perception of a lack of self awareness and inability to pick up social cues
“mimicking robot but I love how much controllll I have over my phoooone”
“I dont want to be around anyone that cares about superficial things anyway” bro its everyone
Featuring an iPhone increased the number of likes received by 82%. Featuring a Samsung increased the number of likes by 20%. That means if you display a Samsung instead of an iPhone in your profile, you will get 34% less likes
Other phone brands did even worse. If your dating profile displays a Oneplus phone, you will get 55% less likes than an identical profile featuring an iPhone
https://www.moneysupermarket.com/mobile-phones/features/mobi...
Two people in the pub, I didn't know them well, but it comes up. What's interesting actually is the green bubble was not an issue for hook-ups, but it was an issue for long-term dating. I am talking about two people I've chatted to in a pub about this, and everyone else as well, so take it with a grain of salt.
Bring it up next time your in the pub! See for yourself.
Of course Apple does not need to care what I think, as I am not likely to buy their products anyway.
Convenience and security, too.
I have 3 daughters and 1 son.
Also, I think that poverty is actually more correlated to stupidity and rudeness. I've read that stress can literally make your brain shrink from the excess of cortisol. Rich people are generally labeled with undesirable properties, which (at least in my case) often comes from a personal bias - it feels unfair to watch someone else have everything I want, so at least they're a bad person and I'm not, so I got that going for me, which is nice.
---
To sidetrack a little bit:
> That's a very stupid criteria.
This is completely redundant - your point would be perfectly conveyed without this sentence. HN guidelines phrase it this way:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."this is indicative of someone with poor judgement AT MOST.
In a U.S. court of law Apple has stood up to authority and pointed out they can't provide the messages requested as they're locked even to Apple. Facebook on the other hand has acquiesced to U.S. law enforcement. That tells me that even if Facebook has secured end-to-end messaging, which I don't think they've ever claimed, they have backdoors.
I wish Signal would be more popular, but it's just not. I can't really ask new people I meet to communicate over Signal because it's a burden to get others to install some new application.
This is a common excuse I hear in college to not use FB messenger or Whatsapp. But those same people usually have no issues using Instagram DMs. For most people, it's just a cover story to mask the real reason: Facebook messenger and whatsapp are uncool in the US
Nonetheless, it is a self-made problem in the US, which wouldn’t even make sense in the EU because we don’t have such a high percentage of apple devices.
Completely false. I have multiple group chats in Messenger. The people who “don’t trust Zuckerberg” enough to not use his messaging products are a tiny minority of people in the US.
Lets do some speculation to firm up the idea. 55% of US users have an android, 45 an iphone and our overall probability of talking to someone who already has a girlfriend is on the overall pretty high say 50% with half of those having a second phone and 80% of those being cheap androids.
The overall percentages of users using each platform is actual the rest is speculation. I have actually probably WAY overestimated the numbers to prove that the strongest argument is basically still bad.
Take 1000 suitors. 500 are cheating bastards. Your chance are 50/50. You apply your first pass green bubble filter and filter out 550 including many good matches.
Lets look at how this effects the cheater pop. We start with 500. 250 aren't using a burner phone and 113 passed the green bubble test another 50 passed because their burner is an iphone.
Your first pass filter only reduced the cheating bastard percentage from 50% to 36%.
Now if we reduce the cheating bastard percentage to a hopefully more realistic 25% we are talking about it reducing the percentage from 25->18.
The worst thing about this algorithm is that it makes it impossible to bubble up especially good choices who nonetheless fail the green bubble test. It's also one that potential bad choices can trivially game by buying a 4 year old iphone on facebook for $90. It's the worst of all possible worlds.
> For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
Talk to people like human beings and you should be able to more reliably pick out the cheating bastards.
> Talk to people like human beings and you should be able to more reliably pick out the cheating bastards.
She does not need to talk to people who put themselves into a pile of "might have a burner number" because her deck would be more than full without those.
SMS by contrast is an open standard.
Exactly. If your complaint is about being locked in but the platform you use is the one everyone has to use because of network effect or otherwise you yourself are locked in with that platform.
And SMS is irrelevant.
The lock-in is obvious: if you're part of Apple-oriented chat groups you can't switch to Android without losing access to those groups, degrading the experience for everyone, or convincing each one of those groups to make the switch to a multi-platform alternative. Claiming not to see this is disingenuous.
Given that I don't see why more of us Americans aren't using WhatsApp! :)
I'm not sure, but I don't think you can actually uninstall the default SMS from Android phones either without having another app installed at a minimum and then I bet similar to Messages if you were to somehow uninstall that app then the default app would appear since it's probably part of the core operating system (similar to other basic functionality like settings or a phone app to receive calls).
I don't know what you mean by you cannot substitute Messages with another app. If I didn't want to use Messages I would just disable all settings and remove it from the home screen and use whatever I wanted instead just fine.
You are correct that you cannot install Messages on non-Apple hardware. Not all software is open source or available for all platforms. For example I cannot install Playstation software on my Xbox, nor can I buy a Nest Thermostat and install a competitor's software on it (without hacking both of course). There are games that are made that aren't created with support for macOS. Etc.
> if you're part of Apple-oriented chat groups you can't switch to Android without losing access to those groups
What is an Apple-oriented chat group?
No. Why would it?
> I don't know what you mean by you cannot substitute Messages with another app.
On Android, if you don't like the SMS app you can replace it with another app that has all the same functionality (and more). Does Apple let you do that?
> What is an Apple-oriented chat group?
Please engage with the discussion. One that uses Apple's proprietary SMS extensions, obviously.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/24/dma-political-agreement/
As a user I cannot see any downsides.
Also, you need like.. a carrier plan to access, wouldn’t really call that open. Any network based messenger can work over my home or even McDonald’s wifi, without any third-parties