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87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

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Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#292
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. Is this really true? I keep hearing about RCS etc but I also keep hearing it's not actually a good standard. Not even sure it does encryption frankly.

You haven't looked that much into it then; RCS has encryption[0], and works great for me. (I have an iPhone 13 Pro & a Pixel 6 Pro. RCS works as well as iMessage for Android-to-Android devices, for me.) [0]: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

Is that RCS having encryption or is that Google providing an extension to RCS only with their Messages app? And to what degree does RCS with encryption have buy-in from American carriers?

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#293

Interestingly, I am a heavy Apple user, and I am trying to convince my teenage daughter and wife to use iPhone and have offered them iPhone and Apple Watch, and they have strongly preferred to stay on Android. I think it's unsurprising most people use / want to use an iPhone in the US, because it has a network effect with iMessage and it's clearly a superior experience for the average person. But, globally that netwo…

Yeah, my mother is basically the only one in my family who uses Android, so when Tim Cook ticked a bunch of people off the other month by suggesting that we should buy our moms iPhones, I suggested it to her. She doesn't really know the difference between Android and iPhone, but she seems ideologically opposed to paying more than a drug dealer would spend on a burner phone because "that's all she needs". It's pretty…

> It was also very frustrating when trying to share photos to put together a slideshow for a funeral. And on that subject, it's her primary camera now and the quality leaves a lot to be desired on that front.

This is actually one of the main reasons why my other family members prefer to stay on Android. While the average Android handset may not have a camera better than an iPhone, the best phone cameras are generally on Android handsets. This is partly just because Android runs on handsets from many different manufacturers and everyone competes on camera / picture quality for their flagship phones, and there is iterative improvements in technology over time. While the recent DXOMark report disagrees, in our testing ourselves, the S22 Ultra outperforms the iPhone 14 Pro, although both capture very good photos.

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#295
I am always surprised by stories like this. I'm part of several distinct, mostly non-overlapping social circles. The majority of people in all these circles are iPhone users. But none of these circles use iMessage as the chat app.

I'm in NYC, so it's not like I'm in some obscure corner of the planet either.

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#296
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only reason its not encrypted is because Apple won't allow it to be.

Citation needed. Is this really true? I keep hearing about RCS etc but I also keep hearing it's not actually a good standard. Not even sure it does encryption frankly.

There is nobody preventing Apple from developing an Android app for iMessage. They already have a bunch of apps on the play store, including one for Apple TV, Beats, and a migration app for iOS. https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Apple

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the "green vs blue bubbles" gets a lot of press, but as someone who is not a teenager, and on the contrary is considerably past middle age at this point, that is not the real reason iMessage has a stranglehold on users. I've got an Android, and I recently went on a vacation with a group of friends who all had iPhones. I did feel a bit like a leper in the group chat we had set up for our vacation, and it wasn't…

SMS has always been pretty broken for group chats and multimedia. I don't think we can blame Apple for that We could blame Apple for not making an Android iMessage app, though

Rumor has it that, despite Apple's public claims, one reason why is that iMessage is tied to a physical device. This helps keeps spam, malware, and banned devices all under control. Expanding to Windows and Android by definition means that iMessage can no longer have that per-device tie, which undermines these controls.

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We like to fingerwag at social media companies for knowingly negatively impacting children's mental health and self-esteem, yet Apple is aware of how their systems ostracize children, in their own peer groups, who can't afford to carry around luxury phones. It's one thing to be ostracized by strangers on social media, it's an entirely other thing to be ostracized by your own friends and peers. The latter is tragicall…

Absolutely absurd statement. Is this similar to the "trauma" suffered by teens that wore Levi's Jeans that didn't have the Red Tab, back in the 80s and 90s? To compare a green text bubble to mental health issues is offensive.

I'm pretty certain that a lot more interaction occurs through phones than through jeans.

As an adult, some of my friends have asked me to switch to an iphone so they could use imessage features in a group chat. It's not hard to imagine being left out of a group for this reason. I don't think I've met a girl in my age group who has anything other than a negative opinion of "Android Users." This stuff doesn't bother me, but I can see how it would upset kids.

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#299
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We like to fingerwag at social media companies for knowingly negatively impacting children's mental health and self-esteem, yet Apple is aware of how their systems ostracize children, in their own peer groups, who can't afford to carry around luxury phones. It's one thing to be ostracized by strangers on social media, it's an entirely other thing to be ostracized by your own friends and peers. The latter is tragicall…

On the other hand, this seems like a teachable moment, where perhaps kids can be encouraged not to marginalize others based on trivial differences in messaging apps. The drumbeat of inclusivity is pretty loud these days so it shouldn’t come as too great a surprise that including their green bubble friends would be the decent thing to do. I don’t place much blame on Apple for completely stereotypically standard teenag…

It's not just a trivial difference in bubble color. SMS conversations in iMessage lose features. The social rejection is a result of the features lost when an Android user participates in a messaging group.

Re: 87% of American teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone

#300
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only reason its not encrypted is because Apple won't allow it to be.

Citation needed. Is this really true? I keep hearing about RCS etc but I also keep hearing it's not actually a good standard. Not even sure it does encryption frankly.

RCS (as in: the standardized version) isn’t encrypted. Google’s proprietary extensions to RCS provide the encryption layer [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

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