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“It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

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Re: “It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most trivial complaint I've ever read. I'm in my 50s and I have zero problems reading green bubbles - it just means that it hasn't been sent via iMessage - if I send to an iPhone and sending falls back to SMS it looks just the same. I can't believe people get that upset about green v blue.

That’s very ableist of you. About 1 in 12 males are colorblind. I’m in this group. I find white text on a bright green background very difficult to read.

This comment says almost exactly the same thing without the first sentence. This trend of everyone calling everyone else a something-ist can’t die fast enough.

Re: “It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

#392
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only see the colors on messages you send. OP is implying that you wouldn’t know what “color” the conversation is unless you’re actively replying to the spammer.

You can still tell whether it is an iMessage or text message without replying and observing the color. Long-press on the incoming message. If the menu shows: Reply, Copy, Translate, More… then it is an iMessage. If the menu shows: Copy, Translate, More… then it is a text.

That's cool, didn't know that Apple didn't try to somehow shoehorn threads into SMS (like they currently do extremely poorly with tapbacks and stickers)

Re: “It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

#393
post #234

This is such a weirdly US specific issue. It's hard to understand why people in this country refuse to adopt a data-based messaging service such as Signal or WhatsApp like the rest of the world has. Why are US citizens so set on having a terrible experience when messaging half of the population? How did other countries decide that using platform agnostic messaging services are better? I believe the UK has a similar s…

Ah yes, whatsapp, that bastion of privacy, and not at all a messaging service that exists primarily for Meta to mine. If everyone was on Signal, sure, but if everyone's on Whatsapp, maybe not the kind of thing to go "why don't you just do this too, why are North Americans so backward?" for something owned by what is basically still just Facebook.

Oh yes, let’s ignore the fact that whatsapp has end to end encryption

Re: “It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most trivial complaint I've ever read. I'm in my 50s and I have zero problems reading green bubbles - it just means that it hasn't been sent via iMessage - if I send to an iPhone and sending falls back to SMS it looks just the same. I can't believe people get that upset about green v blue.

That’s very ableist of you. About 1 in 12 males are colorblind. I’m in this group. I find white text on a bright green background very difficult to read.

Are 1 in 12 colorblind in a way that makes the white on green difficult to read

What if 3 in 12 who aren’t colorblind find it easier to read white on green?

Not everything is worthy of a social justice battle.

Re: “It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

#395
post #344
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlimited SMS plans have been a thing in western europe for the past 15 years, at least. People switched to whatsapp because you can send pictures, not only text.

MMS existed long before phones that had chat apps.

MMS was (is?) spectacularly expensive, I recall sending an MMS and it costing in the realm of £1.50 -> £2.00 per message, furthermore there was a maximum size to the attachment you could send with it (100k-200k?). These two alone made it a non-starter.

Sure it was exciting at first when the first 3G colour display phones with cameras were a thing, but the cost and size limits were prohibitive when proper smartphones came on the scene.

Re: “It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

#396

SMS to me is solely the channel for machines to force a bad MFA implementation on me and couriers to tell me something is on the way/nearly there/delivered. All person to person comms, without exception, iPhone or Android users, is via WhatsApp. Anecdata from UK.

Same, from the US

Re: “It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

#397
post #347
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days it’s good marketing to blame Apple for everything. First, RCS is not a very modern or practical standard. It was created in 2008 by carriers (GSMA!!) for their SMS/MMS centric (at the time) platforms. So is it a good idea to adopt this more than a decade later? I don’t think so. Second, it’s really not Apple’s fault that Google has failed to come up with a messaging solution. Google has released 13 separat…

So Apple should stick to en even older standard (SMS/MMS)? All that Google is asking is for the fallback to be at least in the current century, is that too much to ask.

I personally think they should adopt something brand new and not evil. I'm not saying that RCS is evil, but from what I can tell, while it has federation, Google seems to be gaining a monopoly on RCS (sorry, I don't remember what article I read that in). My pick would be something like Matrix or even XMPP to make sure that there's a definite standard that is federated by design; however, you'd have to trust your carrier/software to not dump your messages onto Google's server instead of using a different server.

Re: “It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

#398

> iPhones make texts with Android phones difficult to read, by using white text on a bright green background. Wow. I can't really come up with anything creative to blame Google for this one. Whatever you want to say about Google's messaging mess and RCS - Apple seems to go out of their way to make it inconvenient to text with Android users. Also it doesn't sound like Google's asking Apple to give up iMessage - just t…

[deleted]

Re: “It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

#399
post #40

I haven't called a "normal" phone call or used SMS/MMS in many many years. Everyone I know (or care about rather) uses Telegram, and it's been great for us all.

that's terrific, but if telegram were the universal standard used for 95%+ of messaging then Google wouldn't bother with this effort.

at least where i live, whatsapp is the defacto messaging platform -- i don't know a single person that doesn't have it, to the point where people won't call you, they just assume you have it so they just send you a message.

Re: “It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

#400

Most businesses, consumers, and developers universally continue to ignore the primary reason that iMessage is a closed platform, rather than an app on every platform as iTunes is: Apple is using device serial numbers for anti-spam, supported by a fully-authenticated hardware and software stack that does not allow user modification. This permits Apple to simply “console ban” any Apple device that spams on iMessage. Th…

It isn't about opening up iMessage. The article is about using RCS instead of SMS/MMS as the fallback. It's a pretty reasonable ask that will raise the quality of service when texting with the majority of the market. They can continue to lock down iMessage however they want.

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