Stage Manager is absolutely infuriating. I hate it.
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Other Green bubbles... Come on now (if you are in the US).
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To those pointing out the apparent triviality of the original post, the problems outlined are real and deeply annoying. As silly as it may sound, for me there are people with whom text communication is a chore and correspondingly less frequent just because of the lack of rich texting interoperability. Trying five times and still failing to send that cool frog photo to your Android-using friend inclines you to just give up on certain kinds of communication with that friend. "Eh, it was just an unimportant frog photo. I'll show my iPhone-using friends instead." That sort of seemingly little thing compounds over time, and you begin to subtly associate your Android-using friends with hassle. They no doubt subliminally associate me with hassle too.
It doesn't particularly matter which rich texting format is universally adopted, but such an adoption would be most welcome. And it needs to be something that is immediately functional (like RCS) without requiring account creation (like iMessage or WhatsApp).
For forum visitors who are more familiar with the state of texting technologies, I would genuinely like to know your thoughts about the potential drawbacks of supporting both RCS and iMessage on the iPhone. I know there are security concerns with RCS, but those concerns are (as far as I can see) identical to the concerns for MMS messaging (i.e. a lack of end-to-end encryption). What's wrong (from a user perspective, not a corporate interest perspective) with Apple adopting RCS and keeping the green bubbles to indicate a lack of end-to-end encryption? Is there an increased spam risk for RCS users? Are there other problems with RCS I'm not considering?
It doesn't particularly matter which rich texting format is universally adopted, but such an adoption would be most welcome. And it needs to be something that is immediately functional (like RCS) without requiring account creation (like iMessage or WhatsApp).
For forum visitors who are more familiar with the state of texting technologies, I would genuinely like to know your thoughts about the potential drawbacks of supporting both RCS and iMessage on the iPhone. I know there are security concerns with RCS, but those concerns are (as far as I can see) identical to the concerns for MMS messaging (i.e. a lack of end-to-end encryption). What's wrong (from a user perspective, not a corporate interest perspective) with Apple adopting RCS and keeping the green bubbles to indicate a lack of end-to-end encryption? Is there an increased spam risk for RCS users? Are there other problems with RCS I'm not considering?
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When I was jailbroken there were tweaks that allowed you to change the colors. I went with a deeper blue for iMessage. For the year I did on Android, and using Textra, I could also specify the colors. I went with a deep blue for ALL messages.
That’s one of the things I miss with my 14PM. This is the first iPhone that I didn’t jailbreak. My 7+, XS Max and 12 Pro Max, are still jailbroken. I enjoyed changing the color of the bubbles and had multiple people asking how to do it when they saw the colors. I wish Apple allowed us to change the colors.
My company uses scanners for certain job titles, and those scanners are running Android. It is horrible and glitches on us several times throughout the week.
OP may have embellished for drama but I can relate. I have one family member out of many that, due to outside influence, refuses to change from their extremely outdated Android phone. They claim it’s because they never use their phone and it doesn’t matter but I know better as I’ve offered free iPhones over the years and they’ve refused.
By that reasoning, they should be switching because it would benefit the rest of us while not affecting the extremely small amount of time they use it. I’ve given up trying to explain the benefits because I know it’s futile but it’s still incredibly frustrating.
By that reasoning, they should be switching because it would benefit the rest of us while not affecting the extremely small amount of time they use it. I’ve given up trying to explain the benefits because I know it’s futile but it’s still incredibly frustrating.
I have lots of friends who use Android. Yes, it's annoying but I can't force them to switch just because of iMessage.
I too despise WhatsApp and everything Meta, yet I must use it for work.
I do wish Apple would just open iMessage to the world. RCS would disappear as would WhatsApp and Telegram. iMessage is so much better than anything else out there, though Admittedly it is not as secure.
We know that the crazy EU is going to force something one way or the other and I wish Apple would just open iMessage rather than be forced to adopt RCS.
I too despise WhatsApp and everything Meta, yet I must use it for work.
I do wish Apple would just open iMessage to the world. RCS would disappear as would WhatsApp and Telegram. iMessage is so much better than anything else out there, though Admittedly it is not as secure.
We know that the crazy EU is going to force something one way or the other and I wish Apple would just open iMessage rather than be forced to adopt RCS.
I don’t necessarily expect everyone to use my platform of choice but I also am less likely to
Engage with them if it requires me to give more effort than I see necessary.
I never got the idea of why apple is wrong for making iMessage exclusive to macOS and iOS. It’s an iPhone thing.
The feature is built into the Os. It’s not an individual app like messenger or WhatsApp.
I feel like that is a tad melodramatic. I have used android messaging apps with the same green layout.
Android messaging apps don't typically have the same claim to user experience and friendliness that Apple does.
Precisely why iMessage fans enjoy using it.
I just don’t think apple intentionally chose green for your reasoning.
Yeah you don’t need to be a genius to understand why it would benefit iPhone users if Apple opened it up. I have friends with Android, if we want to have a group chat we need to use Messenger or a similar service because group chats are broken between us that have iPhones and those that have Androids.
If I switch over to Android for a while (which I’ve done a lot over the years) my wife, parents, siblings will have a poor experience when we have group chats or they send over pictures. At one point my mother had to email me the photos instead of iMessaging me so I could help her, because the ones she sent from her iPhone to my Android was too low res for me to see good enough to help her. She would have loved if Apple supported RCS so she could just send them normally.
iMessage is most secure if both parties who are using it take security seriously and enable Advanced Data Protection. iMessage is e2ee.
I used to think so too. Turns out not to be the case.
https://isecurityguru.com/can-you-trust-apples-imessage-encryption-with-your-life/
"I don’t like what I see regarding iMessage security in Apple Platform Security white paper. It seems to me that Apple’s iMessage encryption is strong enough to prevent government mass surveillance. But it is weak enough for a major government to crack a specific individual’s messages. That explains why iMessage is allowed in countries like China, Iran and Russia while the rest (e.g. WhatsApp, Telegram) are banned."
What I don’t understand after reading some of the recent posts is how there is a problem. I’m involved in several group texts, some the majority are iPhones, some the majority are Android phones. There just aren’t any problems for any of the people in the group texts that I have encountered with text or pics. The only thing that is off are videos as they come through smaller in size and resolution but that’s the only difference. And that is irrelevant anyways, they are just videos. We have never had a problem with pics and plain text.
The one area in which there is sometimes a problem is sending pics between two iPhones in iMessage. Just happened the other day. Both my wife and I have iPhone 13’s and are fully updated, and when I sent her a pic through iMessage it was clear on my phone but blurry on her phone. We were both at home on WiFi.
The one area in which there is sometimes a problem is sending pics between two iPhones in iMessage. Just happened the other day. Both my wife and I have iPhone 13’s and are fully updated, and when I sent her a pic through iMessage it was clear on my phone but blurry on her phone. We were both at home on WiFi.
I promise you the NSA almost definitely doesn't care about your lunch plans.
However, if you're that bothered by SMS/MMS, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from using another service with end-to-end encryption support like Signal or WhatsApp.
The biggest problem for me with SMS based group texts is messages getting delivered in the wrong order or taking hours, sometimes even days, to show up. We found it impossible to hold a group conversation when everything was coming in out of order, we didn’t know who was replying to what or what someone had been able to read. And of course trying to schedule meet ups was impossible when messages were arriving days late.
I have quite a few mixed device friend groups, where we text each other every few hours. We played around with various combinations quite a bit and eventually what we seemed to find was that the problem tended to materialize when people from different carriers were involved. This actually kind of makes sense since your carrier and their servers are responsible for delivering SMS and perhaps there are bottlenecks in communicating with other carriers at times? Or maybe they just don’t get along? Or maybe they do this intentionally so you convince your friends to join your carrier?
I say seems because the problem was not at all consistent. It would happen maybe once a week? But it is such a major problem it really made using SMS rather impossible.
All mixed friend groups are now on Signal. That is how we resolved the issue.
In fact, I almost never use Apple Messages anymore even with people with iPhones, largely as a result of being forced to find other apps for messaging. Kind of wonder if Apple isn’t being rather short sighted by ignoring (or perhaps internationally degrading) the user experience in cross-platform communication.
I have quite a few mixed device friend groups, where we text each other every few hours. We played around with various combinations quite a bit and eventually what we seemed to find was that the problem tended to materialize when people from different carriers were involved. This actually kind of makes sense since your carrier and their servers are responsible for delivering SMS and perhaps there are bottlenecks in communicating with other carriers at times? Or maybe they just don’t get along? Or maybe they do this intentionally so you convince your friends to join your carrier?
I say seems because the problem was not at all consistent. It would happen maybe once a week? But it is such a major problem it really made using SMS rather impossible.
All mixed friend groups are now on Signal. That is how we resolved the issue.
In fact, I almost never use Apple Messages anymore even with people with iPhones, largely as a result of being forced to find other apps for messaging. Kind of wonder if Apple isn’t being rather short sighted by ignoring (or perhaps internationally degrading) the user experience in cross-platform communication.
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I just hate the silo'ing of messaging. At one point, iChat on the Mac (the ancestor of Messages) supported multiple protocols and you could theoretically roll a lot of your chats into one place. At some point, silo'ing became the norm and Apple has 100% played into that. Apple has been very clear that they're using the "green bubble" thing as a platform lock-in tool.
I don't care whether it's RCS or what, but I think messaging with Android users deserves a better fallback than either 1) using primitive SMS; or 2) having to jump over to another app.
I think Messages should fold in as many other services as possible. RCS, SMS, Whatsapp (if that was possible), Google Chat or whatever they're calling it this week... I truly don't care. I'd prefer iMessage, but at the end of the day I just want secure, rich, full-featured messaging with any other smartphone user in the world, and I want it all in one app on my iPhone.
I know I'm not going to get this, of course, because all the other platforms are playing that same game. It's all very lame, and there's no technical reason for all this to be so silo'ed.
I don't care whether it's RCS or what, but I think messaging with Android users deserves a better fallback than either 1) using primitive SMS; or 2) having to jump over to another app.
I think Messages should fold in as many other services as possible. RCS, SMS, Whatsapp (if that was possible), Google Chat or whatever they're calling it this week... I truly don't care. I'd prefer iMessage, but at the end of the day I just want secure, rich, full-featured messaging with any other smartphone user in the world, and I want it all in one app on my iPhone.
I know I'm not going to get this, of course, because all the other platforms are playing that same game. It's all very lame, and there's no technical reason for all this to be so silo'ed.
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Totally agree. There is no reason for messaging to not be like email - a fully open protocol.
We the people loose out and big tech can maximize its big bucks.
This might be one of the few EU tech regulations I might actually end up supporting.
We the people loose out and big tech can maximize its big bucks.
This might be one of the few EU tech regulations I might actually end up supporting.