Is having an Android really a deal-breaker for some people?

RealNooshie@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 543 points –

I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason.

In my experience, when people find out my texts are green, they oftentimes would rather switch to a different platform altogether like Instagram or just not text at all.

Is this actually a deal-breaker in friendships out there?

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Are you from the US? In Germany we use WhatsApp Threema or Telegram for messaging, nobody cares about some bubble colour.

It took me quite some time to understand what OP was talking about...

yeah in America people just use plan text all the time. apps like WhatsApp never caught on here

As an American, what even is this bubble? Is OP talking about the color of that speech box thing? It doesn’t matter to me, I use both whatsapp AND my iphone’s built-in texting app (but mostly the latter for messaging my fellow Americans, as adding them to iphone contacts that are shared with any email addresses if known is more convenient and iphone texts seem to be messed up when you try to send them to international numbers)

If you use iMessage on an iPhone, other messages from iMessage come in with a different bubble color than texts/SMS/MMS that don't come from iMessage. That's anything from a non-Apple device.

Why anyone cares, though, is all elitist nonsense. 🤷‍♂️

I care not because of elitism but because videos sent via MMS from android to iphone are postage stamp quality, texts sent from iphone to android frequently contain emojis that the android user can't see because androids have like two or three places you need to go to update the core functionality of the phone, and half the android userbase only knows about one of those places. It's a severely impaired experience, and it's apple's fault (I have an iphone). My girlfriend is on Android and for any kind of multimedia beyond simple pictures, we switch over to meta Messenger (she picked the app, I hate all things meta).

I didn't know most of this.

Totally seamless Android to Android, and the videos are normal quality. And what are the multiple places to update core functionality of the phone? I get updates periodically, and I honestly have my doubts about whether any other place to check could really include "core functionality", but maybe there's another place for something about how it interacts with iPhones.

I tend not to send/receive a lot of videos, but the biggest problem I've had connecting between Android and iPhone was really more about the fact that I used to have an iPhone. When I switched, most things worked fine, but I stopped receiving texts from a few other iPhone users. I'd only notice I had missed anything, in most cases, days later when I opened up my Mac computer, and the iMessages would pour in that I never received on the phone. I kept telling these people to change their settings to send me regular texts rather than iMessages, but it turned out there was a setting I needed to change in my Apple account to disable "use iMessage". After that change, they all started coming to my phone like any other texts, but Apple definitely could have made that transition easier (if they cared to) by automatically sending these as texts if the user hadn't had an iPhone online in some time. If I hadn't still had a Mac computer, I might never have known about many of these, and people might have just thought I was ignoring them!

Typical Apple, making its users feel superior to everyone else just because they prefer a little more privacy

My impression is that most Americans are happy with default phone text messaging apps, even though rich messaging features between iphone and android don't work properly (because Apple makes good products but also blows goats). The first thing I think about Telegram is Denis Davidoff, the Ukrainian youtuber, and the second thing I think about Telegram is that it is what US extremists used to coordinate the January 6th insurrection on the US capitol.