> It works. It’s better than anything Google has attempted. The problem is, it’s not good enough.
This is wrong. Google had a very good messaging system, Google Talk. It worked really well, was based on open standards, supported federation, video/audio calls and was making its way into smartphones. For example, the Nokia 770-N9 series supported Google Talk as early as Q2 2006. Calls based on an open standard in a smartphone, already in 2006...
However, internal politics at Google led to the discontinuation of Google Talk in favor of a long stream of confusing and half-finished attempts: Google Chat, Hangouts, Duo, Spaces, Allo and Meet. I've lost track of how many different services they have come up with. Apparently there's more of them I didn't even know about [1]. It's comical and sad, since the first one was great and had tons of users thanks to being embedded into Gmail.
They pivoted to Hangouts to boost Google+ when they were chasing Facebook. This is also why they killed Google Reader. So much collateral damage with nothing to show for it.
I've always felt that the shuttering of Google Reader really was the end of an "age" of the web. We went from a really vibrant blog culture with a ton of platforms and different setups to the super closed gardens of the social platforms. F'ing painful.
You skipped the first part, where Google Reader drove out most of the rest of the rss ecosystem, replacing it with something more centralized around Google. Then killed it.
I wonder if that strategy is an unavoidable modus operandi, if so much of your management / work force motivation is derived from increasing the stock price.
...and at least consumers in that are not the customers, but the product...
The same strategy was pursued with Android. It was open-source, but Google set up the Open Handset Alliance with OEMs in 2007 and one of the membership stipulations were that OEMs could not create competing OSes based on forks of the open source code.
Over time, more and more functionality became linked to Google Play Services, which was not open source. The logical result of this was that OEMs simply went with the Google-approved proprietary flavour of Android.
Tizen is a Linux foundation project, it's not an Android fork. In any case, Samsung can always arrange for preferential treatment as they are the flagship OEM.
There were a lot more rss readers popping up and/or getting more attention immediately after Reader shut down. Feedly was one of the earlier winners for example.
> We went from a really vibrant blog culture with a ton of platforms and different setups
I mean, don't we still have that? I know that my RSS feed is still too content-free to keep up with (even after culling a double-digit number of hefty ones.)
And now we have even more RSS aggregators (Feedbin, The Old Reader, etc.) than we had before!
RSS has changed as well. Earlier, the RSS feed could be the entire article or blog post. Then it changed to include ads. Then it changed to a snippet of the article or just the headline with some ads. Every change made it worse for usability.
I don't know how the RSS feed is configured if you set up a blogspot or wordpress blog now, let alone the newer blogging platforms or tools like Hugo.
The RSS didn't change. It's 100% on every content creator to decide what to include in an RSS item. Some decide to put only a snippet, hoping to lead you to their full website to show you ads. It has been this since the earliest days of RSS.
I feel like doing stupid comparisons right now. Feedbin, The Old Reader, or even running a feed aggregator on your own computer are like the sound of a tree falling in the woods. They're also not like The Matrix, because not only they can't be explained but the people who still complain about Google Reader don't understand them when they see them themselves.
I use Feedly, which is pretty nicely designed (it has other drawbacks, but it looks and feels like a modern, proper app).
The real frustration is that websites only put short extracts of their content into the RSS feed to force you to go and... look at their ads, I guess? But I'd imagine the number of folks using RSS feed readers who don't also use ad-blockers is vanishingly small.
end of Reader didn't kill blogging, Social Media killed blogging by effectively allowing anyone to blog with zero effort. FB and Twitter are or were where the majority of discussion was happening.
> So much collateral damage with nothing to show for it.
Yes. I think if Google wants to keep its dominant position, they need to rethink how they do management.
What I said in the parent post about Google Talk could also apply to other product lines. They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards. As a consumer, I don't take most of their offerings seriously because they are so short-lived and confusing. Why shall I put my money on something that might be killed or phased out soon?
From what I've heard from some insiders, other Alphabet branches seem to have equivalent management issues. It's sad because they have a significant amount of resources and they could be delivering tons of value to the society.
I've mentioned this before, but I agree wholly. Google's product "strategy" gets shit on all the time (killedbygoogle.com), but the real issue is that the company is structured as if that's what they want to have happen. It's a loose association of warring VPs trying to establish big enough fiefdoms to be able to buy a third house. There's no real benefit to maintaining existing products for them. They just want to reorg things so they can amass more and more reports and justify their next enormous equity refresh. Killing old products to "make room" for new hotness is a pretty good way to do that.
It took them the failure to dominate the next two new markets and the fear of remaining rich but becoming marginal.
With the internet they had a success with IE but saw companies developing their services with new non Visual*/.Net languages and running them on Linux and MySQL.
> They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards.
And the latest: TensorFlow -> TensorFlow 2 -> JAX{Haiku, Flax}. This one is especially egregious because it's foundational for Google's own technology.
I wasn't there for the beginning of it, but I was for at least some of it, including the end. Google+ was a devastating event for Google. Like finding out that I can't even imagine how much time and money was wasted on making it, shoehorning it into other products, trying to foster adoption of it and ultimately deprecating it and trying to _extract_ it from those same products.
You spend as many years as they did talking about only hiring the best of the best, it was inevitable that they would disappear up their own asses and lose any ability they ever had to tell good from bad. In that light I can't imagine them being devastated by anything other than the humiliation of a golden child getting a B. Beyond that, when you're sucking untold billions out of the industry (and society) while they slept, the "waste" of money was just points on a chalkboard. I mean, look at it from a few steps back: even with what you/they would describe as an existential competition against Facebook, that's what they came up with. "The best of the best." As a corporation they aren't businesspeople, they're rich kids with more money than they can ever spend and they have been that for at least 20 years.
It's kind of weird to claim they tried to foster adoption with the whole real name thing going on. Google was nuking accounts if they decided something was not your real name, and destroying e.g. a gmail account for someone who decided to join Google+ with the same name. Any cry for help was met with the usual Google Wall Of Silence. After a few very visible failures, people got the message quickly: Stay away from plus if you have any other valuable data in the Google world.
I still wonder what they were smoking. If you want users on your platform, not banning them randomly seems a good start.
I sometimes wonder if Mozilla conspires to drive Firefox into the ground.
But I also sometimes wonder if someone inside Google and MS are actively sabotaging or if it is possible that all this self harm has been inflicted unintentionally.
Having Firefox around for just a few hundred million per year is convenient for Google to not have Chrome considered a monopoly (although Edge getting back the market somehow changes it). Anyway it feels like it would be stupid and potentially more costly for them to do moves to sabotage Firefox. It's like an insurance.
But the big question is if there is an agreement or "understanding" or something that Google only pays as long as Firefox doesn't become a threat, i.e.:
- don't fix the plugin ecosystem
- don't fix theming
- don't get too far ahead technically (i.e. a good reason to get rid of the servo team)
- don't claim too much authority (i.e. get rid of MDN)
Of course this is wild speculation and mostly in jest.
Mozilla might have been the doctor at one point but now they’ve morphed into the politician. The Google gravy train has utterly destroyed Mozilla’s ability to innovate. The whole culture over there has become completely corrupt and self-indulgent and the good ones have either left or been let go. Sad days.
It is as correct to say that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. The difference between these claims and Hanlon's Razor is that the razor warns against assuming the malice in the absence of evidence.
I actually think Wave was a bit before it's time and couldn't really find a place to settle. It kind of reminds me of the laser. At first, it was a fun playtoy but no one had any real uses for it. Over time, it became more and more important until now it's ingrained in almost everything we do.
Google Wave had that same kind of feel but it was never give the time to develop and grow. I don't know if it would have been as important as something like the laser, but it sure did feel like something that would change the world. But that's just me.
It was weird, Wave's main reason for existing is for businesses with massive email chains of 100 versions of a document, but they killed it about a month after enabling it for business accounts
Nokia N900 was my best instant messaging experience ever.
I had Google Talk, Skype, my country's Gadu-Gadu and later Facebook chat in the same app! The same uniform interface with SMS. I had one simple button to switch protocols. I could also easily see online status of my contact on all of these (and fall back to SMS if they weren't online).
There is absolutely a value in it. I'm using my phone mainly for communication and I could kill for a physical keyboard, especially for a vertical slider like the old Blackberry Priv.
There is the F(x)tec Pro1X [0] which looks similar to the Nokia N900. It's a little bit too expensive for the specs (about 740€ for the 8GB/256GB version with Snapdragon 662), but could be a nice phone.
Or maybe OnwardMobility will succeed and release the new Blackberry this year and it won't be a piece of crap. /s
Also about Duo - even though I agree that it's kinda half-assed, strange interface app, it consistently has lower latency and better video quality than WhatsApp or Signal. I use it wherever my contact has it.
I'll second that. I have found it to have the best quality of all video calling alternatives and handle low bandwidth situations the best too. The interface is weird but focusing on just one thing and doing it well feels like a good choice.
I don't know about Signal because I don't use it but WhatsApp is also pretty good at that job. It also helps if one lives in a country/on a continent with a decent mobile internet service, I guess the US is not the best in that domain.
Also, who still prefers to make a call in this day and age? You only do that if there's something urgent, text is the way.
Definitely not. And the US does have pretty decent mobile internet.
> Also, who still prefers to make a call in this day and age?
People who have their social anxiety under control. When I was younger I wanted to talk to the opposite sex on the phone so I could hear their voice and flirt with them. Maybe the younger generation gets turned on by emojis and memes?
I mean couldn't it be solved on software side to automatically reconnect when I'm back online? Software developers are ingenious about working around the limitations of protocols and physics.
I may be walking outside with gloves in a freezing temperature not excited about taking phone out. But actually I was in train so no issues. Second time I was cut off when I was walking and explaining things for a few minutes... only to realize I'm dropped out of conversation - again I needed to manually reconnect by explicitly tapping on that button.
At one point I had my Google Voice number tied to Hangouts, so SMS came through that app, and maybe one or two friends that also used Hangouts. I was never sure what client or integration they used, because it always seemed disjointed, like the app was made for someone else and I was an edge case so many of the features didn't make sense or didn't work, but I assume they did for someone. The most confusing part was the contacts tab, which had recommended contacts at the top instead of alphabetic ordering. It never made sense. It had about 50% numbers with no name associated. I assume just phone numbers of businesses I dialed at some point. The rest were a mixture of people I've emailed before but never called, someone I messaged frequently, and a bunch of people I haven't communicated with in any way since before Hangouts was even a thing, which I can't fathom why a recommender would decide I might want to call them now.
Disclaimer: I am a Googler voicing my own opinions about our products.
Google really does use all of its own products internally. In fact, I've had a FAR better experience inside Google than outside of it. When 100% of your work happens on chat/gmail/docs/other internal tools, it's pretty seamless. We rarely dogfood external use cases though, where users don't fully drink the Kool-Aid.
They definitely use gsuite products all the time and in most cases exclusively (i.e. nobody uses Powerpoint, everyone uses Google Slides), but in other verticals (e.g. phones or laptops) it's not so clear cut.
I could never understand how to use it personally, people would sometimes message me from gmail, I was utterly confused. I never used it because of that.
This article is quite frustrating in a few ways because I feel like it misses the point on both sides of the fence:
Google’s ethos was clearly to throw a bunch of teams at the problem and see what sticks. From a planning perspective it might seem sensible but for the user it’s deeply confusing: they just want to know from Google which one app is blessed and will be supported for the long haul so they can get on with their day.
Apple OTOH absolutely nailed this. Messages is there, it’s always been there. Sure the i was removed from the word but it was still the same app. Simple, direct, everyone on the same protocol without any confusion.
In terms of the complaints about things like tapbacks - The last thing I want is more than a single row of reactions. The point is for them to be simple and universally understood instantly.
Google's stock Android Messages app has been consistently good for the last few years. Simple interface that doesn't try to do too much - good search functionality and a web client if you'd like to send SMS/RCS from your computer.
I generally like the app, but I find the search to be hit or miss, and it kills me that I cannot search at all in the web client. It would also be trivial for them to coordinate backups of your messages, but this functionality requires a 3rd party app.
I remember google talk. There was a time when everything Google released was hip, minimalist, fast and to the point. Google search, maps, Gmail, hangout.
They blamed their competitor's embrace/extend/extinguish behavior to pull out of it (IIRC MS and perhaps others had asymmetric compatibility with Google talk, and that's how they justified making Google talk proprietary).
We basically built our first startup communicating over GTalk. Slack was not a thing. Some people were using Skype but GTalk was simple and it worked just fine.
Google talk was a nice small piece of software running on a computer with limited features comparing with Skype. Even with Gmail auto loading Google talk web app, it did not gain enough traction say replace Skype or MSN messenger.
Saying it is a good mobile phone app is a huge exaggeration, I had used it back in the 2008 era, the experience was horrible, almost exact opposite of “it just works”.
I remember that at some point it felt exceptional that I could switch between Nokia N9 and browser on my desktop, continue the same chat and get new message notifications on the right device. But the integration broke a lot and of course shutting down Talk broke it completely.
I wouldn't say so... It pays well and has relatively little accountability (proof: look at how many chat apps failed while PMs congratulated themselves launching them). You might not be able to have any meaningful impact but you won't suffer much consequences either. Heck if you play your cards right you may even land the CEO spot.
Mobile technology evolved very quickly but XMPP did not. I remember using Pidgin to chat on Google Talk. Then Google decided (rightly) that more secure auth was needed, and implemented an XEP to add OIDC authentication. Now third-party clients had to decide whether they wanted to implement Google's auth, or not. Ultimately it is easier to control the protocol and the app--and along with those, the tracking, the display of ads, the feature set, and so on.
I mean, does E-mail need new features? I’d argue that it is successful and ubiquitous because it doesn’t change and have a half dozen companies breaking compatibility by trying to out-feature each other. Th Internet could use more applications like E-mail and fewer like the chat mess we have.
Chat should be the deadest-simplest protocol/app on the planet. It’s sending text… That’s pretty much the first thing a developer learns how to do when they learn network programming. We should be able to send text from one computer to another in a way that is compatible no matter what company’s client you use. Yet nothing has managed to gain traction.
Well, it got html and rtf and attachments bodged into it, and never got encryption working.
And it's plagued with spam and attacks and fakes.
Chat is sending text, and files, and encryption, and now doing all that to groups of people, which means you need group managers and permissions, and authentication of those users. Might as well add video and audio calls now you have an address book, as phone companies can't do that properly it seems
I really can't stand texting personally. It astonishes me how much it's a step backwards in innovation for the convenience of companies being able to target and index conversations that people think are private better. Yet still, even voice recognition can't recognize when I say names of my friends that are from foreign countries, and it doesn't connect me with strangers that speak other languages. I think our tech focus on typed text has really stunted the growth of tech in the past few years a lot, also it does nothing to make sure our interaction become easier with differences in learning capabilities and disabilities that exist in our society.
It's really a shame that voice recognition hasn't been pushed further because of all the effort put into requiring everyone to use tiny phone keyboards and frustrating emojis just to convey a message and then waiting for someone else to respond in a way that completely distracts people during normal activities like driving or crossing a street.
It's simply not good progress to continue down that texting-based/focused path in my opinion for future progress.
Text is much less disruptive to the people around you and also private. I probably would not be comfortable reading out most of my texts aloud without thinking twice even if recognition were perfect.
(But it is not really just text. People send multimedia content all the time.)
I understand your point, but there are numerous advancements like noise cancelling and other things that would be better developed if we weren't so focused on texting. For example, a phone could emit a static (non-irritating) tone to isolate spoken communication and then filter it out of voice communication. Simple sound-proof booths could be placed in many locations to allow for call privacy as well.
At the end of the day, texting is probably just as insecure with cameras everywhere and with the fact that the messages are transmitted and retained over mobile networks in the same way as audio and video files would be, although the audio and video files would not inherently contain direct transcripts of the communication.
Texting is asynchronous. If I have a question for you I can send it when I think about it and you can respond when you have time.
If I call you, it's basically me saying "What I want is more important than what you're doing right now". Sometimes I may still want to do that, but certainly not always.
I find it really annoying when someone insists on having a long back and forth conversation over text that could be handled in two minutes with a call, but there are a lot of things that don't justify calling someone.
There's also the documentation factor. Being able to reference previous conversations is desirable in some cases.
Texting is also interruptable. If something happens around me, I can look around and then go back and catch the train of thought. If I'm on a call or listening to a voice message and there's a loud noise, I've lost the sentance. Sure, I can ask the other party to repeat, or repeat the message (or even worse, try to get it to go back just enough), but if there's a lot of interruptions, I may never get the information.
> For example, a phone could emit a static (non-irritating) tone to isolate spoken communication and then filter it out of voice communication.
As if our cities were not loud enough. You might also find out that a noise that is not irritating to some parts of the populations are unbearable to others. This sounds like a very high tech solution in search of a problem, whilst the obvious answer is simple: just use text messages.
> Simple sound-proof booths could be placed in many locations to allow for call privacy as well.
So we have to isolate into some specific infrastructure to send a message? What am I supposed to do if I am late and in a packed train, for example?
> At the end of the day, texting is probably just as insecure with cameras everywhere and with the fact that the messages are transmitted and retained over mobile networks in the same way as audio and video files would be, although the audio and video files would not inherently contain direct transcripts of the communication.
What would sending audio messages change? Installing microphones in a finite set of booths sounds much more tractable than putting cameras (with a resolution high enough to make individual characters on a smartphone screen visible; none of them do that today) everywhere we can write messages. Voice recognition is accurate enough that you would not need any transcript to extract information from intercepted messages.
Frankly, you sound like you have a personal issue with text messages, which is fine, but none of what you wrote makes any sense.
It didn't have E2E encryption, sync across devices or work as a transparent(-ish) SMS substitute/overlay. It was more of a nice but late-to-the-party AIM clone, which wasn't really the direction of instant messaging was headed. Google's IM strategy was and is a mess but gchat wasn't even in the same category of messenger by the time Apple got serious about iMessage.
It's somewhat mind boggling to me that the default messaging app for everyone that I know is WhatsApp. Everyone uses it from old people to young people to businesses. Doesn't matter if you're using iOS or Android or Windows or MacOS. We communicate via WhatsApp and it's just second nature.
I sure hope so. If I get an SMS/RCS from anyone on my android device I typically freak out, just as I freak out when people call me on my phone number.
Phone service protocols feel very outdated to me and are prone to scams, which I get from time to time on SMS, but I'd say never on whatsapp, or at least I can't recall any scam attempts.
From what I've read, WhatsApp won precisely because of being truly platform independent. 10y+ ago Android/iOS monopoly was not yet that huge, and compared to other apps, WhatsApp had a client (which worked well) on the long tail of cheaper devices/OSes, which drove its adoption, because you could communicate with literally anyone.
And the final, genius and/or lucky move (in Brazil) was when phone operators started allowing both Waze and Whatsapp [1] to work even when your data plan had ended. Now everyone, even those on the cheapest pre-paid plans, was guaranteed to get your message.
[1] Maybe some federal judge considered those apps essential because someone was unable to text for help due to their data plan, and operators were ordered to allow that traffic to go at all times.
Telegram is faster and adding features all the time - people only it during Whatsapp outages - returning as soon as the service is back.
What Telegram does much better are public groups for creators, but its never the primary channel to communicate with their audiences, since discoverability is much worse than Instagram/Twitter.
In India. Whatsapp is defacto for everything. group, 1:1 messages, calling, sharing photos/wishes in family/friend circle. Even for business communication in small orgs, reaching out shops, ordering to local stores.
It works phenomenally on iOS/Android/Windows/Mac and even on Windows Phone till its very end. Call quality is good and messaging is fast and very reliable. When you take phone off aeroplane mode, you receive Whatsapp messages first even before SMS etc.
I hear this a fair amount on HN and it doesn’t chime at all with my experience (I’m in the UK). WhatsApp is popular with parents of school-age kids but even then there’s no “second nature” expectation that you’ll use it - I don’t and no-one bats an eyelid. I don’t know any older people who use it at all. Facebook Messenger is popular too, and SMS/iMessage is the default for “I just want to contact someone”.
Another anecdotal UK experience: all contact with humans is via WhatsApp except one older relative. My SMS inbox is 99% 2FA codes, appointment reminders and delivery updates
For me its whatsapp for everyone under 90 (over 90 is email or phone) and signal for everyone who is in IT or is close to someone IT. With the caveat that as almost all signal users are on WhatsApp too sometimes we forget and use it anyway.
Sms is mostly for when you want to add urgency and be less likely to be muted.
I would love to get rid of WhatsApp due to FB and hope to do so somehow soon.
Not my experience at all in the UK, in all my social groups it's basically assumed you have WhatsApp and we aren't all parents
That assumption even extends to the business environments I work in. I'm often in the position of needing to coordinate with groups of customers, third parties and contractors during a change window. WhatsApp is the lowest common denominator
Strange, I'm in the UK as well but everyone I know and meet uses WhatsApp. Got a few friends who are on Signal and Telegram also, but those are only in my more technology-oriented circles.
Likewise, I’m in the UK and everyone I know uses WhatsApp aside from one or two who use iMessage for whatever reason (but I am sure are also on WhatsApp). I’m quite happy with it, it works well, shame it’s a Meta product
UK here, all my friend groups are on WhatsApp except one which has moved to Discord. I have one individual friend who sends text messages. My parents have WhatsApp but are probably 40:30:30 email:text:WhatsApp. My broader family has a WhatsApp group (that i'm not in!).
Until recently, one friend group was on Facebook Messenger, but only because one guy was a WhatsApp holdout who eventually gave in.
I don't know anyone who uses iMessage, but then i have an Android phone. Maybe they're all having cool and sexy group chats on that without me.
You need to move a little bit out of Europe for WhatsApp to be all encompassing.
In Dubai almost half my bank correspondence has been on WhatsApp. Guy asks me which credit card I want and starts sending me snapshots of a printed brochure.
Advertisements have WhatsApp contact information listed, most businesses has a chat line open in WhatsApp. Delivery drivers will text you on WhatsApp if they have trouble finding your place. It’s really everywhere and that is despite the fact that phone calls on WhatsApp are blocked.
But it’s not like people aren’t on Facebook or nobody snaps or anything.
And of course, in China it’s WeChat, Japan and Taiwan it’s Line and I think South Korea still live and breathe through kakaotalk.
But for the majority of the world WhatsApp is really the first line of contact.
WhatsApp rules in Eastern Europe, too, at least in Romania (where I live). This whole "blue bubble" thing is a little bit confusing to me, I do own an iPhone and it bugs me the wrong way that sending a SMS is not really sending a SMS, it's first trying to do it via web and only then go the old, SMS way.
> it bugs me the wrong way that sending a SMS is not really sending a SMS, it's first trying to do it via web and only then go the old, SMS way
AFAIK it’s sending it over the Internet, but not over the web ;)
If it annoys you, you can disable it easily in your devices’ settings. Personally I don’t care much, and iMessages instead of SMS is convenient for mates in the US or Australia.
French here; my usage is mostly: WhatsApp for group conversations (circle of friends, family, setting up some event/holidays/whatever), SMS for one-on-one conversations. I am definitely not a heavy communicator, though: perhaps younger folks have different usage patterns.
As a reminder: most cell phone plans here include unlimited (free) SMS messages
Same here: WhatsApp for group discussions and whatever the default message app uses otherwise (SMSes or iMessage; does not matter much but we use iMessage features when we can). And Discord for the guild mates. And Facebook messenger for one group, but I don’t quite remember why we went down that route.
I'd be interested to know what drives these differences, whether it can be measured, and why there seems to be limited crossover of "circles".
In the UK, I've had WhatsApp for about 12 years since the Nokia N900. If someone gives me their number, it's assumed we will communicate by WhatsApp.
As an interesting crossover, my American friends communicate with their friends/family in the US with iMessage but use WhatsApp for everything else and the only Brit I've met who used iMessage by default had spent significant time in the US in recent years.
Yeah, poorer countries like Germany. /s (We are trying to switch to something more data protection friendly, but we have not agreed upon the next golden app, and the government is actively trying to ban Telegram, so ...)
It really comes down to network effects - the app that got popular first tends to stay.
> We are trying to switch to something more data protection friendly
It’s kind of difficult if we want to mandate backdoors at the same time. That’s not against Germany specifically; most European governments seem to be under that delusion. Well, those who need to look like they care about privacy anyway; the others don’t care about the “data protection friendly” aspect.
Most people I know just use SMS and that's where Apples solutions is brilliant. My mom doesn't know she's using iMessage, nor does she care, she just thinks it's SMS. Personally I believe that the majority of iMessage users are completely unaware that Apple silently upgrades your communication from SMS to iMessage.
> Personally I believe that the majority of iMessage users are completely unaware that Apple silently upgrades your communication from SMS to iMessage.
You can call it whatever you want, who ever came up with that idea at Apple should have been given a bonus. It's an absolutely brilliant idea that provides Apple users with a solution better than SMS/MMS completely seamlessly.
Whether you or I feel like it's the right, or even a moral defendable, solution is irrelevant for most other users.
Also in Europe Netherlands its mostly whatsapp and sometimes facebook messenger when going out and adding people. But the talk usually transitions to whatsapp after exchanging phone numbers.
But i prefer telegram more it actually feels like a modern chat application whatsapp feels like a early 2010 app.
Funnily, in my country there's a generation split -- people <40yo use Messenger and >40yo use WhatsApp. Which is funny for several reasons -- Facebook is mostly used by older people nowadays (younger left for Instagram), but the Facebook's Messenger app is the exact opposite. And WhatsApp was never popular in the younger generation, which makes me wonder how the boomers figured out how to use it.
(But the bottom line is, as you can see, that Meta is dominating the market.)
Probably depends on who your friends and families are but iMessage is super popular in parts of Australia. Facebook messenger is also quite popular with a lot of people I communicate with. WhatsApp is third for me, where I am in one group as well as individual messaging to to one or two people. It seemed to be getting more popular here over time but some people switched to Signal when WhatsApp made their privacy changes a year or so ago. Seems to have lost some momentum here, but again maybe that’s just my circles.
Eastern European here, both Whatsapp is prevalent and Telegram is gradually gaining ground (although I use it from back to the start of 2016).
Surprisingly to me as a techie, a lot of people outright demand you on Viber or you can't text them. I still refuse though because Viber is crap: it's ad-ridden and can't even sync chats properly when you install it on a new device.
Within the US, with a modest amount of pre-pandemic international travel, WhatsApp was a thing I was aware of, but never had cause to use (or even install). I'm not certain I've even read the name since the pandemic started before today.
Everyone I know uses some other platform, or just SMS because it works.
can confirm for italy: whatsapp is 100% the only expected tool of communication. telegram is making some waves in some circles, but for the most part it's whatsapp only: groups, 1:1, business support, anything
my experience in germany and spain is vastly similar
> While blue-bubble FOMO is certainly real, suggesting that it’s the reason people want iPhones is A-grade, uncut “people only buy Apple products because they’re status symbols” kind of delusion.
~ Macworld.com
yeah, ok...
> Since Apple made that choice not to support Android, though, it’s probably safe to say that Apple never actually intended for iMessage to compete for instant-message domination over the rest of the world
apple has made exclusive decisions over and over and over again. and i think everybody outside of the apple bubble knows that its because Brand Prestige is a HUGE part of apples branding.
I can't disagree that Brand Prestige is a big part of their marketing and branding. I used Android phones and linux or MS operating systems on PCs exclusively for my entire life, until the last 2 years or so. I was also quite zealously anti-Apple and anti-Apple-fanboy, and I considered their 1984 ad to be incredibly ironic.
Once the fifth android device in a row bricked on me I made a decision to try an iPhone 11. I couldn't be happier. It just worked, never crashed, and certainly didn't brick during the time I used it, just under 2 years. I recently upgraded to an iPhone 13 and am still thrilled with it. I never had an Android phone that lasted longer than a year before issues started to surface, and I never had one make it 2 years ever.
The performance of the iPhone made the take the plunge to try a MacBook Pro for my personal use. Couldn't be happier with that, either: it offers a linux-like experience on the command line, and provides a mostly great UI (I don't care for Finder--but I haven't any other real complaints).
Edit: my Android phone purchases were top-of-the-line models: Nexus and Pixel phones purchased off Google directly.
I am not sure what budget range you were choosing for these Android phones you mentioned. If you spent the same amount of money that you spend on an iPhone 13/11 on an android, it wouldn't brick. My Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and S2 are still working. They aren't fast but they could be used if I was desperate. I am glad iPhones worked out for you, but I have to say I haven't had any problems with the Androids I have used. I also like that I can root and customize the OS at a deep level. I have an iPad mini and iPod touch. I am familiar with both ecosystems. My iPad mini 4 has crashed on me and it is getting worse with every iOS/iPadOS update. Ram seems to be the limiting factor.
I've had plenty of bad experiences with flagship Android devices. Nexus 5x bootlooped after about 12 months. I had an Essential phone that decided to be off, but not respond to the power button; a known issue with no fix other than to wait until the battery drained itself all the way (which isn't fast because the device is mostly off). If you wait long enough to find out if an Android device is long term reliable, it's not going to be available as a new devicd anymore, and even if it was, you will have a much shorter period of updates after purchase.
All that said, if you want value for money, you embrace the disposable nature of Android devices, and buy around the $200 mark. They may not consistently last much more than a year, but $/year on phones is much less. If you can get upstart flagship phones when they've crashed down to earth, even better: Fire, Robin, Essential was a nice period of commercial flops that made decent phones (baring that power state issue). And Mr. Rubin is rumored to be working on a new upstart phone, so maybe another good buy is coming up soon. (Hopefully with a headphone jack this time)
The definition of flagship is specious at best. Recent Pixels have been coming out with budget mid-range processors and less technological prowess as compared to their brethren from Samsung etc, and the camera is at a standstill since the Pixel 2.
On the other hand, devices like the Nexus 4 had a big emphasis on powerful CPU and midrange price. Safe to say that Google's strategy is fluid, to put it charitably.
That is like saying the 601 limousine was Trabant's flagship product. Sure, yes, you are technically correct but... no. The Nexus devices were less than half the price of actual flagship products.
Back when the Nexus came out, the top iPhones were selling for $599, if I recall correctly. So at $400 it was more than half, but that's splitting hairs because it was Google's flagship. By sales volume a bit player, but it occupied tremendous mindshare because of the brand.
I paid $400 (or more?) for what was billed from google as their premier nexus device (I just got whatever the lowest RAM was). I got it for a testing device. What was lauded was "doesn't come with carrier bloatware/apps". OK. Fine. It was a middling experience at best, but was presented as Google's 'best' at that time.
> If you spent the same amount of money that you spend on an iPhone 13/11 on an android, it wouldn't brick.
In my experience that has not been quite true. Do you consider it fair to consider top of the line Pixels with mainstream non-Pro iPhones? I'd say they are roughly in the same price class. If so, I can tell you almost every other if not every single Nexus/Pixel generation has major and widespread issues after a year or so. iPhones usually have none of that and they have longer software update cycle.
Huh? What kind of issues are you talking about? The person above said 5 bricks in the row. You have to try really hard to get that even with cheap noname Android phones.
As for non-critical issues, the debacles with "holding it wrong" and forced low performance mode are quite memorable. I don't remember anything quite as bad as forced slowdown in the Nexus/Pixel line.
We have a box of bricked Google branded handsets in the office. It’s quite normal. They’re not worth repairing or replacing. Conversely we have no dead iPhones at all (apart from where some idiots cratered them). We’re rolling out iPhone 12 and 13 to replace the androids. In fact a friend of mine’s flagship galaxy that is 11 months old dropped dead in the middle of nowhere the other day and left her up shit creek. She went to the apple store on Monday and bought an iPhone 13.
>We have a box of bricked Google branded handsets in the office.
And here's why:
>It’s quite normal. They’re not worth repairing or replacing.
People have bricked and broken iPhones fixed all the time. In my small 50k citizen town there are three shops that only fix iPhones. That's all they do for a living. There's exactly zero "Android repair shops". At best you could ask one of the iPhone shops if they can help. Please stop this myth of Apple devices not breaking. They break all the time.
It kind of depends on the user. My iPhones never break. My daughter's - who actually USES them - are a consumable. Mostly they die due to physical damage or because of the battery croaking after multiple charge cycles per day, but I think she had one where she broke the flash before physically breaking the phone beyond repair.
Now to nitpick on your post: is it possible that there are a lot more iPhone users than Android users in your town? In mine there are no iPhone repair shops, just generic phone repair shops that fix everything if they can.
Edit: there's a discussion further down about plastic laptops vs aluminium laptops and someone saying his plastic laptops never broke. He should take a look at my daughter's laptop :)
Never been a brand zealot, never will be, but also almost never seen what you say either. I used Androids for almost 6 years before jumping to iPhones. Androids were consistently unreliable and had to be repaired or changed often -- severely lagging just mere months after a buy, bugs that go unfixed for a full year, displays randomly getting super dim, batteries getting hot and going to 60% of the original capacity in just several months, volume buttons breaking etc. I am on my 3rd iPhone and I completely forgot that my phone can be a source of trouble. I have no reason to make this up. I am a normal consumer who goes after reliability.
I understand that many people are somewhat offended by Apple's mere existence (because they indeed do plenty of shady stuff) but please strive to be more objective. Not everything that Apple does is bad and your generalization is not helpful.
And as another poster said, any smartphone will break if you're rough with it. I've seen my fair share of drunk girls dropping their phone on a concrete floor, clumsily trying to pick it up, proceed to fall ass-first directly on it, and then rage how the phone is "trash for breaking as easily".
> In my small 50k citizen town there are three shops that only fix iPhones.
I live in a capital city (~2.5M people) and I know a smartphone shop owner who also owns 2 service/repair shops. He gave up on repairing Androids because Android users are very price-sensitive (his words): "they buy a phone for 220 EUR and when they hear a replacement for the display they broke is 90 EUR they just say: screw that, I'll buy a new one, or just grumpily leave". He was paying 2 Android phone technicians to basically sit around twiddling their thumbs all day, for basically 4-8 repairs a month, so he let them go and paid for his iPhone technicians to learn Android repairs for the occasional customer who needed them.
The iPhone "repairs" were mostly routine work in comparison: many people, myself included, routinely swap the battery when it reaches 80% capacity (because at that point you do notice a reduced battery life). Often people break their displays so they need new ones. Very rarely they had to actually replace a logic board or anything else internally.
The shop owner also told me that he can count on the fingers of one hand the iPhones he has to completely replace in warranty during any given 3-6 months period.
As is the case with 98% of everything, the reasons for a phenomena are economic. No grand conspiracies or big bads.
I mean, I am sorry, but I find it extremely hard to believe in 5 bricks in a row. Even if we optimistically take that 1 of 10 devices bricks on its own, the parent would be pretty unique at 1 per 10000. That just does not add up. Some significant part is missing from that story.
The nexus line cost less than half of actual flagship products. Besides, I disagree they had widespread problems. I owned almost one of each type and all are still functioning 100%. My girlfriends old iPhones on the other hand are broken, every single one of them. Now she buys Android phones and they work just fine. See, anecdotes are useless.
I have bought flagship android devices from many brands. The most expensive Samsung Galaxy native Google Maps app would be more laggy than an iPhone SE in the web view gmaps (and the native app would be even smoother).
The only exceptions I've had where performance was reasonable given the price are Sony's phones, the LG G1(?) and some of the pixels. But generally speaking everything on Android stutters _so much_ it's really painful.
I have always had this silly theory that this is somehow a Java thing, because there have been very motivated people trying to get low latency stuff working on Android and are just unable to... but it's just unavoidable no matter how much money you spend.
I am not an Android developer myself, but my understanding is that you can write extremely performant code, so it's probably not true that Java is holding back developers who want to write stutter-free apps.
So this might have changed, it's been a while since I looked into Android dev, but I think that some of the C++ integration stuff ends up hitting FFI latency. So you can get good performance, but you're still bound to (for example) latency in the input layer because your hooks into the OS HID layer is still going through the same stuff, _and_ you have some FFI nonsense.
I imagine that thanks to people at Epic and Unity that things will have improved much on that front, it's not like games don't exist on Android after all.
All in all, Google just made a big disservice to the Java community with their Dalvik and ART forks running Android Java, and the sooner they are on their coozy Kotlin universe with Android running on top Kotlin/Native (Kotlin is after all so much better than Java /s), the better.
It's also about controlling both the hardware and the software and the resulting integration. Like people were able to create not stuttering games with 8 bit CPUs in the 80s.
I was purchasing them right off Google: Nexus and Pixel phones, very much the same price point as iPhone. I assure you, they were very poorly made (one Nexus had a faulty power button that caused the phone to constantly power cycle) and the software was terribly unstable besides. I suppose I got statistical outliers every single time, but while it's possible it's not likely.
Nexus phones were cheap compared to iPhone, that was their whole differentiation. For example, Nexus 5 launched at $349 while at the same time iPhone 5 launched at $649. There's nothing comparable in those prices.
If you really did buy all of these, then you certainly didn't pay the same price. And after that, there was 3 years break before first Pixel - so you used a bricked phone for 3 years? Or it worked fine for 3 years?
Unless they stated otherwise elsewhere, why are you assuming they went from the Nexus 5 straight to the Pixel? There’s also the Nexus 6 (2014) and 5X/6P (2015) before the Pixel (2016).
Only one of my flagship android phones bricked iself: a Samsung S3.
The rest just became painfully slow.
When I tap camera and the flagship phone seems to have to finish a conversation with some server somewhere before camera opens and the moment is gone then I get annoyed.
So after iPhone got user replacable keyboards I dared to try it and it has been better for me.
> My Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and S2 are still working.
My Galaxy S4 and Note 4 were working quite fine ~18 months later, but only technically. They were aggravatingly slow and I was factory-resetting them each every 3 months, also rooted them and de-bloated them quite thoroughly. This rejuvenated them for a while but then some mere 1-2 months later they were back to a crawl.
We can throw anecdotal evidence around until the end of time but to say older Samsung are working only applies in very strict dictionary terms and not what an average user would find acceptable (f.ex. various functions were routinely taking 2-3 seconds before the device responded). Several acquaintances had the same experiences.
I believe generalizing all Android phones without differentiating between a flagship experience and budget price experience to be a dishonest representation.
Is it though? You have a reasonably consistent and good experience from iPhone SE to 13 Pro Max. Why would it be unreasonable to expect the same from Androids?
(Personally I have found the real differentiator is not the price, but the amount of crap the vendor adds. There are crap 1k+ phones running Android and often you can find some cheaper ones that have a better software experience)
You have a fairly reasonably consistent experience going from one Samsung to the next, or from an LG v20 to LG v60. But, going from a Samsung to an LG? Yeah, there's differences. They're skinned differently, some have their own custom apps by default that aren't stock Android. Each does certain things slightly better or worse.
As an example, in my experience and preference, I've preferred the audio on my LG phones to my prior Samsung phones (I don't use my current Samsung with headphones at all, as it doesn't have a 3.5mm plug and I don't have an adapter and I don't want wireless headphones, pure personal preference there on no wireless and I've had no need for an adapter for the duration I've had the Samsung this last 9 months). I'd say for my personal taste and use, the audio experience has been a fair comparison as I've used the exact same headphones and largely listen to the exact same music files across the different phones (literally by moving the SD card from one phone to the next, no copying involved). I'm sure someone out there will disagree, though, and that's fine.
But, there you go and counter an anecdote with another just like OP pointed out. I can counter the counter too: I have all my old Android phones - all the way back to my Sony Mini (with sliding keyboard!) and they all work just fine. All of my girlfriends old iPhones are broken or bricked. I'm sure that wasn't what you meant with a reasonably consistent experience from Apple devices. There are a ton a Apple repair shops in any town so its not unreasonably to say that it isn't a rarity that they break. These are anecdotes and you simply cannot use it to compare.
IMO that Apple devices break less are a myth. They just get repaired instead of thrown out hence last longer on average.
Also the SE cost twice what most Android phones cost. It is not a budget phone.
iPhone SE (which you seem to describe as "budget price experience" considering the message you're replying too) base price is 489€. I can buy 2 very decent budget price Android devices for that amount of money. 6 if I don't go with decent.
Prestige is great and can really juice sales, but it only works for so long. If your product isn’t good the prestige won’t last.
I’m not saying your product has to be the absolute best, but it needs to somewhat earn its reputation.
Brands have lost their prestige in the past for this exact reason. Some probably are right now.
Apple has been a juggernaut for ~20 years (since the first iPod). The “people just buy for the prestige” argument can’t hold that long if that’s all a brand has.
macs make up 10% of apples quarterly revenue[1], with iphone being pretty much always at least 50%.
with something that makes up a practically annual or semi-annual purchase (iphone) vs mac (maybe every 4-5 years?) i think the social value plays a massive role, and the actual product simply has to have plausible deniability of being "good enough to justify the price."
frankly, iphones being $1k+ is part of their social perceived value.
nobody is saying iphones are bad. but apple throws its weight around in bad-faith ways. and they get justified by the apple bloggers. the "walled garden" is part of the prestige.
oneplus 6t - Nov 2018 to present, and i can't justify buying a new phone yet. i will probably need to replace the battery soon though.
my laptop is a mid 2014 macbook pro i traded my unused vacation for when i left that job. still going strong. amazing actually, considering it's 8 years old now.
I’ve got the same mid-2014 mbp. I had to get the battery replaced, but otherwise it’s been the longest lived laptop I’ve had that still gets regular use.
I had a nexus 6, too. I was doing some mobile development at the time and figured that a flagship product would be a good introduction to android ecosystem. It wasn’t a bad phone, but I was surprised that the build materials weren’t on par with anything Apple had at the time. The screen was good and responsive, but seemed plasticky and 2nd rate compared to the glass that both high-end Samsungs and Apple used.
Similar experience with the nexus 9 tablet. Good idea, meh execution.
Maybe things have changed, but the nexus line, considering it is (was?) a flagship product, didn’t seem to live up to expectations.
Nexus were never premium. It was cheap-ish high-end SoC best demonstration of Android OS.
However, Pixels are definitely meant to be flagships, and IMO they are still not worth that name.
Anecdata: my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 fell quite literally hundred times more than my Pixel 5 (I was very clumsy/drunk by then, and got better), and is still perfectly alive , while my Pixel 5's display broke very easily (it's not even the glass that is broken, it's some internal circuitry). Maybe phones were to be tougher back then? Well, I also have a Samsung Galaxy S10e, it survived many falls just fine (well it does seem a tad worse than my Galaxy Note 2, because paint goes off where it fell).
I had the successor to the nexus 6, the nexus 6p, and it had a noise cancellation issue that canceled out voices instead of the background. Made the phone completely unusable as phone. I rarely made phone calls and didn't realize the issue wasn't just sporadic until out of manufacturers warranty. Haven't bought an android since (I also really disliked the hey google stuff they were integrating at the time.)
The bricking might have been your usage of it. I own an old Android phone (moto g 1) and it still works just fine. How old is that now? 10 years? Probably. It only has become a bit slow, as apps require more performance.
> my Android phone purchases were top-of-the-line models: Nexus and Pixel phones purchased off Google directly.
So the problem is with Google's phones not with Android in general. Anecdotally my Samsung Galaxy S2 failed after 6 years (which is sad but fair IMHO), my Sony Xperia Compact still works after 5 years, same for a Samsung A40 after 3 years.
I think you have encapsulated the concept of FOMO.
Undoubtedly, for the money Apple devices cost - they better damn well work flawlessly for the next 10-15 years. But they don't. I use a MBP and iMac for work and I hate it.
The price difference between iPhones and high-end, official Android (e.g., Nexus, Pixel) phones is negligible.
It's simply not possible as far as I've seen to purchase a PC laptop with similar construction quality (when they're not plastic garbage they're poor imitations of the metal body and interior layout), but one can pay almost as much for a MacBook Pro to get a PC laptop with similar or somewhat superior performance characteristics. That construction quality is worth a premium price point.
I prefer plastic and other material than aluminum unibody. They are lightweight, solid enough, not become too cool, not edgey, and soft. Don't link aluminum == premium.
It’s inferior in every respect, quite aside from any “cool” factor. It breaks easily and it doesn’t support the non-plastic pieces (e.g. the monitor) well are two of the most important factors.
I guess the point is "citation needed". What you said is "common sense", but the source of that "common sense" is mostly marketing material. At least I don't recollect seeing any hard data, that would support either of those claims.
FWIW, I'm reading this on an early 2013 MBP. I think it would still have years of use in it, but new MacOS versions don't support it any more and I have this gut feeling that Linux maintainers aren't okay with the idea of supporting decade old hardware from the hateful enemy.
Not quite sure what you were doing. I have been using Android since the HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2 in the US) in 2010, I’ve been rooting and installing multiple custom roms (only on my last phone did I switch to just staying on official LineageOS), and I never had a single phone get bricked. I have no idea how you managed to do that while staying on stock, not have I ever heard of people having such issues.
None of my Android phones lasted under 2 years, my last one lasted almost 5 years and only got replaced because I wanted a slightly better camera, and both the battery and USB-C connector started to fail.
> We have a box of bricked Google branded handsets in the office. It’s quite normal. They’re not worth repairing or replacing. Conversely we have no dead iPhones at all (apart from where some idiots cratered them). We’re rolling out iPhone 12 and 13 to replace the androids. In fact a friend of mine’s flagship galaxy that is 11 months old dropped dead in the middle of nowhere the other day and left her up shit creek. She went to the apple store on Monday and bought an iPhone 13.
But maybe the issue is just with Samsung or Google phones, Samsung I dislike as much as Apple, Google phones (the Pixel ones, I had the Nexus) seem overpriced for my needs.
Maybe, but what you consider bricked, and what a layperson would consider a bricked phone will also differ. Which drastically reduce the chance of a truly bricked phone. Getting an android to the point of being unrecoverable is definitely harder than an iPhone. But that is irrelevant for $MYMUM
Yeah, I’ve had 2 or 3 soft bricks or bootloops. *Always* after doing a mistake when flashing a new ROM. Even with custom roms, the worst thing during normal usage I encountered was an unexpected restart.
Nah, the 99% of law students in my classes who went for shiny macbooks instead of absolutely any computer that allows its user to take notes and search the web obviously did so after carefully weighing the pros and cons of every solution. Not because they felt compelled to fit in the group.
My parents have been Windows users since the 90s and I am regularly their IT person to solve their computer issues (which have been aplenty!). I somehow managed to convince my mom to switch to a Mac Mini about 5 years ago whereas my dad refuses to switch. I get far more calls from my dad about issues with Windows than I get from my mom. As such, I recommend all my friends and their younger siblings to get a Mac. Even if it's just for taking notes in law school. It just works.
99% of developers that don't develop for Windows also seem to use and prefer Macbook Pros, so the argument "the law students don't know squat" doesn't really hold water.
If my Thinkpad was not a solution, I would have continued using a Mac even with their lack of ports and upgradability.
What? In what world? I think that is a bubble in itself right there. Software devs are among the most aware groups of people (which still is not too aware, sadly)
about limitations, configurability, free software, and open source software on their devices. You cannot even test websites you develop properly on MacOS (including what happens with blocking solutions in place, as MacOS limits their capabilities). Also browsers do not have the same right like on other systems. Only Safari has, which is not what you should test with. It is ill suited at least for web development.
> Also browsers do not have the same right like on other systems. Only Safari has, which is not what you should test with. It is ill suited at least for web development.
What right does Safari have over Chrome running on a Mac?
Developers need much more in a computer than the average law student. Heck, I would consider buying a macbook myself, they're obviously very good computers. All I'm saying is, let's not downplay the insane trendiness effect that goes with Apple products.
There are numerous stories on reddit of kids who get bullied if they have an android phone instead of an iPhone. Teenagers crying when they receive the last Samsung phone instead of an iPhone. Etc.
> Brand Prestige is a HUGE part of apples branding.
I agree it is certainly part of their branding. An iPhone is an iPhone no matter the price you pay. The iPhone SE for $400 doesn't feel any less premium as the most expensive $2000 iPhone. There isn't really a obvious design element that tells you it's the cheap iPhone (except the notch and the camera, but it could just be that you didn't buy a new one) and this is also true for the hardware.
Other manufacturers definitely have a much worse customer experience for people that buy their low-end models. This is understandable because they don't have the margins Apple has.
But pretending that people buying Apple just do so because they are held hostage and they are missing out on a better user experience is delusional. Android and iOS both are trying to lock you into their ecosystem and try to sell you additional services which increase your lock-in. I'm not conviced that they deliberately design their products in a way to increase the lock-in. It probably comes naturaly if you don't have any open standards and interopability as a design goal.
People on here talk about RCS for example but if you look at the Wikipedia page about RCS [1] you can see that carriers started implementing RCS in the last 4-5 years. For my country there is only one carrier listed and they implemented RCS less than 2 years ago. Sure RCS was a standard when Apple released iMessage but at the time most providers were still charging outrageous prices for SMS/MMS. Good luck convincing them a standard which would remove a revenue stream. So iMessage was a good solution to offer a better experience for iPhone users. It just works, no configuration required and you can always fallback to SMS/MMS.
They probably could've made iMessage an open standard or made an Android app. But would've other manufacturers and Google participated in this standard (mind you it would've been centralized, there was no Signal protocol) or would everyone using iMessage be better than what we have now?
I think a lot of the criticism today is hindsight. We know a lot more today and a lot of stuff was in it's infancy when it was released and tried to solve different problems than what we see today.
Sorry for the rant. This post went a bit overboard but I had a lot of thoughts on the topic that ended up in this post. And I'm interested if someone has something to add or disagrees with my assesment completely.
Switching from iphone, which all my friends and family use, to a pixel caused so many issues with texting I almost went back to iOS solely because I was causing headaches for others.
FOMO is real for sure, but plain old inconvenience is also at play. If your entire family and social circle is on iOS, it's a massive pain to leave. This is by design.
I completely understand what you mean by this, and what bothers me the most is that this is problem should be entirely avoidable. Pleaes correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't think of a single technical reason why "a non iphone in a group chat" has to cause such infuriating levels of inconvenience for everyone involved. Someone had to put explicit effort into making it as unbearable as it is.
The only reason I can think of is Apple using a dominant position in a network in order to sabotage alternatives.
> Pleaes correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't think of a single technical reason why "a non iphone in a group chat" has to cause such infuriating levels of inconvenience for everyone involved.
SMS/MMS is the lowest common denominator for non-Messages devices. So including a non-Messages device in a group chat means the whole chat needs to be downgraded to SMS. Even if Apple added support for RCS tomorrow, group chats would need to downgrade to it and lose E2EE and rely on the participants carriers to deliver messages just like with SMS.
There's no good way for Apple to integrate the shit show of non-Messages protocols in a sane way. Carriers made a mess of RCS in the design, implementation, and deployment. Google has had to run their own RCS backend to allow Android users to actually use RCS thanks to the carriers' bungling and meddling. Even they haven't helped the situation with a decade of half-starts in messaging apps.
Blaming Apple is a bit ridiculous. They're not going to spend a billion dollars fixing the problems created by carriers and Google when they already have their own messaging system.
It's a problem APPLE CREATED! this is texting, plain and simple. Apple decided to do their own thing and call it texting instead of just making their own entire messaging system. Now people are brainwashed... But only in the US really...
> Apple decided to do their own thing and call it texting instead of just making their own entire messaging system.
They did make their own messaging system. Their Messages (née iMessage) is entirely separate from carrier provided SMS/MMS. It's accessed via the same application as SMS because on early iOS they only supported SMS. The Messages/iMessage features were added to their existing application.
Saying "this is texting plain and simple" ignores a ludicrous amount of complexity about the underlying systems. There's nothing plain and simple about text messaging systems. If you're going to bash Apple for supposedly creating problems at least familiarize yourself with the subject.
>Blaming Apple is a bit ridiculous. They're not going to spend a billion dollars fixing the problems created by carriers and Google when they already have their own messaging system.
I blame Apple for making communications software (iMessage, FaceTime) that is utterly useless to me as an Apple customer.
There are exactly two useful ways to make this kind of software.
(a) Build on top of a standard that others can implement for other platforms.
(b) Support all big platforms yourself.
Apple has decided to do neither. They made something that is totally useless for everyone outside of some close-knit circles in the U.S. Lock-in strategies are always lock-out strategies as well.
But they're not just pissing off their own customers, they're also playing a very risky game. Messaging apps have a tendency to become platforms in their own right (e.g WeChat).
By taking itself out of the picture, Apple is creating a power vacuum that is being exploited by the likes of Facebook. Ultimately this could even threaten Apple's hardware sales, for instance if Facebook manages create something interesting out of WhatsApp + Oculus.
So in my opinion, Apple's strategy is unintelligent and norrow minded. It's classic short sighted "corporate greed".
When Apple released iMessage and FaceTime respectively there weren't really good "standards" for them to adopt.
For iMessage there were desktop messaging standards like XMPP or the immature at the time RCS from cellular carriers. XMPP is not a great protocol for mobile devices with unreliable/changing network connections and background processing constraints. RCS was immature when iMessage was released and hadn't really been deployed by carriers or was deployed but not interoperable between them. It also requires a SIM and a cellular service. So it's a non-starter for non-phone devices. Additionally it doesn't offer E2EE without proprietary extensions and running private relays like Google has done.
For FaceTime there was never a really good video telephony standard to implement. FaceTime uses some existing standards but all over Apple infrastructure. Remember FaceTime has always been an over the top data service and like iMessage has no tie to carriers. When FaceTime was released it didn't even work over cellular, it was WiFi only.
So what standards should Apple have adopted? As a minority player in the mobile or computer markets which of their own services should they have pushed as standards?
Obviously standards are the way to go since WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Google's 400 different messaging systems all implement the same standar...oh wait they don't.
Messages is a value-add for Apple's platforms. Google isn't bending over backwards making Nest devices work with Apple ecosystems and Microsoft doesn't offer an XBox SDK for the PlayStation. WhatsApp isn't opening their messaging for Apple to adopt. Companies compete with one another, making products and offering services to attract customers. Why is this unintelligent and narrow minded when it's Apple?
If there was no suitable standard then they should have created one. Either that, or support all major platforms.
>Companies compete with one another, making products and offering services to attract customers. Why is this unintelligent and narrow minded when it's Apple?
Because it's classic short-termism for the narrowest financial reasons, showing no creativity or vision whatsoever. They prioritised locking in some U.S based users at the cost of creating an oppportunity for the likes of Facebook to serve the overwhelming majority of users for whom Apple's offering is useless.
I have no problem in principle with proprietary software that is only available on a single platform. What I find unintelligent and even offensive as a customer is choosing this approach to create this specific type of software that so obviously requires a different approach.
For me, iMessage and FaceTime do not add value. It's preinstalled crapware that causes massive security issues.
> They created their own messaging system and let SMSes enter it.
Apple supported SMS before iMessage/Messages existed. Their Messages app didn't even support MMS until iOS 3. It didn't gain the iMessage functionality until iOS 5.
Apple supports the global standards of SMS/MMS. Their own Messages service can be disabled entirely so a phone will only send SMS/MMS messages. Just about any phone able to connect to an extant cellular network can receive these messages and send messages to an iPhone.
SMS and MMS lack a lot of capability that people want in messaging systems. SMS was born out of unused space in control messages in the GSM spec. That's why fucking everyone from DoCoMo (i-mode e-mail) to RIM (Blackberry Messenger) to Apple have added some over the top messaging system to phones.
SMS is a fallback because it's supported by essentially every carrier. Carriers have tiptoed towards a better messaging standard with RCS but they are at cross purposes with OS vendors and end users. They want a messaging system that allows them to charge per use and the ability to snoop on user messages. So they turned RCS into a mess of a standard and have bungled or slow walked it's rollout.
But no, I'm sure it's Apple that caused all the evil in the world.
A trillion dollar company should be able to easily figure out how to avoid "reaction" messages from dumping a screenful of text and destroying the messaging experience for everyone. I"m sure they can do it for less than "a billion dollars".
I'm not suggesting that Apple should be responsible for making cross-platform messaging 100% compatible, but someone at Apple has made conscious decisions to make the experience as infuriating as possible.
RCS is great. They should have done it ten years ago.
Sure, ten years ago it probably didn’t seem to matter, but the iPhone 5 already bumped the screen size from 3.5in to 4in the rear camera was already 1080p, and “phablets” were already a term in 2012. It was totally foreseeable that MMS size limits where going to be a problem, if they weren’t already!
What a great case of skating where the puck is, instead of skating where it’s headed. RCS existed as a spec, just not implemented by carriers. The fact that Apple, and even Google, are routing around their MMS servers is totally their fault.
And if everybody is on WhatsApp or Messenger or Telegram nobody really knows of you have an iPhone unless they look at you carefully when you use your phone. It becomes a commodity if we care only about messaging.
Oh it's real. It's very frustrating to text people who can't receive live photos, videos sent are reduced in quality by a significant degree, can't receive replies to specific comments, and can't receive link previews. People don't click links without a preview, period. So no use sending a video or live photo via icloud link either. I have absolutely minimized texting android users due to these issues. It probably helps that 80% of the folks I text regularly (or have at some point) are apple users.
>videos sent are reduced in quality by a significant degree
What is the purpose of this? It's an issue solely with apple phones, people sending me videos from Android phones come through fine in full quality but anything from an apple device comes in looking like a Minecraft video.
>can't receive replies to specific comments
Apple actually started having their phones start sending texts with the reaction a few years ago, see this from my girlfriend earlier today
MMS video and picture sizes are size constrained by the carrier in the profile. As many carriers already allow 4MB or even unlimited sizes it is purely an issue of carriers being cheap and lazy and leaving old limits on MMS. It would probably even be profitable for carriers as MMS already counts against data and RCS allows the larger sizes anyway. Yet Google prefers to roll yet another new protocol and complain instead of getting the carriers to just fix MMS configuration issues to solve the biggest ongoing complaints.
Just as a data point from outside the US: a 4MB MMS is about 5$ in Germany, even on a 30+$/mo base price package. Sending that to a group call multiplies the cost with the number of recipients.
MMS (and in all likelihood RCS) is a complete non-starter for this market.
That picture is the description of a reaction, not a reply. And the description is much worse than having the reactions on the message like in iMessage.
It doesn't matter whose fault it is. I mean its really users fault for not using messaging apps, but that's clearly by design. Apple crafted iMessage to be good enough that iPhone users overwhelmingly use it and it provides a much worse experience when texting non iPhone users.
RCS is an inferior anti-user unencrypted "standard" to iMessage; too little, too late, and driven by Google who effectively bribes carriers to get behind it by providing backend servers to them and sell out the user. No user wants additional say from carrier and potential opportunity for billing. The only reason RCS has even become a thing and Android is playing that game is Google intended to force Apple's hand by ganging up on them with carriers. They failed and now they whine. What they are asking iMessage is to basically fold their pocket ace hand and join and be a lower-class participant in a Google-controlled messaging world. No wonder Apple will always say fuck you.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Considering there are dozens of other chat apps with huge market shares on both platforms, is it inconceivable that they had a better product than most chat apps? (Until quite recently iMessage was the only widely distributed and usable end to end encrypted messaging platform out there, for example.) It is Google who controls the majority of smartphones, not Apple, yet they have not been able to effectively "abuse" their market position, mind you.
Personally, whenever I carry an Android, I'd very much prefer Signal or WhatsApp than Google Messages app.
Bundling and control of defaults are powerful levers. If users were presented a ballot on first use then perhaps these incumbents would have to compete on an even playing field.
Oh I agree completely. Not only should there a regulated standard for texts placed upon any company with 5% marketshare, there should be a similar standard places upon social media over 5% marketshare.
Ah yes the "standard" that the carriers have slow rolled, rolled out only partially, or rolled out in certain regions. Such a great standard Google themselves have proprietary extensions only available in their Messages app and only when using their back end.
Apple and Google don't want to play nice with one another. That's on both of them. The carriers are a third pole that don't want to play nice with each other or Google or Apple.
Google and Apple want value-add features on their platforms. Carriers don't want E2EE so they can mine text messages for advertisers.
You're not going to legislate or regulate a platform into existence. Apple and Google didn't appear on the scene yesterday. They both started at zero users amid a market full of competitors. They are the competitive upstarts that actually competed and and were successful.
Before the iPhone and Android there were a number of mobile platforms that all sucked in their own special ways. The mobile market was the incumbents' market to lose and they then lost of their own accord.
IMO Windows Phone was a superior alternative yet could not complete because the two incumbents were too entrenched. Network effects don't impact only users but developers as well.
> IMO Windows Phone was a superior alternative yet could not complete because the two incumbents were too entrenched.
Seriously? Windows Phone flopped because Microsoft couldn't get its act together. IE sucked and couldn't handle even mobile sites that iOS and Android had no problem with. The messaging and e-mail had anemic features. And Microsoft simply couldn't execute on a third party developer strategy.
For whatever interesting ideas the OS had it was a dumpster fire of execution. It didn't help them at all that Windows Phone 7 had no backwards compatibility with Windows Mobile so they burned anyone invested in that platform. They repeated the trick with Windows Phone 8 where Windows Phone 7 devices couldn't run 8. Being the third place platform and repeatedly burning your customers was just an asinine choice for Microsoft.
Windows Phone had interesting features and UI concepts. What killed it was Microsoft's absolutely terrible execution. It had little to do with Apple and Google being "entrenched". Microsoft wrapped a handful of interesting features or good hardware (Nokia phones) in layers of crap.
I had never heard of it either until I switched to an iPhone for unrelated reasons. Half my contacts suddenly were congratulating me on being "blue". It was... weird.
anecdata: I heard about it a lot. ESPECIALLY when i was in high school and college.
Definitely heard girls (with iphones) gossip and discussing prospective men and say "but his texts are green". Its not code for "he isn't rich" - I went to a private school and hung out with sorority girls so everyone was well off, but something more ambiguous. Something makes blue bubbles feel better.
Maybe its just that iMessage is a more rich form of communication vs SMS, and people hate needing another app to check for that one android user in their life.
> Maybe its just that iMessage is a more rich form of communication vs SMS, and people hate needing another app to check for that one android user in their life.
The user experience of conventional SMS is often terrible; it's not encrypted (I'm not even talking about E2E but simply in-transit encryption as mobile carriers are nasty and may want to snoop), vulnerable to number spoofing, delivery reports aren't supported on iOS (and even then it really depends on carriers) and is slower than iMessage.
Yeah, I use Signal for a few of my friends and I try to get others in so we can all be in the same chat group on PC and phone, the responses I get would make you think I asked them to feed their children to piranha.
Or perhaps we shouldn't trust apple with our communication data and move everyone to something lime signal
But yea, I wouldn't want to date someone who thinks like that anyhow. Their values are obviously too different from my own if they value iMessage over security, privacy, and the ability to modify my own devices
> But yea, I wouldn't want to date someone who thinks like that anyhow... if they value iMessage over security, privacy, and the ability to modify my own devices
Yeah. I think the sorority girls would agree that it may be a bad match.
> if they value iMessage over security, privacy, and ...
Its not source available, but iMsg has long been e2ee and with a focus on privacy - but i can imagine that their word isn't enough for you to trust them.
> Its not source available, but iMsg has long been e2ee and with a focus on privacy - but i can imagine that their word isn't enough for you to trust them.
This is a marketing lie fed to you by Apple. In reality, thanks to pressure from the FBI, if either you or your contact has iCloud backups enabled, iMessage is effectively plaintext. (Same with WhatsApp on iOS, but the situation is much better on Android.) https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/what...
Its not a lie, it can still be e2ee as a protocol - thats stored client side in plaintext. If that client uploads it unencrypted... that's their fault. (conceptually).
I think its only a lie in that apple has it upload by default (opt-out) which means as you pick it up from a store, its not e2ee, even though minor setting changes (one boolean button?) can make it real e2ee.
Everything is "effectively plaintext" if anyone can actually read it. You could screenshot your texts, and that ruins encryption. And obviously in a multi-person setting any weak link ruins it for all.
Personally, i'm disappointed its opt-out not opt-in, but i think plaintext backup and easy backups are a net-good for the users, even at expense of e2ee. Most customers don't need e2ee, but many will need backups. That said, i think most data, especially texts, could benefit with auto-deletion of old content. Some things don't need to live forever online.
These are all really weak excuses for the fact that the FBI applied pressure on Apple specifically to not add encryption to iMessage backups on iCloud, and there's documented evidence showing that it takes advantage of that.
Apple is acting in the FBI's interest, not in yours.
Besides its E2E, Signal has all the downsides of iMessage; it still relies on phone numbers as identity, is a centralized walled garden hostile to third-party clients and the desktop client is an Electron pile of shit.
Your list of complaints is valid, but iMessage has another major downside: it only runs on Apple hardware. Using Signal means almost everyone can participate in a group chat if they so choose.
On TikTok there's a lot of GenZ videos about green bubbles being ugh. It is definitely a thing with younger people. I got an iPhone after never thinking I'd buy one ever, but decided Apple is the lesser of 2 evils, and everyone I text that has an iPhone immediately recognized the blue bubble. Also, it sucks if you want to send a picture or video to a green bubble.
I saw a guy on tinder once say not to even bother if your texts are going to be green. It really rocked my world to realize there are real people actually like that out there
Honestly I wouldn't want to date someone who thinks like that anyhow, so good. It filters them out because their values obviously don't line up with mine.
You can't really have text conversations between iMessage and android because SMS is so slow. It's like having a conversation where each person can only say two sentences a minute.
This could actually work as a decent filter if you don't want to waste endless hours doing tech support and fixing up their stupid Android full of malware.
Can I just ask where you live? I know a lot of countries don't have proper Google Play stores so have to resort to sideloading. Obviously in western countries we don't have this issue so android malware is a non-issue but I'm interested in what country android phones are full of malware to the point where you're apparently wasting a lot of hours doing tech support.
Hours was hyperbole as I actually don't even bother to clean the device and just recommend getting a used iPhone and help them migrate the data, but technically cleaning a device after malware would've involved backing everything up, resetting the device, potentially updating the firmware (or installing a trusted third-party ROM like Lineage) and then reinstalling & configuring all the apps & accounts - I can easily imagine this taking hours especially on a slow internet connection.
I don't think it has anything to do with getting your apps from Play Store vs elsewhere. This is in the UK and despite Google Play being available, back when I worked in a phone store, customers bringing compromised Android devices was fairly common (in fact some of them didn't realize the bullshit ads or spam on their lockscreen/notifications was malware, they thought it was just normal and accepted it), and that was only the stuff I could see - technically there could be plenty more malware that chooses to remain stealthy.
I imagine blue-bubble FOMO is more popular within the US because most younger Americans use text messaging instead of WhatsApp/Telegram like you would find in Europe or South America (aside from occasional group chats or college teamwork)
Lol completely untrue outside of a demographic of people online. Maybe the people in computer science majors at universities, not
your average young American
Friends, yes, and family if they're on Discord as well. The IRC style of group communication genuinely works better than a ton of different group chats.
It gets talked about a lot (I've seen many articles talking about it over years), so I guess I think it must exist. Never ever heard of it in real life. Maybe just Wealthy Zoomers? People from New York? Teenagers? I have no idea, but things keep telling me it is real. Like, I know more people with android than not, I have an iphone, I think I've never been in a group chat that was "blue bubble."
MMS isn't as bad as it used to be, however. Less regions have service that is too poor for MMS to work but SMS works fine I think.
Green texts are objectively worse. It's hard to have text conversations with iPhone users as a none iPhone user because they refuse to use messaging apps and sms takes like 20 seconds. Not to mention degraded media quality and lack of all the other features iMessage has.
I have yet see a meaningful difference between Whatsapp and iMessage. The degraded media happens because Apple like to use non standard formats for media and the framework of iMessage is based around compatibility with MMS and SMS. MMS is pretty limited even in the age of 5g. Apple could easily allow iMessage to work on android but they don't because they know people will buy iPhones for iMessage.
It's "as good" except for Zuckerberg creeping around in the shadows and using Whatsapp as a backdoor to your contacts list to infer who you're talking to.
Apple has yet to do this and so far there's little indication they are going to. WA having terrible uptake in the US is a good thing.
In Europe not only Android is dominant but people use WhatsApp or Messenger. iPhone owners must use them too as their primary messaging app. I guess they have their iMessage full with SMS from banks and other notifications, like my Android SMS app.
Yes Or mms or rcs. Sometimes you could be texting another person on an Android that's just on a different carrier and for whatever reason you can't get the rcs status. And this applies to way more than just texting... Some carriers let calls that stay within their own network sound way better. Switch sims and boom, crap quality.
I use whatever The other person wants to use though. Telegram, discord, Skype, email, text, Twitter, whatever
It wasn't FOMO for me, but rather a exhaustion from interoperability between the two platforms.
Group chats become impossible with iphone users, so you stop being invited. Texts were constantly dropping, so people would think I was ignoring messages.
Just switched from android to iPhone after 12 years of owning and working with android as a developer. I just got tired of fiddling. Most of my social group and family uses iPhone and there's no way the non-technical folks in my life are switching, so... If you can't beat, join.
So now least you've now heard of it from someone other than these articles :shrug:
A success for Apple's strategy. It can't work in all the other countries were the primary messaging app even for iPhone users are WhatsApp or similar apps.
I was never an American teenager in this century. IDGAF what color my "bubble" is, and neither does anyone else I care to communicate with. That said, even in the olden days as a teenager there was a lot of social pressure for things that just don't matter.
Yes, it might not exist for you and your age group, but saying that it "doesn't exist at all" is just wrong. It does matter, and it is a factor for certain age groups.
You can disagree with it, but that doesn't make it not real.
There's no FOMO here but when iPhone users bitch about it like it's my fault and not Apple's, I think less of them. It's a shame so many people are allowing themselves to be manipulated by Apple to peer pressure their friends into buying Apple products.
>Let’s start with the obvious: the only people having this conversation about iMessage are Americans
That makes it important. A large section of 300 million of the richest people on the planet want blue text bubbles rather than green ones, and will buy the expensive phone to get it. Fortunes have been made on much less.
Even more important is almost all of iPhones market share is in USA. So would apple care about maintaining the market where most of it's phones are sold? Well, ya, of course.
Apple has >1billion active units worldwide, or one for every three and a half people on the internet. While the USA market is highly profitable their operational scope is much larger.
The author ignores strong evidence suggesting that iMessage brings people (especially young people) into the apple ecosystem, locks them in and lands and expands. iMessage is the killer app for iPhone and integrates flawlessly with the desktop app.
I hate to disparage the intelligence of the author in general, but in this specific case they are wrong and startlingly ignorant of the market they pretend to understand at an expert level.
Agreed. It's similar to how BBM was a killer feature for blackberry and brought so many people into that ecosystem.
It may not be enough to keep a company going forever - apple has many other ways of propelling itself - but its powerful enough to get people in the ecosystem
Hm. But as stated this is mostly a US thing because of critical mass. Most people I know already use at least two or three services so honestly they don’t really care what service you are on. I remember that in uni people who didn’t have messenger were “annoying” because it was the service which almost all of the group had (while everybody had also others like WhatsApp, hangouts, kakao and whatnot)
People use iPhones because they are the best phones. High iMessage usage is the effect, not the cause. I personally don't know any iPhone user who doesn't also have an alternate messaging app installed on their device.
Remember that there was a time when Blackberry had 100% platform lock-in with BBM. I myself got one (including a pricey service plan) just to be able to message my friends in college. Yet everyone left the app (and ecosystem) overnight because there was a better device available.
There was a time when ICQ was unbeatable, and it seemed like people would be using it forever, because how do you move off of a platform that everyone you know is on? Then came AIM. Then MSN Messenger. Then Skype. The Google Talk. Then Facebook Messenger. Then WhatsApp and iMessage. It will be something else tomorrow. There is no such thing as network lock-in for messaging apps, simply because costs to switch to a new one are negligible, and you can use as many of them as you want at the same time.
But the critical mistake you're making there is calling iMessage a messaging app when iMessage is actually the default texting application. AOL instant Messenger just was AOL instant Messenger. Same as MSN. Skype let you make phone calls. Google talk let you do some things but it was pretty much just Google talk...
There are non-technical people who use iMessage because it's the default texting application and it's not a messaging platform it is something that Apple has perverted and customized into something that is deliberately incompatible with other anything.
> I personally don't know any iPhone user who doesn't also have an alternate messaging app installed on their device.
90% of the people I know with iPhones don't have any messaging apps other than iMessage. I've tried to get them on Signal or WhatsApp, complete refusal.
Tough to say. I’m still using my 2016 SE, which received iOS 15 just a few months ago and updated to the latest release within the last couple of weeks, the same day as the iPhone 13. This phone cost $400. I highly doubt there are many phones out there that beat this “bang for the buck”.
You're not wrong. iPhones caused everyone to hike their prices up to $1000 for true flagships the minute the iPhone X came out. And when the 7 came out, everyone soon ditched the headphone jack and introduced their own wireless earbuds for $200. And when the 4 came out, everyone suddenly sacrificed battery life to crank display PPI up past 400 and even 500 to beat "retina" quality. Same for removable batteries and SD cards, which iPhones eschewed from the beginning. I'm definitely forgetting a few iPhone trendsetting moments, too.
It's a damned shame we don't have a counterweight to Apple to force them to rethink consumer-hostile decisions like these. Imagine if there was a viable alternative who kept the headphone jack. Or small phones. Or fingerprint sensors. Or cheap prices. Instead, everyone just does what Apple did last year. And unless I want to buy a phone with crappy US cellular band connectivity, I'm stuck with... Samsung, Google, and Apple.
I didn't pay for mine, it was my first touchscreen phone provided by work. But I checked prices out of curiosity, and as I recall it was north of 400 € -- around 450-480, I think. At the time, it was the hottest new thing on the market, so I'm sure it got cheaper after a while; perhaps you got yours a bit later? Or maybe it was just more expensive here in Finland than elsewhere; pretty much everything seems to be.
I did think i bought it pretty fast after release and 250€ seemed a good price. But now, I'm not so sure anymore ( how fast i bought it, I'm sure it was 250)
This article basically echos what the Google report said. If you are talking about US teenagers then iMessage is king. If you are looking at the rest of the world then it is kind of a flop because in a lot of the rest of the world SMS is a complete rip off so a message system that falls back to SMS is useless, hence people in those countries use cross platform messaging that eliminates SMS on their phone.
Is it possible that Apple simply doesn't want to dominate messaging? I mean, if they do, what do they gain? (more revenue, more lock-in, more success) What do they risk? (regulatory/anti-trust implications)
Apple can easily be understood by trying to avoid becoming IBM/AT&T. They don't want to be ubiquitous because that has its own regulatory challenges.
I would be rather surprised if managers at Apple are directed to avoid building features that would help prompt greater sales in the name of avoiding ubiquity.
It basically boils down to money. If Apple considers the move to support rich messaging, and it seems like it will shut off a revenue stream, they won’t make the move.
Keep in mind we’re largely talking about teenagers heavily influenced by peer pressure and for the most part wanting to spend their parents’ money on iPhones.
Blue vs green arms these kids with an actual reason to tell their parents.
If I was Apple, I don’t know why I would ever want to remove this high barrier to entry. Having it making me a ton of money.
> Is it possible that Apple simply doesn't want to dominate messaging?
Yes, but also that Apple don't want to make it easier for Google to get their grubby little fingers inside more of Apple customers' data than they already do.
As someone probably younger than the lot of you: No. out of all social media messaging , teenagers are not using TikTok for communication purposes. Sending TikToks? Yes. Communication ? No.
And this is clearly shows how Americans percieve the thing.
You can't send iMessage to non-iPhone user then.
You still can send SMS/MMS to non-iPhone user.
But because Apple intentionally bundled SMS/MMS messenger app into iMessage you are thinking iMessage == SMS/MMS.
To give you an idea why are conflating them - you don't actually need a phone number for iMessage/FaceTime. Because the primary ID for it is your Apple ID, not your phone number.
In Italy no one use iMessage, everyone use whatsapp or telegram or both. I also don't know anyone using signal. I also don't knwo about facebook messenger, I don't use facebook anymore since 9 years ago.
1. I use both WhatsApp and telegram with different people, a lot of people I know do this.
2. I meant I don't use Facebook Messenger or website chat. I know tech speaking WhatsApp now use same backend, I started using WhatsApp well before Facebook acquisition.
> No one uses WhatsApp and Telegram simultaneously. It's oxymoronic.
What do you mean?
I use Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook messenger, Discord, Teams and rare times SMS on the same phone. Different apps for different friend groups.
You seem to be back in the 90s with chat applications. You seem to be in need of a modern version of Pidgin that combines all of the different chat systems into a single app with a unified interface.
Clearly there are some people who value iMessage, for whatever reason. I have to imagine there are also plenty of people like myself who have been using the iPhone since version 4 simply because it's the best phone I've ever used, period. And the user experience of my iPhone + Macbook + Airpods just makes my life easier and more enjoyable in a lot of ways.
And I use iMessage because it's how I 'text' people, similar to how I used to text people on my Blackberry and my Razr and my Nokia before chat apps were a thing. I don't want to download chat apps - I just use what's convenient which is iMessage and it works great for my use case.
There is the personal story told of “I use to use Nokia and Razer and they were good, but I’ve been using Apple products for the last 11 years and I like them a lot” which is a story about brand loyalty developing in an article about an article about Apple developing brand loyalty in American teens. Combine that with the ~9% brand name usage in the textblock and the whole thing stuck out to me.
The only group I have seen care about iMessage colors and see it as a status symbol is high schoolers. Once I got to college, no one cared.
People just wanted to be able to talk easily. It was annoying to set up cross platform group messaging at first, but it hasn't been a problem for at least 6 years. The biggest thing pulling people to iMessage now is convenience and not wanting to figure out a different mutual platform.
A large portion of the current generation of kids are actually tied to Discord. I expect Discord to start dominating more and more as time goes on. Hackathons are organized and held on there. Clubs at my university have moved to Discord. There's a specific to my university Math discord and a separate CS one where even teachers interact. A lot of online streamers have set up their own branded discord for their community. I have heard some companies like Amazon even have a new hire Discord. Slack, iMessage, Whatsapp, and Messenger all lack things Discord provides.
I believe Discord is the endgame for group messaging. The way you can organize conversations in to categories and channels is a killer feature that no other service gets quite right. The way Discords use roles to help categorize people into groups and have granular permission control for who can access what content is so useful. It's a matter of when, not if Discord is the best service.
There is one big caveat to Discord right now and that's the lack of End to End encryption. Whatsapp and Signal are the only two messaging services I trust for privacy sensitive communication. I don't really care if government agencies snoop on the fact that I was playing Rocket League for the last two hours though. iMessage is E2E as well but only if you communicate with others that are also tied to the Apple ecosystem which makes it useless for me because a lot of my international friends aren't. I have an ipad that has my contacts synced so I can see who else has iMessage.
This can help a lot with adoption by “lame-sensitive” users. Snapchat’s confusing and unintuitive design kept “lame” parents, teachers, managers, etc off the platform and helped maintain a kind of exclusivity.
Discord still has that. Instagram is currently losing it. Skype once had it, but has long since lost it.
A platform that figures out how to be cool and stay cool will reap many benefits.
I'm not sure if I agree that's a valid disadvantage of using Discord though. The basic features of Discord are very easily to learn and you only come across the more complex features by needing to use them. I personally find IRC to be more complex to understand properly for a beginner. Being complex is anti-apple in terms of philosophy but I believe that it gives more usability in the long term.
Discord lacks multi account feature on mobile (some desktop support had come recently). It enforces use my "gamer" profile to all other community. Slack did it well from very beginning.
I have to disagree, I can setup a profile and name per discord. I strongly dislike Slack's method of having different accounts tied to a single email but each can potentially have a different password. I hate having to switch and log out and log into different Slacks and there's no clear way to see an overview of all of the ones I am in efficiently. It feels like a UX thing more than a functionality thing. Discord's UX for managing notifications and what communities I'm part of is very pleasant.
I am only a "gamer" in the gaming related Discords. There's no cross talk between two Discords unless the other people also share in being a part of both communities. People in a music related discord don't ask about the game I am playing unless they happen to be interested in it.
Discord is terrible for privacy though. No sane parent should encourage use of Discord for that reason alone. They collect literally everything they can get their hands on.
Discord is just the current iteration of the free messaging app treadmill. They aren't (or at least weren't, last I checked) profitable. Eventually they'll be bought and have to monetize somehow, which everyone will hate, and then we'll all move on to some other platform. As long as they are spending investors' money, though, they'll be great!
They will use imessage again when they aren't sitting in their rooms chatting. Waiting for a discord to load on a spotty mobile connection is no fun. Meanwhile imessage, either through its own channels or via sms, just works, and is still the best way to get a hold of people you know in real life, since the audio fallback is just as reliable too.
I feel like the core premise of the article is wrong. Google's problem is not a lack of innovation, but the complete opposite - there's _too much_ of it. Great Google products come out very often but few get "long term" treatment. Part of it is engineer churn/turnover, but a bigger factor imo is culture.
Is this an American thing to be so hung up on phone's builtin messaging software? Here in Eastern Europe everybody just use third-party messaging providers (Telegram and, unfortunately, Viber) that are available on every (major) platform.
The vast majority of people in the US don’t use a 3rd party app for messaging. Why this is I can only speculate. My guess is that we were marketed SMS as a “killer feature” of phones and phone plans during the pre-internet days of cell phones
Here in Europe, SMS used to be so expensive that nobody used them anymore when alternatives such as WhatsApp came up. In the meantime unlimited SMS are included in most contracts at no extra cost (or no choice) and still very few people use it anymore.
Interesting US only problem. In Europe people use whatsapp. In China they use <whatever's in fashion in China, iForgot the name>.
It's been ages since I've had less than unlimited text messages. I'd still rather not use those because they're crippled, and any "improvement" made by the phone providers will still be crippled compared to what a tcp/ip based app can do.
For example, I'm 100% sure any SMS "improvement" will still be tied to the phone. Even whatsapp is slowly moving away from that.
There's exactly one useful feature in iMessage compared to whatsapp. It recompresses your photos less. I use it when I want to send photos to a family member and that's all.
I can't understand why anyone would like to use iMessage, when you can use Telegram, whatsapp,... except stupidly for status signal.
In non apple world, I think that people almost never use sms anymore. Except for first contact with someone you don't know, or receiving advertisements, one time pin codes,...
For RCS, it is going nowhere because most of the users are not interested to let mobile carriers get back control over any of our non encrypted communications. They want to be more than a pipe to abuse of it for financial gain, we want them to be just a pipe.
> I can't understand why anyone would like to use iMessage, when you can use Telegram, whatsapp
People don't use iMessage, we use Messages, and iMessage is one of the protocols that it supports. And I use Messages preferentially because I know everyone will have iMessage or a SMS fallback and it Just Works. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to go to one of four apps to talk to somebody (I have Signal because of That One Friend but I don't open WhatsApp or Telegram ever despite having both). They're all in this one, and it's good enough. (Messages also works on my laptop without me having to install anything, which is minor but handy if I want to dash off a longer message--and just like Messages on iOS it'll send as a SMS or as an iMessage and I don't have to care which is which. And no, nobody I know socially uses email.)
I'm sure WhatsApp is a great alternative if you live in a country where Everyone Has It, but I do not.
Signal, Telegram, and Whatsapp all have very feature rich desktop apps. I personally love Whatsapp and the fact that I can go to a webpage, scan a QR code on my phone and have a functioning desktop experience regardless of where I am. iMessage doesn't "just work" if there's degraded functionality for people outside the Apple ecosystem. I'm not sure what good enough means, that's really specific to the features you need. I actually strongly dislike how terrible sharing files between an iOS and Android user is if you choose to stick with iMessage. What's worse is the poor file system structure that iOS exposes where you can't manipulate and share files directly. If I want to share a song I have saved on my phone through a message, I should be able to share it like I would a picture. Having iMessage and sending to another iMessage user doesn't help in that situation. I'm also not sure what country you live in where you imagine everyone has a single messaging platform. Most people I know just use multiple apps and are willing to put in the effort it takes to switch apps.
Signal's desktop app takes, and this is not an exaggeration, minutes to start on a desktop once you have a few thousand messages for it to chew on. Signal also likes losing your login besides so you have to re-pair it to your phone, losing message history on the desktop in the process.
Messages is instant and doesn't lose history. And nobody I know uses Telegram or WhatsApp. If they work for you, then more power to you, but they do for me. Because with them I can talk to anybody if I need to, and if Android people don't like getting 3GPP videos or whatever that's just not really a problem that I care about.
The bar is really, really low. I'm sure WhatsApp or Telegram pass it if you know people who care about them. I don't, and I suspect most Americans are in the same boat on that one.
I care about how media gets transcoded. Effective communication is based on clear communication.
Signal on desktop with more than 10k messages opens in less than 10 seconds for me. Similarly with Whatsapp web. The only time Signal desktop has "lost" my login is when I uninstalled and reinstalled it on my phone. Which makes sense because it means it refreshed the cryptographic keys associated with my account.
Signal doesn't have an easy way to transfer messages to desktop or messages to a new phone by choice due to privacy reasons. It's not a decision I agree with, but it's a decision I understand.
Whatsapp is fine in terms of transferring messages and is instant. It's better than iMessage because it has the same major features while being platform independent. The unfortunate thing actually is that iOS makes it harder to backup the actual database of messages for something like Whatsapp or iMessage because it intentionally hides the files from you. I know many friends that have gotten upset that they lost their messages, because their iPhone died for whatever reason. It's really hard to recover data from a dead phone without paying a lot of money, if it's even possible. On the other hand I use a microsd card in my Android and my Whatsapp database is mirrored to it. I have some messages going back more than 10 years without having to use any sort of cloud backup solution or rely on the good grace of itunes backing things up properly. You need root access to get the Whatsapp key on an Android, but once you have it, you can decrypt the copied message database on desktop.
As of Oct 2021, there's an option to make an E2E encrypted Whatsapp backup based on a key of your own choosing. That means I can use a cloud backup and still maintain privacy over my data.
I care about making it easy for others to be able to communicate with me regardless of what they use, you don't have to care though.
I use it bc ~95% of the people that I message with use it as well. It’s a rare day when I text with someone who doesn’t have iMessage. I don’t know for sure, but I’m quite confident that a significantly smaller fraction of those people use any of the other messaging apps with any frequency.
To me it seems less of a status symbol and more driven by network effects. (Say what you will about my network)
People only use it because they have an iphone and that's the default way to try and send a message. No one past maybe high school where you are judged for everything says "I need an iPhone so I can use iMessage." I bet most adults don't even understand that iMessage is its own protocal that is separate from sms because other than the blue color and sending confetti or whatever, it functions exactly the same from the end users perspective as sms. Most people have no clue at all. The only people who care are the people writing these articles and the techie people reading them.
Jumping between iMessage, telegram, WhatsApp, and slack, the big missing feature in iMessage for me is the inability to delete messages. It’s way too easy to select the wrong photo or text the wrong person and have to awkwardly wiggle your way out of it. WhatsApp shows the message was deleted and has (had?) a timeout for the delete which feels like a nice implementation. Telegram’s deletion functionality of your and the recipients messages without leaving a trace might be overkill for iMessage.
this is a dumb take, implying you must have chat presence on every phone in the world to not be a failure. imessage isn’t that product. i think for iphone owners the messages app is still the preferred solution for all messages. you’ll use others if needed, but you’d rather not. it’s a great app because most people use it naturally without even thinking. apple business chat is going to bring in a lot of revenue for apple. i message has a strong future
WeChat is a China based app and most of the rest of then are hoovered up by Facebook Inc. Do you really want an ad company to be greping through all your allegedly secure message? China based apps speak for themselves in the current climate.
iMessage seems like a fine solution to me when I want to send IMs. I'm not interested in all the chaff associated with recent IM enhancements. They all seem pretty irrelevant to the main function: text and photos sending.
RCS sucks, but it's the best path to cross-platform messaging that can (and should) be end-to-end encrypted (RCS already supports the Signal protocol for E2EE).
I'd love to see a better privacy/security messaging standard, but let's get something in there incrementally like RCS.
On a side note, can Google allow Android devs to implement RCS in other apps than Google Messages and Samsung Messages, please?
Another big article over a simple thing. Reading these feels like people (not only the author) are focused on problems and not on solutions, and they mix everything together into the political drama.
If the problem is green bubbles being ostracized for some teen-idiotic reason, would you like to know what to do?
Make them all the same color.
Yes, iMessage is SMS. The color is there for you to see if a message will be sent over SMS or over the internet, because SMS may cost money. Specifically, there are two colored things: a message itself and a "send" button, one shows the past, other shows the future. Leave the coloring of the button and own messages intact, and make all incoming bubbles blue. Or green, if you feel funny. There's a reason to see how you send, but no reason to see how it was delivered. That's it. No more issue. End of story.
I had an Android phone when RCS was rolling out. It never worked. Well before then, iMessage - like most message platforms - already did everything that RCS did and far better.
Thank gosh Apple (and other message apps) decided to keep improving instead of waiting on telecom companies to build and support this standard.
No other messaging app is as simple and easy to use as iMessages. I have no inclination to use FB/WhatsApp (though it's popular especially for international cases). I'm never going to convince all my friends to download and switch to something like telegram/signal.
iMessage is simply the best SMS/Rich messaging platform that, like a lot of what Apple does, Just Works.
I will never trust a google messaging service to last and be around in 5 years. They have a massive graveyard here.
I think you are missing the point - quite a bit. No one is asking Apple to give up iMessage and replace it with RCS. The ask is to replace SMS fallback with RCS fallback. When you message someone without an iPhone, you currently use SMS. Even though you are using the iMessage app, the message is sent using SMS.
With RCS instead of SMS, iMessage will continue to "Just Work" as it does right now. iOS<->iOS will still happen over iMessage.
> I had an Android phone when RCS was rolling out. It never worked.
It has rolled out now though. No one asked iMessage to support RCS back then. They are being asked now. So it's not relevant what happened with you whenever you had Android phone.
> Well before then, iMessage - like most message platforms - already did everything that RCS did and far better.
iMessage did that for iOS<->iOS communication. Not for messages sent over SMS.
> No other messaging app is as simple and easy to use as iMessages.
This won't change with RCS.
> I will never trust a google messaging service to last and be around in 5 years.
The protocol should stay there as the SMS one is still around. If G gives up support, the fallback for RCS is... SMS which is anyway supported by iMessage already.
Disc: Googler but nowhere close to Android, RCS, any messaging app.
Not really. Google is giving the middle finger to carriers who implemented Universal Profile on their own rather than use Jibe. And we now have fragmentation even before there was time for significant adoption.
That said, your points about iMessage are right. I believe RCS support might actually help iMessage in some markets, since SMS fallback is precisely the reason people won't use it.
I kind of agree with this article. I think Apple doesn't think a lot about their competition in a sense that they solely focus on the user experience of their products and don't worry with trying to push for interopability with other products. But the whole bullying thing because of the background colour seems laughable.
I also think that they have a big advantage because they have a narrow range of products (there aren't 50 different iPhones) that they can sell at a high volume giving them a lot of leverage with suppliers. Additionally they control the whole stack and probably should be able to offer a superior product compared to their competition if they execute right.
I'm not sure if this warrants intervention from regulators. As a consumer I see potential for a great product that simply isn't possible if multiple companies design different elements of the stack. There are much bigger conflicts of interest and you may be using the same software and parts as your competitor so they will never be as specialized.
I'm not sure if these advantages are fair. Should a hardware manufacturer not be allowed to develop an operating system for their hardware? Should the developer of an operating system not be allowed to develop and integrate services into their operating system?
I guess I could extend this thinking to the overall centralization in the tech space. Which is convenient and really worrying at the same time.
I live outside U.S. and I had a few iPhones in the last years… I almost never used iMessage. Mostly because 50% of my contacts use Android or other apps on iOS (WhatsApp).
About the apps, I am forced to use WeChat because some of my friends live in China and that is the only communication channel they have… but it is the worst experience I ever had. Even Viber was better. And in China it’s heavily controlled.
Among my contacts in Europe, Telegram is widely used and becoming almost “a standard”… only a very few use Signal.
It’s less about blue bubbles and more about functionality. I don’t want WhatsApp as my main messaging app. And I can’t get critical mass on Signal. And sure as shit not FB Messenger or Telegram or Snapchat….
Even if Apple made all chat bubbles blue, I’d still get ultra low shitty videos from my “Android friends” sending a clip and not thinking about SMS limits. Maybe it looks fine on their end. On my end, get the magnifying glass out.
Or having too many people on a text thread? Wtf? Is this 20 years ago?
I also don’t get the hard core Google defensiveness thing. This is a company that mines everything they can get from you to sell ads to you…Who notoriously cancels services or fails to execute fully on them. Google Chat/Talk/Voice was confusing. Which do we use? And what about that bizarre email experiment? Voice is my favorite Google product by far. I don’t use Chrome for privacy reasons, but admit I’m stuck on Gmail. I tried to de Google my email, and then realized that having my email off of Google was cool except so many people I email were on it, so they have it anyway…
I don’t really care if your chat bubble is green or blue or red. I just want it to work with whatever I’m sending and be encrypted. SMS isn’t. Carriers retain. Why subject myself to that?
It’s for sending text messages. Please can we have some apps that just remain simple and don’t have to metastasise into social networks mining our thoughts?
You know what app I never use on my phone? The phone app. Is there any actual anxiety about this? Does it need to morph into a Clubhouse-style swamp of dark patterns trying to turn audio in money? No. It just needs to sit there for when I might need to phone someone.
> The theory goes that in most countries, people fled traditional text messaging faster than in the U.S., due to more onerous per-message fees–and Apple was just too late to the party.
Whose theory? Feels bogus: Here (and in most of Europe AFAIK), SMS has been free-unlimited since Idunnowhen, and hundreds included back when there were still limits shortly after the turn of the century. Pretty much all the whining about limits I can recall has been from Americans.
And that's not to mention the Gruber article they link to as "proof" of the iPhone's general superiority... Say what you want about that "fireball", but for a supposedly independent and critical Apple observer, he doesn't feel all that "daring"... That was the most revoltingly gushing piece of Appleologia I've seen in a long while.
Was anyone else’s first response to this submission something along the lines of, “wow, MacWorld is still around?” I remember when they started muscling in on MacUser with a frankly inferior product, but were so successful that they crushed it. And then MacAddict tried to be the scrappy underdog.
> Let’s start with the obvious: the only people having this conversation about iMessage are Americans. In most of the world, iMessage is an afterthought. Platform-agnostic chat apps like WeChat, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger dominate, though the particular apps in question vary from country to country.
Excuse me? Anyone using an iPhone and messing someone with an iPhone is using iMessage. I'm in an EU country and I have specifically made an effort to notice what sort of messaging platform people use and by far if they're on iOS they're using iMessage.
Such a bold and impudent statement to make! It's baffling how they can even write such a title and paragraph.
Ah it's my own messages that are green (took me a while to find one). Ok, so I think I used iMessage at some point, not sure though. Have to admit that that green bubble feels a bit dated, so perhaps it's on purpose? Anyway, nobody uses iMessage here, I don't remember ever seeing a blue bubble in the messages app, it's al Whatsapp here, which is actually worse, at least iPhone users seamlessly switch between sms and iMessages, in Whatsapp you're left out with a dumbphone (and I know people with dumbphones still). Then again, they may avoid Whatsapp on purpose.
I'm too old (mid 30s) to waste time chasing apps. If it comes with the OS, namely the default SMS messaging app, I use it. When I was on Android, that's all I used and I could contact everyone. Same on iOS now. If anyone was annoyed at sending me SMS, then it meant their comms wasn't important enough — automatic filtering.
I used whatsapp exclusively for years before moving to iMessage.
This post misses the point just how much Apple users like iMessage.
The reason iMessage is not popular in other countries is: Ubiquity trumps everything. iPhone is a unaffordable luxury good outside a few rich countries. Apple pricing is horrible.
imo, and most likely all Apple users: iMessage UX is better than WhatsApp
Blue texts are definitely most of the reason I have an iPhone. It's just not possible to have conversations over text with SMS speeds and 90% of my friends refuse to get messaging apps. I could care less about the prestige, but most of my communication happens over text. Other big reason is how well iOS works with airpods.
I think the biggest problem is not the green bubbles but the damn group chats. There’s no way to have a group chat with multiple iPhones and androids without it turning into a mess. I don’t know where to point the blame it that situation but it does make you want to stick to the dominant platform.
What kind of a mess are we talking about here? I haven’t had any group chat issues (android and iOS participants) for the last few years.. I do remember it would bug out on occasion but I just haven’t seen any of that in a long time. I have a 3 and a 10 person group chat that has both android and iOS users… dont know if there is some threshold before issues start cropping up.
Any company has a better messaging software than Google.
Why?
Because Google didn't even have one. Bingo, none of their offering is going to work reliably for whatever purpose and that is not user's fault, and frankly speaking, it is 2022, there is no room for them anymore.
This article does not mention the word 'security' even once.. Weird, considering the recent scandals and that company's reluctance to fix them on time.
Everything should just be Matrix protocol at this point. 40m users so far. A long way to go until it is anywhere approaching as ubiquitous as email, but I hold hope.
iMessage being incompatible with different platforms makes it pretty shit compared to other apps that work on everything.
Outside of the US iPhone users have other messaging apps on their phone.
But I don't think Apple ever really wanted to corner this market anyway and don't really care. Same way they never wanted to beat Windows or Lenovo with their Macs.
Can’t you mix Apple account with phone numbers if everyone is using iMessage? And if everyone isn’t on iMessage it would defeat the purpose and might as well use an android, no?
You shouldn't have total control over a shared message. You have no right to delete something that you sent to someone else from their device. Same reason you can't delete an email you sent to someone from their inbox or burn a letter you sent via mail.
> You shouldn't have total control over a shared message.
I don't think we should be beholden to the mechanics of snail mail or email (almost 30 years old) when we're designing technologies in 2022 and beyond.
It's impossible to send hundreds of mail envelopes, and would be hard to send hundreds of emails in a minute, and both take deliberate action to accomplish. But I can easily send 100 chat messages in a minute, and in that mode of communication with its web of connections, mistakes are easy to make and speaking for myself I appreciate the ability to correct them.
With that said using telegram has been a breath of fresh air (and I hear whatsapp has it too)
We're not beholden. They are simply good ideas that extend beyond the medium (letters, telegrams, and emails included).
It mimics life, you cannot unsay something.
If someone is hostile in a message towards me, and then deletes that message, in a situation where this eventually goes to court or some other formal proceeding, I need evidence of their action for my own defense.
> mistakes are easy to make and speaking for myself I appreciate the ability to correct them.
Mistakes can be corrected - spelling, factual, or otherwise. Followup messages, staring to correct a spelling mistake, talking on the phone, leaving a voicemail etc.
This is wrong. Google had a very good messaging system, Google Talk. It worked really well, was based on open standards, supported federation, video/audio calls and was making its way into smartphones. For example, the Nokia 770-N9 series supported Google Talk as early as Q2 2006. Calls based on an open standard in a smartphone, already in 2006...
However, internal politics at Google led to the discontinuation of Google Talk in favor of a long stream of confusing and half-finished attempts: Google Chat, Hangouts, Duo, Spaces, Allo and Meet. I've lost track of how many different services they have come up with. Apparently there's more of them I didn't even know about [1]. It's comical and sad, since the first one was great and had tons of users thanks to being embedded into Gmail.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...