This is setting up a false binary for people to argue fruitlessly over. It's not the market leader in many places, but it's not a complete failure either.
This is setting up a false binary for people to argue fruitlessly over. It's not the market leader in many places, but it's not a complete failure either.
Uh, what? Despite the headline (which is what you mostly seem to be responding to?), IMO the author actually presents a pretty balanced discussion about iMessage, talking about some of the ways it...
Uh, what? Despite the headline (which is what you mostly seem to be responding to?), IMO the author actually presents a pretty balanced discussion about iMessage, talking about some of the ways it has succeeded, but also where they think it has largely failed.
iMessage’s role is to provide a solid, end-to-end encrypted service for the Apple ecosystem that (secondarily) can coexist with SMS messages so that iPhones can exchange messages with people who aren’t in Apple’s ecosystem. It works. It’s better than anything Google has attempted. The problem is, it’s not good enough.
Apple’s UX failure
The reason that I consider iMessage more of a failure than success is all about its slow pace of development and poor choices, especially compared with the WhatsApps and WeChats of the world.
The author backs off a bit with "more of a failure than success" but there is still the question of whether popularity in the US alone counts as a success, or maybe just popularity among younger...
The author backs off a bit with "more of a failure than success" but there is still the question of whether popularity in the US alone counts as a success, or maybe just popularity among younger people in the US, to the point where some look down on Android users. (Or so I've heard from enough places that it seems to be real.)
The author does make some good points. I just wanted to head off that sort of conversation by pointing out that the success/failure framework shouldn't be taken too seriously. I think of it as the "Is jazz dead" conversation.
But maybe that was too preemptive of me. Imagining how a silly debate would go doesn't mean it would happen.
Fair enough. I was even tempted to edit the headline to be less clickbaity in that regard, for similar reasoning, but there was no lede and I didn't feel like trying to come up with one myself.
I just wanted to head off that sort of conversation
Fair enough. I was even tempted to edit the headline to be less clickbaity in that regard, for similar reasoning, but there was no lede and I didn't feel like trying to come up with one myself.
This is the single most important feature in a chat program. Any friend group with a mix of iphone and android is going to end up using a different program. Mine uses Discord, which does...
Platform-agnostic chat apps like WeChat, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger
This is the single most important feature in a chat program. Any friend group with a mix of iphone and android is going to end up using a different program. Mine uses Discord, which does everything those listed programs do, but better.
The goal was to change Apple’s operating systems so they were no longer dependent on the ancient, carrier-controlled SMS text message system.
I mean, sort of? If your only inter-op with any other platform is SMS than you've just created an SMS app that sheds SMS as people onboard. Results in a more-tightly controlled messaging system exclusive to your ecosystem, especially when the fallback SMS provides an inferior experience. But that's really been Apple's focus for over 20 years. Apple almost never puts interoperability first. Back to the original iPod (circa 2001), they made design choices that heavily favored or were exclusive to their operating system. It wasn't until version 4.0 that there was even a windows version of iTunes, and the original iPods were firewire, which was fairly rare outside of Apple machines at the time.
I was going to refute what you were saying, but I slowly realized that I know more people/groups than I originally thought who use non-SMS and iMessage. My old college roommates and I use Facebook...
Any friend group with a mix of iphone and android is going to end up using a different program. Mine uses Discord, which does everything those listed programs do, but better.
I was going to refute what you were saying, but I slowly realized that I know more people/groups than I originally thought who use non-SMS and iMessage. My old college roommates and I use Facebook Messenger. For work, we use Teams day-to-day, even for joking around after hours, but also WhatsApp when we travel in group (Idk why we don't just stick with Teams alone). I, a co-worker, and a former co-worker use WhatsApp to talk privately/personally. My gaming friends and I use Discord. I used to play a mobile MMO called "Galaxy on Fire: Alliances" years ago, and the preferred medium was LINE since the community was global.
The most resistance I've found to using nicer messaging applications is family. For example, my brother and I are on iOS, but our parents are on Android. I've tried to get them all to use WhatsApp or Signal with me, but only my mom got on board. The only time we all used WhatsApp was when some of us were traveling overseas since data is easy to get and cheap. But as soon as we were all Stateside again, that stopped. Think my dad and brother outright removed the app.
Same with extended family. The aunts and cousins love using group texts. But god is it annoying to get stuck in one of those. There's no way out and now with the iMessage tapbacks, we all just get spammed with "So and so loved this." My favorite is when one aunt starts talking to another in the group text. It'll go one for awhile before I or someone else says something! But there're no proposals or movement to use a single messaging system to do away with that.
The difference, I suppose, has to do with privacy of phone numbers. With my gaming friends, we didn't want to give out phone numbers to people who, at the time, were just random people on the Internet. For work, we got tired of having to deal with changing phone numbers and contacts as people came and went. Plus we work with hotel staff during travel, and they tended to use WhatsApp for receiving our on-site requests. For family, however, of course we all freely give out phone numbers to each other. Though Idk why my college roommates and I use FB Messenger.
I'll toss this out there: My inlaws love discord. We got them onboarded by being the exclusive way to see grandkid pics. It got us through the pandemic, provided a great way to do video (discord...
I'll toss this out there:
My inlaws love discord. We got them onboarded by being the exclusive way to see grandkid pics. It got us through the pandemic, provided a great way to do video (discord on pc hooked to tv for couch-scale holiday chats).
We've got about 10 people on it, and we keep 5ish active text channels of different topics going all the time. The eldest is 89, so nobody can leverage the "I'm too old for Discord" excuse. And if the group chats are too much, you mute the channel.
That said, I was starting college when Facebook had just started branching out to other colleges. So I get the FB Messager for that one.
That's good to know. I appreciate your insight. I'd be thrilled if I could get at least my parents on Discord. My brother and I already have it. And it's actually becoming the main way the two of...
That's good to know. I appreciate your insight.
I'd be thrilled if I could get at least my parents on Discord. My brother and I already have it. And it's actually becoming the main way the two of us communicate digitally. In a way, my brother was the hardest one to convince to use WhatsApp. So my parents should be easy.
This is the thing about Messages that absolutely drives me up the wall. It's especially annoying at work when we get a message come in and it's just someone "liking" something we sent them. Apple...
There's no way out and now with the iMessage tapbacks, we all just get spammed with "So and so loved this."
This is the thing about Messages that absolutely drives me up the wall. It's especially annoying at work when we get a message come in and it's just someone "liking" something we sent them. Apple is 100% in the wrong for making their service spam people who don't own their products.
The funny part is that it spams everyone in a mixed group text. My brother and I, being iOS users, use it frequently in our message to each other. No problem. But in the extended family group...
The funny part is that it spams everyone in a mixed group text. My brother and I, being iOS users, use it frequently in our message to each other. No problem.
But in the extended family group texts, if one person does it, the rest of the recipients - iOS or Android - gets the HTML-like "alt" of the Tapback. At the very least, Apple could have at created a way to parse the text and turn it back into a Tapback for iOS users. Or better yet, turn off Tapbacks in a mixed setting.
As Jason Snell says, iMessage could be so much better than it is but Apple just hasn't iterated the way that other platforms have. They tried some things a few years ago, like adding iMessage Apps...
As Jason Snell says, iMessage could be so much better than it is but Apple just hasn't iterated the way that other platforms have.
They tried some things a few years ago, like adding iMessage Apps that were a total bomb. It just doesn't seem like a platform they care about. They get their lock in for free when you insert your SIM into an iPhone so there's just no incentive.
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.
I keep hearing this refrain but I have been using an iPhone on and off since iMessage launched and I have never once cared about someone using an Android phone and having to text them. And I've also never heard anyone else complain about it.
I really think this is blown way out of proportion. No one genuinely cares. It's almost like someone heard someone else make a joke about it and thought it was a serious comment. It just kept getting spun and spun until it was some big thing.
I don’t think people care too much in direct messages, it’s group chats where the problems start. If you invite an android user, it means downgrading the group for everyone and losing a lot of...
I don’t think people care too much in direct messages, it’s group chats where the problems start. If you invite an android user, it means downgrading the group for everyone and losing a lot of features people want. So it becomes “let’s not invite them, they use android and it will ruin the group”
This is only an issue if your friend group uses iMessage though, and it seems discord is a lot more common. I actually agree with Apple blocking RCS though because it’s just another shitty carrier controlled platform with no desktop support. Killing of SMS and using internet IM programs is just a better solution.
What is astounding is just how badly google has failed. It’s not that they just weren’t good enough, but that they seem to actively want to destroy their own products. Virtually everyone knows apples message program is iMessage. What is googles app of the month? Who knows.
I've never had someone say, "Oh don't start a group chat with X because she doesn't have an iPhone." I can't imagine caring about something like that... As for Google's messaging situation, you're...
I've never had someone say, "Oh don't start a group chat with X because she doesn't have an iPhone." I can't imagine caring about something like that...
As for Google's messaging situation, you're right. It's made even worse by the fact that their current product is literally just called "Messages". And if you have a Samsung phone (the biggest Android phone manufacturer), it comes with a Samsung-made app called "Messages" as the default app instead of the Google "Messages" app. And the Samsung app doesn't support RCS via Google, only via your cell carrier. So unless your carrier has enabled RCS, you can't use it via the Samsung app.
Really? Definitely seen that happen before. It's something that kinda creeps up. Of course, for something very important, like oh grandma X is in the hospital here's the groupchat to let everyone...
Really? Definitely seen that happen before. It's something that kinda creeps up. Of course, for something very important, like oh grandma X is in the hospital here's the groupchat to let everyone know how she's doing, yeah no one cares if you're on Android or not.
But, say, the 5-7 person groupchat for sending cat pictures. Well, if anyone with an Android is there, then we all go back to sending caveman images via SMS. So Android users are excluded - but hey, it's just a cat picture group. Not like they'd want the experience of loading SMS images anyway.
Then, suddenly people start making dinner plans using the cat picture group - it's a groupchat with a circle of friends already in it, why make another one? Let's just reuse this one, it's a casual invitation anyway.
Well, suddenly Android people are being excluded from plans. That's generally how it happens from my experience. Not explicitly excluding Android users, that's kinda silly, although maybe it happens in middle/high school just as a status thing, but an "ugh" malaise that the moment you invite an android user the whole group gets downgraded that you keep procrastinating on. "Well, I should probably invite Bob, we're doing more than cat pictures... but ugh, I don't want to be the person who ruins in the gc, well let's just wait a bit more, maybe I'll start a messenger group instead <proceeds to do no such thing>"
When schools shut down back in 2020 due to COVID, pretty much all my collaboration with my colleagues moved to group messaging. Most schools don't have Slack or anything like it, and even if they...
When schools shut down back in 2020 due to COVID, pretty much all my collaboration with my colleagues moved to group messaging. Most schools don't have Slack or anything like it, and even if they did, most teachers (or at least the ones I work with) wouldn't know how to use them. So, we used what everyone did know: our phones.
I ended up in several different groups for different teams that I worked with (e.g. grade level, department, etc.), and I was the sole Android user in all of them -- everybody else had iPhones. Most of the people I work with were so embedded with iPhones both themselves and with their contacts that they didn't even know what was going on with the groups and the green bubbles and the different UX. I had to field a lot of "Why can't we just add someone to the group instead of making a new one?" and "Why aren't reactions working?" questions. That, and I had an absurdly high delivery failure rate both for messages I sent and received. I'd miss entire messages, or they'd arrive out of order.
It really highlighted how ridiculous our current state of fragmented messaging is, and when I got a new phone in late 2020, I chose an iPhone. The decision was in part because I've moved away from Google due to privacy concerns but mostly it was because having iMessage made my professional environment so much smoother. Now I'm not the one person screwing up everybody's else's chats. I hate that group messaging is even how we're professionally communicating in the first place, but I'm also still mad at Apple for refusing to release an iMessage app for Android.
I used to have issues with group text messages (which are technically MMS) when I used Cricket (they’re a budget carrier owned by AT&T in the U.S.). Their forums were always full of people...
I used to have issues with group text messages (which are technically MMS) when I used Cricket (they’re a budget carrier owned by AT&T in the U.S.). Their forums were always full of people complaining about that. Since I switched to a different carrier, I’ve never had that issue reoccur.
But what you’re describing seems like more of an institutional failing than anything to do with messaging platforms. The school’s IT people should have stepped up right away and said, “here’s what we are standardizing on. Everyone make sure to install this app on your phone and use this for communication and planning. If you need help, we can walk you through it.”
All of the confusion you described should be directed at the IT people and they should walk people through it. And the confusion would be there regardless of the messaging platform, since most people are relatively computer illiterate. They know the bare minimum they need to in order to do their job.
When we went into lockdown here, our IT department got everybody set up to work from home and had remote training for people to learn how to use Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
This is very true. I'm not exaggerating when I say that what you're suggesting is well outside of our IT department's purview, which is not a dig at them in the slightest (they're great). We...
But what you’re describing seems like more of an institutional failing than anything to do with messaging platforms.
This is very true. I'm not exaggerating when I say that what you're suggesting is well outside of our IT department's purview, which is not a dig at them in the slightest (they're great). We pretty much have the bare minimum IT staff necessary to ensure that we have internet, Chromebooks for the kids (and the many, MANY issues that come with that), and printing capabilities. They're already overworked just managing that for an entire school district. Implementing entire new communication systems, much less training the teachers on them, would be unheard of.
For perspective: because I'm good with computers (relative to most people in education), I've been doing de facto tech support my entire career because we don't institutionally prioritize it. When COVID hit, I directly supported many of my coworkers, showing them how to set up remote lessons and run video classes. I actually made some tutorial videos for kids with digital learning basics (e.g. muting and unmuting on video chat, tiling windows side by side on the screen, etc.) that ended up getting passed around from staff member to staff member because they were all trying to figure it out themselves with little to no institutional help. None of this was my actual job responsibility -- it never has been -- but I am not exaggerating when I say I literally do it all the time.
I'll 90% agree with you. I very very rarely care about if the person I am texting has an iphone or not. The only exception to that is if I am on my laptop and my phone isn't nearby. I can use...
I'll 90% agree with you. I very very rarely care about if the person I am texting has an iphone or not. The only exception to that is if I am on my laptop and my phone isn't nearby. I can use messager on my laptop to text other iphone users or groupchats that are all iphone, but I can't do that if I am texting an android phone. I wouldn't say that's ever been more than a slight annoyance though.
Thanks for this! I had the same complaint that @Micycle_the_Bichael had (fantastic username) and this resolves it. I do most of my texting via my Mac so this is great.
Thanks for this! I had the same complaint that @Micycle_the_Bichael had (fantastic username) and this resolves it. I do most of my texting via my Mac so this is great.
Here's the official Apple instructions. Just FYI, you do have to manually enable it for new devices. So if you ever get a new laptop, you'll have to manually toggle that on.
Here's the official Apple instructions. Just FYI, you do have to manually enable it for new devices. So if you ever get a new laptop, you'll have to manually toggle that on.
I wish the author had spent any time talking about why they view things as failures rather than just saying them and moving on. What does "flop" mean here? I have and still use that app menu...
I wish the author had spent any time talking about why they view things as failures rather than just saying them and moving on.
The truth is, at some point Apple realized it was competing with those apps. The result was its introduction of the iMessage App Store, which it clearly thought would take the world by storm. It was a flop. Which, fair enough–Apple took its shot and it missed.
What does "flop" mean here? I have and still use that app menu regularly. Is universal adoption what it takes for something to be considered a success? Can something not be a success if it works for the people who want it without negatively impacting those who don't? Just because it didn't become the defining feature of iMessage doesn't mean it was a flop, at least IMO.
Similarly..
Apple recently introduced replies and mentions to iMessage. They’re… not great? But I appreciate the attempt. I hope Apple is working on new tweaks to improve the experience–but my fear is that it will just walk away from that feature, too, and it’ll sit there being not-quite-right for all eternity.
What's wrong with them? Again, I use the reply and tapback features in groupchats with and without android users and none of us have a problem with it. I find the reply feature in iMessage to be better than Discord's reply feature. When you're in an all-iphone groupchat the reply feature works better than discord, and when an android phone is involved it is equally as bad as Discord. They don't list any reasons that it is a failure, or what any of the problems are. They just matter-of-factly say "this is bad" and then move on.
The RCS stuff is the closest they get to defending a point and they still don't really. The closest they get is
But in the end, the real reason Apple should support RCS (as a green bubble, or perhaps a new color of bubble) is that it’s a more full-featured protocol that will mean that the experiences of everyone in mixed-platform environments–iPhone and Android users alike–will be better than they are currently. It’s a usability issue on the iPhone, not just on Android.
which still doesn't tell me any of the features RCS brings that SMS doesn't or why they would improve my experience. They just say "it has more features and will make the experience better".
To wrap this up, I'm not saying that the author is wrong; they very well could be correct about everything they are saying. I'm saying they haven't developed any point in their argument enough that I could agree with or refute it.
I really, really wished that messaging had developed like email had...in that: one is not tied to a specific phone number/identity (though in email, you can if you wish choose something that is...
I really, really wished that messaging had developed like email had...in that:
one is not tied to a specific phone number/identity (though in email, you can if you wish choose something that is less anonymous, and in fact clearly expressing your true identity... e.g. hotdude123@whatver.net vs john.smith-job-applicant@something.net)
not tied to a specific app (with email of course i can choose to use any reasonable mail client)
less centrally controlled i.e. not tied to a carrier/provider (for email, if my email address uses my own domain name, i can switch mail providers with little to no impact on ability to send and receive messages from my existing contacts, etc.)
But, i get, capitalism and the movements of the masses and such. Le sigh.
EDIT: I forgot to add of course the very important of interoperability across any/all/most systems ...e.g. an email from john@something.net can be sent to/received by linda.something@gmail.com, etc.
This is setting up a false binary for people to argue fruitlessly over. It's not the market leader in many places, but it's not a complete failure either.
Uh, what? Despite the headline (which is what you mostly seem to be responding to?), IMO the author actually presents a pretty balanced discussion about iMessage, talking about some of the ways it has succeeded, but also where they think it has largely failed.
Which the author then expands on, at length.
The author backs off a bit with "more of a failure than success" but there is still the question of whether popularity in the US alone counts as a success, or maybe just popularity among younger people in the US, to the point where some look down on Android users. (Or so I've heard from enough places that it seems to be real.)
The author does make some good points. I just wanted to head off that sort of conversation by pointing out that the success/failure framework shouldn't be taken too seriously. I think of it as the "Is jazz dead" conversation.
But maybe that was too preemptive of me. Imagining how a silly debate would go doesn't mean it would happen.
Fair enough. I was even tempted to edit the headline to be less clickbaity in that regard, for similar reasoning, but there was no lede and I didn't feel like trying to come up with one myself.
This is the single most important feature in a chat program. Any friend group with a mix of iphone and android is going to end up using a different program. Mine uses Discord, which does everything those listed programs do, but better.
I mean, sort of? If your only inter-op with any other platform is SMS than you've just created an SMS app that sheds SMS as people onboard. Results in a more-tightly controlled messaging system exclusive to your ecosystem, especially when the fallback SMS provides an inferior experience. But that's really been Apple's focus for over 20 years. Apple almost never puts interoperability first. Back to the original iPod (circa 2001), they made design choices that heavily favored or were exclusive to their operating system. It wasn't until version 4.0 that there was even a windows version of iTunes, and the original iPods were firewire, which was fairly rare outside of Apple machines at the time.
I was going to refute what you were saying, but I slowly realized that I know more people/groups than I originally thought who use non-SMS and iMessage. My old college roommates and I use Facebook Messenger. For work, we use Teams day-to-day, even for joking around after hours, but also WhatsApp when we travel in group (Idk why we don't just stick with Teams alone). I, a co-worker, and a former co-worker use WhatsApp to talk privately/personally. My gaming friends and I use Discord. I used to play a mobile MMO called "Galaxy on Fire: Alliances" years ago, and the preferred medium was LINE since the community was global.
The most resistance I've found to using nicer messaging applications is family. For example, my brother and I are on iOS, but our parents are on Android. I've tried to get them all to use WhatsApp or Signal with me, but only my mom got on board. The only time we all used WhatsApp was when some of us were traveling overseas since data is easy to get and cheap. But as soon as we were all Stateside again, that stopped. Think my dad and brother outright removed the app.
Same with extended family. The aunts and cousins love using group texts. But god is it annoying to get stuck in one of those. There's no way out and now with the iMessage tapbacks, we all just get spammed with "So and so loved this." My favorite is when one aunt starts talking to another in the group text. It'll go one for awhile before I or someone else says something! But there're no proposals or movement to use a single messaging system to do away with that.
The difference, I suppose, has to do with privacy of phone numbers. With my gaming friends, we didn't want to give out phone numbers to people who, at the time, were just random people on the Internet. For work, we got tired of having to deal with changing phone numbers and contacts as people came and went. Plus we work with hotel staff during travel, and they tended to use WhatsApp for receiving our on-site requests. For family, however, of course we all freely give out phone numbers to each other. Though Idk why my college roommates and I use FB Messenger.
I'll toss this out there:
My inlaws love discord. We got them onboarded by being the exclusive way to see grandkid pics. It got us through the pandemic, provided a great way to do video (discord on pc hooked to tv for couch-scale holiday chats).
We've got about 10 people on it, and we keep 5ish active text channels of different topics going all the time. The eldest is 89, so nobody can leverage the "I'm too old for Discord" excuse. And if the group chats are too much, you mute the channel.
That said, I was starting college when Facebook had just started branching out to other colleges. So I get the FB Messager for that one.
That's good to know. I appreciate your insight.
I'd be thrilled if I could get at least my parents on Discord. My brother and I already have it. And it's actually becoming the main way the two of us communicate digitally. In a way, my brother was the hardest one to convince to use WhatsApp. So my parents should be easy.
This is the thing about Messages that absolutely drives me up the wall. It's especially annoying at work when we get a message come in and it's just someone "liking" something we sent them. Apple is 100% in the wrong for making their service spam people who don't own their products.
The funny part is that it spams everyone in a mixed group text. My brother and I, being iOS users, use it frequently in our message to each other. No problem.
But in the extended family group texts, if one person does it, the rest of the recipients - iOS or Android - gets the HTML-like "alt" of the Tapback. At the very least, Apple could have at created a way to parse the text and turn it back into a Tapback for iOS users. Or better yet, turn off Tapbacks in a mixed setting.
As Jason Snell says, iMessage could be so much better than it is but Apple just hasn't iterated the way that other platforms have.
They tried some things a few years ago, like adding iMessage Apps that were a total bomb. It just doesn't seem like a platform they care about. They get their lock in for free when you insert your SIM into an iPhone so there's just no incentive.
I keep hearing this refrain but I have been using an iPhone on and off since iMessage launched and I have never once cared about someone using an Android phone and having to text them. And I've also never heard anyone else complain about it.
I really think this is blown way out of proportion. No one genuinely cares. It's almost like someone heard someone else make a joke about it and thought it was a serious comment. It just kept getting spun and spun until it was some big thing.
I don’t think people care too much in direct messages, it’s group chats where the problems start. If you invite an android user, it means downgrading the group for everyone and losing a lot of features people want. So it becomes “let’s not invite them, they use android and it will ruin the group”
This is only an issue if your friend group uses iMessage though, and it seems discord is a lot more common. I actually agree with Apple blocking RCS though because it’s just another shitty carrier controlled platform with no desktop support. Killing of SMS and using internet IM programs is just a better solution.
What is astounding is just how badly google has failed. It’s not that they just weren’t good enough, but that they seem to actively want to destroy their own products. Virtually everyone knows apples message program is iMessage. What is googles app of the month? Who knows.
I've never had someone say, "Oh don't start a group chat with X because she doesn't have an iPhone." I can't imagine caring about something like that...
As for Google's messaging situation, you're right. It's made even worse by the fact that their current product is literally just called "Messages". And if you have a Samsung phone (the biggest Android phone manufacturer), it comes with a Samsung-made app called "Messages" as the default app instead of the Google "Messages" app. And the Samsung app doesn't support RCS via Google, only via your cell carrier. So unless your carrier has enabled RCS, you can't use it via the Samsung app.
Really? Definitely seen that happen before. It's something that kinda creeps up. Of course, for something very important, like oh grandma X is in the hospital here's the groupchat to let everyone know how she's doing, yeah no one cares if you're on Android or not.
But, say, the 5-7 person groupchat for sending cat pictures. Well, if anyone with an Android is there, then we all go back to sending caveman images via SMS. So Android users are excluded - but hey, it's just a cat picture group. Not like they'd want the experience of loading SMS images anyway.
Then, suddenly people start making dinner plans using the cat picture group - it's a groupchat with a circle of friends already in it, why make another one? Let's just reuse this one, it's a casual invitation anyway.
Well, suddenly Android people are being excluded from plans. That's generally how it happens from my experience. Not explicitly excluding Android users, that's kinda silly, although maybe it happens in middle/high school just as a status thing, but an "ugh" malaise that the moment you invite an android user the whole group gets downgraded that you keep procrastinating on. "Well, I should probably invite Bob, we're doing more than cat pictures... but ugh, I don't want to be the person who ruins in the gc, well let's just wait a bit more, maybe I'll start a messenger group instead <proceeds to do no such thing>"
Messages is the SMS app. Google still has its own chat and it's built into Gmail. That's the one my family uses.
When schools shut down back in 2020 due to COVID, pretty much all my collaboration with my colleagues moved to group messaging. Most schools don't have Slack or anything like it, and even if they did, most teachers (or at least the ones I work with) wouldn't know how to use them. So, we used what everyone did know: our phones.
I ended up in several different groups for different teams that I worked with (e.g. grade level, department, etc.), and I was the sole Android user in all of them -- everybody else had iPhones. Most of the people I work with were so embedded with iPhones both themselves and with their contacts that they didn't even know what was going on with the groups and the green bubbles and the different UX. I had to field a lot of "Why can't we just add someone to the group instead of making a new one?" and "Why aren't reactions working?" questions. That, and I had an absurdly high delivery failure rate both for messages I sent and received. I'd miss entire messages, or they'd arrive out of order.
It really highlighted how ridiculous our current state of fragmented messaging is, and when I got a new phone in late 2020, I chose an iPhone. The decision was in part because I've moved away from Google due to privacy concerns but mostly it was because having iMessage made my professional environment so much smoother. Now I'm not the one person screwing up everybody's else's chats. I hate that group messaging is even how we're professionally communicating in the first place, but I'm also still mad at Apple for refusing to release an iMessage app for Android.
I used to have issues with group text messages (which are technically MMS) when I used Cricket (they’re a budget carrier owned by AT&T in the U.S.). Their forums were always full of people complaining about that. Since I switched to a different carrier, I’ve never had that issue reoccur.
But what you’re describing seems like more of an institutional failing than anything to do with messaging platforms. The school’s IT people should have stepped up right away and said, “here’s what we are standardizing on. Everyone make sure to install this app on your phone and use this for communication and planning. If you need help, we can walk you through it.”
All of the confusion you described should be directed at the IT people and they should walk people through it. And the confusion would be there regardless of the messaging platform, since most people are relatively computer illiterate. They know the bare minimum they need to in order to do their job.
When we went into lockdown here, our IT department got everybody set up to work from home and had remote training for people to learn how to use Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
This is very true. I'm not exaggerating when I say that what you're suggesting is well outside of our IT department's purview, which is not a dig at them in the slightest (they're great). We pretty much have the bare minimum IT staff necessary to ensure that we have internet, Chromebooks for the kids (and the many, MANY issues that come with that), and printing capabilities. They're already overworked just managing that for an entire school district. Implementing entire new communication systems, much less training the teachers on them, would be unheard of.
For perspective: because I'm good with computers (relative to most people in education), I've been doing de facto tech support my entire career because we don't institutionally prioritize it. When COVID hit, I directly supported many of my coworkers, showing them how to set up remote lessons and run video classes. I actually made some tutorial videos for kids with digital learning basics (e.g. muting and unmuting on video chat, tiling windows side by side on the screen, etc.) that ended up getting passed around from staff member to staff member because they were all trying to figure it out themselves with little to no institutional help. None of this was my actual job responsibility -- it never has been -- but I am not exaggerating when I say I literally do it all the time.
Sometimes I have the patience for it and, well, sometimes I don't.
I'll 90% agree with you. I very very rarely care about if the person I am texting has an iphone or not. The only exception to that is if I am on my laptop and my phone isn't nearby. I can use messager on my laptop to text other iphone users or groupchats that are all iphone, but I can't do that if I am texting an android phone. I wouldn't say that's ever been more than a slight annoyance though.
You can use Messages on the Mac to text people via your phone. You just have to enable text message forwarding on your phone.
Thanks for this! I had the same complaint that @Micycle_the_Bichael had (fantastic username) and this resolves it. I do most of my texting via my Mac so this is great.
NEAT! There goes my last major complaint with Messages. Thanks!!
Here's the official Apple instructions. Just FYI, you do have to manually enable it for new devices. So if you ever get a new laptop, you'll have to manually toggle that on.
I wish the author had spent any time talking about why they view things as failures rather than just saying them and moving on.
What does "flop" mean here? I have and still use that app menu regularly. Is universal adoption what it takes for something to be considered a success? Can something not be a success if it works for the people who want it without negatively impacting those who don't? Just because it didn't become the defining feature of iMessage doesn't mean it was a flop, at least IMO.
Similarly..
What's wrong with them? Again, I use the reply and tapback features in groupchats with and without android users and none of us have a problem with it. I find the reply feature in iMessage to be better than Discord's reply feature. When you're in an all-iphone groupchat the reply feature works better than discord, and when an android phone is involved it is equally as bad as Discord. They don't list any reasons that it is a failure, or what any of the problems are. They just matter-of-factly say "this is bad" and then move on.
The RCS stuff is the closest they get to defending a point and they still don't really. The closest they get is
which still doesn't tell me any of the features RCS brings that SMS doesn't or why they would improve my experience. They just say "it has more features and will make the experience better".
To wrap this up, I'm not saying that the author is wrong; they very well could be correct about everything they are saying. I'm saying they haven't developed any point in their argument enough that I could agree with or refute it.
I really, really wished that messaging had developed like email had...in that:
But, i get, capitalism and the movements of the masses and such. Le sigh.
EDIT: I forgot to add of course the very important of interoperability across any/all/most systems ...e.g. an email from john@something.net can be sent to/received by linda.something@gmail.com, etc.