This is the worst part about Apple. I support apple at my work but it gets harder and harder to hear my daughters talk about the bullying on text groups.
WTF is wrong with Apple?
This is a people problem, not a technology problem.
If it’s not bubbles, it’s the style of jeans, or where you come from, or which football team you support. Bullies will always find something to use.
There was a famous psychological study looking at in-groups and out-groups (us vs them mentality). They tested people with completely arbitrary differences. Things like giving some people short pencils and others tall pencils to see what would happen. Before long, those with similar pencils colluded together finding other similarities to bind them as a group. Not only that, but they looked down on their counterparts.
The famous “Robber’s Cave” study looked at this as well: https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html
They’ve found this pattern everywhere and with everyone, child, adult, every ethnicity. It’s how we are wired. Team Apple. No fuck you, I’m team Android. Windows vs macOS. Consoles are better than gaming PCs! It goes on and on and on. Blue bubbles vs green bubbles. Even if Apple switched the colors, it wouldn’t matter. People would still be pissed text messages got blue.
There’s also one huge factor no one talks about: green is not Android. Green is SMS. Since there is no interoperability between Android RCS and iMessage yet, it comes in as a standard SMS.
Many moons ago I worked in IT and telecoms providers would happily hand over plain text transcripts of SMS conversations. Blue bubbles for me
I guess I’ll need to have it happen to me in order for me to actually understand why this is even a problem… I just can’t fathom caring at all.
I care about the color of the message insofar as it indicates whether it’s encrypted or not.
If not color, what should they switch to in order to still communicate this information to the user?
The article isn’t clear on how encryption will work with RCS. Guess I’ll be looking into that.
This is what I was going to say. It’s good to know if a message chain is going over Apples E2E encryption or regular SMS that’s completely transparent to the carrier. There’s also a fundamental technological difference that allows group messages over iMessage, but not over SMS. iOS 18 supporting RCS helps a lot, but I still think it’s a good idea to have an easy way to differentiate iMessages vs RCS vs SMS due to security and functional differences.
Imagine caring about the colour of speech bubbles and calling it “bullying”. Some people can’t be helped.
Teenagers very much do. Apple does as well. You’ve obviously disconnected from it and so your opinion is irrelevant.
