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The green vs blue bubble thing is just a shorthand way of talking about it. The average person either doesn’t care or cares because mixed-platform group chats have lots of rough edges and limitations, so if you’re the lone Android user, it feels like your fault.
Anyone who seriously escalates this stuff to being a real life problem is crazy, but it is more than just the color of the bubble.
In their defense, why should they have to care whose fault it is that messaging sucks on Android? They just want a pleasant experience, and iMessage has been the best experience for Apple users for like 15 years. It’s also as much Google’s fault as Apple’s, if we want to get nitpicky about it. I wouldn’t spend a lot of money implementing the protocol Google wants either, because Google will abandon it and back three competing new ones before your next good bowel movement.
I’m saying the very idea that you need to ever even think about this as a defense against the enemy is the hobby. There’s only a battle to be fought here if you want there to be, and most people don’t want that. The impact on their lives is not actually tangible. Ad tech doesn’t really hurt anyone. No one likes it, and at best, it feels a little gross, but feeling vaguely icky is not the kind of tangible impact that reliably drives people to action. What happens to you when Facebook or Google bundle you into anonymized groups of eyeballs and promise advertisers that they’ll show you ads relevant to the profile they’ve built of you? Nothing really. If you think about the way they built that profile by tracking your every move online, then yes, it feels creepy, but that’s it.
But that’s not the kind of privacy we’re talking about. Privacy discussions are largely about ad tech and tracking. The post here isn’t calling people idiots because he thinks Threads is more likely to leak your credit card numbers and nudes. He’s calling people idiots for not caring about tracking the way he does. And the reality is that there’s no real reason why they should care. The argument boils down to just, “c’mon, don’t you think it’s creepy?”. And if I say, “not really”, we’re kind of at an impasse. There’s just no obvious pragmatic harm you can point to to reason them over to your side. You may as well being trying to convince them to enjoy pineapple on pizza. If they don’t already, the game’s pretty much over.
It’s more, “oh, that video clip looks like shit, and every time anyone on this chat likes something, everyone gets spammed a repetitive long-form explanation, and we can’t add Jimmy to the chat because it’s SMS now and AT&T limits it to 10 people, and …”
In the bad old days, SMS was incredibly limited. Apple came out with iMessage, which was both a full IP messaging client with rich features, but seamlessly fell back to SMS, and that was amazing, because a lot of the people you wanted to talk to only had SMS. Google briefly had a similar thing, but whoever ran that product lost the weekly pistols at dawn match that Google uses to set corporate strategy, and hangouts lost SMS integration, which meant you needed two message apps — one for IP messages that was good and a separate one for SMS that sucked. And they were completely separate — no shared threads or history or anything. And then hangouts was killed anyway to make room for chat, or meet, or duo, or allo, or jello, or J-Lo, or Oreos, or who the fuck knows anymore-oh. And so for several years, if you wanted the only thing anyone in the US ever wanted from a messaging app, you had to get an iPhone, because Google kept killing their apps every year like, “hey guys, our new app still can’t talk to your mom, but we integrated the “hot dog or not” feature from Silicon Valley into it, and isn’t that amazing?”
Now, it doesn’t matter, because no one is limited to SMS anymore. Everyone could be on whatever IP platform. But Google still picked a fucking standard built by the phone company with crappy baggage attached like requiring a phone number to use it, and anyway, they’re so late that everyone already picked iMessage. Even if RCS was as good, no one wants to change a bunch of stuff to be no better than when they started, and RCS also still isn’t as good.