I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason.
In my experience, when people find out my texts are green, they oftentimes would rather switch to a different platform altogether like Instagram or just not text at all.
Is this actually a deal-breaker in friendships out there?
Keep using SMS? What are Apple’s other alternatives, exactly? RCS is still a mess, the only way it has e2ee is if you use Google’s messaging app, and there’s no way you will see Apple adopting Google’s standard without having a say in it, and rightfully so - Google locks tons of proprietary features out of their APIs - EXIF data for Photos, Categories in Gmail, etc.
I think this is actually more of a comment on Google’s lack of direction with messaging - how many different messaging apps have they sunset by now? Half dozen or so? Messaging has always been a cluster on Android. WhatsApp is supposedly e2ee, but they have backdoor bugs being patched on a nearly basis - ask Jeff Bezos how his dick pics got hacked.
I mean you can install Google messaging apps on iOS (not that I would want to use them…). But try that the other way around. Apples option to not using SMS would simply be to provide iMessage for Android. Problem solved. They would very likely become the main messaging platform by doing so. Currently the majority of the market is likely split between WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat.
But obviously they fear that this would hurt iPhone sales. At the same time this also leads to iMessage being irrelevant in the majority of markets where iPhone isn’t as dominating as in the US.