Blue vs green bubble "debate"? Apple put green bubbles in their app to annoy their own users, who then turn around and blame non-apple users. What's to debate about that?
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
238 points (95.8% liked)
Technology
59675 readers
3479 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I doubt they will change the bubbles, or they will find some other way to differentiate messages coming from outside the Apple garden.
The bubble being green and Apple making them progressively uglier and breaking their own interface guides is one issue, but the main issue people care about are how SMS conversations break with an iPhone. Group threads will randomly have messages delivered in different threads, pictures and videos are low res if they send at all and there's no advanced features like typing indicators, read receipts, etc.
The hope is with RCS that is fixed. If so, the color of the bubbles doesn't really matter.
Apple put green bubbles in their app to annoy their own users
Out of curiosity, when do you think Apple started using green bubbles?
It's not "when" they put green bubbles in but how they've been maliciously modifying the design of green bubbles. They have made them progressively harder to read, here's one article about it: https://uxdesign.cc/how-apple-makes-you-think-green-bubbles-gross-e03b52b12fed
The whole argument is ridiculous because it's only the messages that you wrote and sent that are even on a blue or green color. The messages you read are always on the same light gray background regardless of how they sent.
People never re-read their own texts, good point.
It's just an incredibly weak argument. Messages that you, yourself, wrote are in slightly lower contrast? Who cares? For users who actually have vision problems with low-contrast, there's a single Reduce Transparency toggle in Accessibility settings that will resolve this issue and a bunch of other ones.
An incredibly weak argument is saying that it's fine for Apple to intentionally make their UX worse, because they didn't make it worse enough to matter.
They picked a tint of a color used on low priority text. Someone argued that this particular tint is slightly worse for certain people. If you don't have vision problems, it's not really worse for you at all. We're talking about small differences in relative contrast between different elements. If you do have vision problems, you can easily make it and other similar situations across the entire platform easier to read with an accessibility toggle.
No, I don't buy the argument that the UX for reading SMS messages is meaningfully worse than for iMessages.
People do care for some reason. Psychology or something, here's Marques Brownlee's pretty in depth explanation of the whole thing. It seems like Apple has been aware of the issues and happy to keep them/make them worse since at least 2013
People care that SMS and MMS suck. "Green messages" is just a shorthand, nontechnical way of describing it. Nobody legitimately cares that the green background is every-so-slightly lower contrast than the blue background.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
here's Marques Brownlee's pretty in depth explanation
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Yeh, not very compelling. Apple has been screwing up usability by reducing the contrast of a lot of screen elements. MacOS window component are horribly washed out these days. Wouldn’t surprise me if they reduced the contrast of the green bubbles just to “improve” the aesthetics
Looks like I'd need an account to see the full article, but did the green bubbles have better contrast in previous iOS versions?
Somebody wanna check the temperature in Hell real quick?
checks out
Oh man it truly did freeze over. Are the pigs flying yet?
Fuck.
That explains why I just saw a flying pig outside
Cool, when will Google add it to Google Voice FFS?
Exactly
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association,” an Apple spokesperson tells 9to5Mac.
RCS will instead replace SMS and MMS and “exist separately from iMessage when available.” Apple didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
The change likely comes in response to regulatory pressure from the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a rule that requires major companies, such as Apple, to make their services interoperable with other platforms.
Companies like Google and Samsung have long pushed for Apple to add support for RCS with splashy marketing campaigns and videos.
Earlier this month, Google sent a letter to the European Commission that argues iMessage should be considered a core platform service under the DMA.
Apple may not be doing this out of its own willingness, but the addition of RCS is a more than welcome change — especially for all of us who have had to deal with receiving poor-quality videos sent from iPhones to Androids (and vice versa), along with a patchwork of other missing features that make it less appealing to text between devices.
The original article contains 423 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 55%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
🥳🥳🥳
in other news 2.2 came 3 years ago
Isn't this the technology that allows google/att to look at and analize all my texts? Why would anyone want this?
They can already look at your texts when using SMS/MMS, which is what the messages app uses when chatting with non-imessage users. SMS is known to be insecure.
RCS doesn’t have to go through Google’s servers - carriers - or I guess Apple - could set up a gateway
@HeartyBeast @stefano @Haphazard9479 Google put up their own because the carriers botched the rollout. The carriers were very fast to deploy MMS servers because they could charge by the picture. Now that they no longer can do that, they were in no hurry to do the upgrade.
Using Pixel phones, RCS is pretty nice. You do get the three step confirmation (sent, received, read) and end to end encryption.
Hopefully Apple will implement the encryption.
Hopefully Apple will implement the encryption.
Apple said they are going to implement the open standard so no. Encrypted RCS is proprietary to Google.
Finally, Apple says it will work with the GSMA members on ways to further improve the RCS protocol. This particularly includes improving the security and encryption of RCS messages. Apple also told 9to5Mac that it will not use any sort of proprietary end-to-end encryption on top of RCS. Its focus is on improving the RCS standard itself.
Apple is going to use their weight to get the carriers to improve RCS itself, including adding encryption, so that they drop Google’s proprietary implementation.
It would behoove Google to use the open standard since they've pushed for Apple to adopt RCS for so long.
And if the carriers actually start supporting it properly, there's no need for Google to run it's own proprietary version. Plus, proprietary encryption protocols are always less secure than the widely tested open standards.
@RGB3x3 @Earthwormjim91 Yes, google needs to put the encryption into the open standard ASAP, and then push Apple if they don't quickly implement it. I have pixel devices and like RCS. Looking forward to being able to RCS text everyone.