- cross-posted to:
- apple@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- apple@lemmy.world
The problem that I have with the way Apple does this has nothing whatsoever to do with me. It’s their device, it is not possible for me to care any less about it.
No, the problem I have is that it becomes a severe bullying / exclusion tactic among kids. Now, kids will always find something to bully other kids about, but this one seems to hurt a lot because of the source of the ire and the inability to do anything about it (short of purchasing an Apple device).
My eldest was excluded from group chats with friends because they “ruined” the quality of pictures and videos by being in the group chat. These are friends mind you, not the sort of bullies the rest of us might’ve had. It’s devastating to kids when their friends exclude them like this. What do you do? You can’t complain about the technology not mattering, you can’t reason with it, you can’t say: “it gets better”.
Kids these days have a very different relationship to technology. That relationship can seem weird or “wrong” to folks who remember a time before these ubiquitous devices. Crap patterns like this creating artificial walled gardens are not “novel” or “creative” ways to increase sales.
Hell, adults and “friends” of mine really seem to care that I have an android. They constantly bring it up as if they think bullying another adult into buying their specific product will somehow work or maybe they think that it bothers me or something. I could not care less. Start a new chat without me and the other android users? Cool, go ahead. Spoiler: they won’t.
Or they have and haven’t told you, as I’ve experienced multiple times now (as an adult in my thirties, no less). It’s why I fell out of my bar trivia group, they slowly forgot to send us Android users (aka my partner and I) texts separately, so we just drifted out of that circle.
It’s comical how petty so many adults get about the bubbles too, and absolutely refuse to consider using anything else. Luckily my partner was on the Pixel train like me before we met, so it’s not an issue there, but suggest Signal, Telegram, or hell, even Facebook Messenger (which they all have as well), and you just get befuddlement in response. Even my mother, who is in her fifties and is a department director at her job, gets perpetual shit from her coworkers re: the staff group chats that just can’t go into Slack for whatever reason, as she’s the lone Android user in that whole bunch. None of these people even grew up with cellphones of any type, and yet they’re just as petty about messaging as any socially-obsessed teen.
Oh well, no skin off my back, and if anything this petty behavior from a subset of iOS users is basically an anti-advertisement to me. The last time I had an iPhone, I deliberately disabled iMessage from the get go to head off this mess (and at the time, turning it off when switching away from iOS was a nightmare too).
All these text and emoji features that are being added into apple but are not compatible with Android: this seems like a problem…
Until you download signal.
It has great features for group messaging, video calling, emojis and is generally feature rich.
And it’s end-to-end encrypted when messaging other signal users.
It’s available on iOS and Android.
Does it offer SMS?
Because I’m not going to ask someone to download an app so I can talk to them.
Exactly, who is using bog-standard texts and phonecalls in this day and age? Do they also use internet explorer because that’s the default too? Even if you’re not on Signal, everyone and their mums has WhatsApp, I don’t see how this is even an issue!
So many people use standard clear text messaging and calling.
When I try to explain encryption, I usually get the line
" I’ve got nothing to hide!"
I never understood the complaint. If iPhone users don’t like the way Apple messaging works with Android contacts, they can just use an alternative like Whatsapp. Right?
I’m my experience, if iPhone users don’t like the way Apple messaging works with Android contacts, they bitch at the person using Android telling them to get an iPhone.
It doesn’t even occur to them that they also break features on the Android users’ ends as well, but I only see iPhone users complaining. It really isn’t that big of a deal to share a file over SMS/MMS with a link rather than trying to share the actual file directly. Is that difficult to do on an iPhone?
My dad likes to send me videos. He sent me one yesterday… It seemed like he was at a harbor by the 8 pixels that got through
He also frequently emails me from his phone. I used to ask him to send videos to my email. Even tried to coach him through the process -surely they must have a share button?
I think iPhones are designed around the idea that “either it just works, or you shouldn’t be doing it at all”.
Even my technical friends seem to forget the fact they understand how all of this works the minute they look at their phone - I had to coach one through uploading a larger video to Google drive and sending me the link. My brother in Christ, we use GitHub together. We use Google meets regularly. We used Dropbox in college. Why are you acting like I told you to put it on a flash drive and mail it to me?
I send photos and videos via MMS all the time and they work fine, but almost everyone I message is an Android user.
Or they can bitch at Apple to fix their SMS/MMS problems.
Apple has a SMS/MMS problem the same way some people have a rodent problem.
I mean the right answer is something like Signal, but you have to really beat on people for that.
I tried for years. I’m over it.
Hang on … I set a picture on MY phone and then anyone I call sees MY picture? Oh yeah, can’t see how this’ll go wrong. How long before dick picks are sent, or advertisements, or someone finds a way to use it to hack someones phone.
I can see this could be useful, especially folks with eye sight issues (but how would this affect blind folks?), but it’s just another way to tell someone who is calling. I don’t answer my phone unless they’re in my contact book already.
This seems eh to me, but I’m not an Apple person anyway.
This was the first thing I thought too. I got to find that comic about “time-to-penis” stats.
It’s not much different than a profile picture on most social media networks, is it? You could have done all of this with your Lemmy profile picture as well.
Phones are a bit more ubiquitous for older folks though. Imagine a vulnerability that allows me to post my “pic” as pulling from your phone and it comes up with a picture of your cousin or something. Or if I’m targeting you, you’re an old person that doesn’t understand technology and you see your granddaughter show up in the picture and don’t look at the number or anything. There seems to be a lot of ways this can be abused. I hope I’m wrong and we’ll never see a story about people abusing it, but people pretty much always abuse these things.
As far as dick picks, apparently Apple will scan the images on device to check for nudity and alert you if they think it contains nudity.
Also you can set it to only show the banner from people in your contacts.
The solution is to just use something like Signal.
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This does seem to be a US centric problem, I don’t know anyone who still uses SMS, everyone seems to use Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal here
I can’t see this actually being a big deal, like at all, lmao. This assumes everyone cares or even knows the implications of a contact poster, and you can even make them for contacts that haven’t made one themselves. If you automatically think “ew Android!” when someone didn’t make a contact poster (when they can literally be on iOS, but not make one), you have issues.
Took some time but got all my contacts to switch over to signal so apple can go screw themeselves
wanting everyone in your own walled garden is standard corporate fuckery, but Apple deliberately making the color contrast lower for green messages is just dark.
https://uxdesign.cc/how-apple-makes-you-think-green-bubbles-gross-e03b52b12fed
I think this could’ve great if it was an open standard but that’s not the apple way.
Don’t forget, FaceTime will be an open standard, aaaaany time now https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/07/apple_announces_open_standard_facetime_video_chat_for_iphone_4
I remember this and thought I was crazy. There was an article linked somewhere on Lemmy last week that addressed this. It seemed like it was a Steve Jobs special - no one knew he was going to promise that. Subsequently, they got tangled up in a patent dispute with someone who owned a very vague communications protocol patent. That outcome has been appealed, from both sides, in courts basically since then.
It was announced in 2010 and then a year later Jobs died so it’s not out the realm of possibilities that other Execs decided against it and backtracked on it. It’s very possible if he lived longer it would have happened or at least an App would have released for it on Android and possibly iMessage would have had one too.
So… here’s a hot take I guess (disclaimer: i am an iphone user): People who are actively complaining about Apple having features that are unique to its platform don’t know how products work. Apple created this technology and design themselves and other companies want to leech off the features. We should want competition like iMessage vs whatever Android uses. For anyone to basically say Google doesn’t have the ability or resources to create an actual competitor is silly. They absolutely can make an alternative, but they choose not to. Google becomes complacent and progress slows or completely stops. I’d rather have a product that is FEATURE-FULL than feature-less. Additionally, this contact feature thing is neat, but I wouldn’t call it a “game-changer” or revolutionary. It’s similar to the super old ability that some cellular providers had/have where you could play a specific song instead of the calling tone.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. 😒
The issue is that if Google does create a competitor, or an open standards competitor is created, like RCS vs iMessage, Apple isn’t going to implement that, or in any way interoperate with it. So even if Google or someone else made a better system that worked beautifully on Android and any hypothetical alternatives, but Apple only implemented their own system and refused to share, things would remain shit. Which is exactly where we are.
Apple doesn’t want to live in a world where multiple brands and types of mobile phones operating systems exist harmoniously. They want to intentionally make life difficult for anyone who didn’t buy an iPhone. In the process they make it intentionally difficult for people who did buy an iPhone, because their communications with non-iPhone friends are hampered.
They’re also egging easily influenced teenagers on to shame other teenagers for having “worse” phones and creating unnecessary divides and unhappiness among friends. All so kids will bully other kids into buying iPhones.
None of these features are difficult to invent or implement. They should all be open standards and iPhone users and Android users should all together be angry at Apple for putting a malicious profit motive above the creation of a smooth and universally interoperable user experience.
The issue is that if Google does create a competitor, or an open standards competitor is created, like RCS vs iMessage, Apple isn’t going to implement that, or in any way interoperate with it. So even if Google or someone else made a better system that worked beautifully on Android and any hypothetical alternatives, but Apple only implemented their own system and refused to share, things would remain shit. Which is exactly where we are.
If Google had a popular competitor to iMessage, Apple users would feel left out, and that’s what would force integration.
All they had to do was add sms to one of their chat apps, and people would have migrated over word of mouth for the extra features slowly overtime.
This is uniquely an issue in the U.S. because there are plenty of popular cross-platform competitors that are widely used in Europe: WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram.
iMessage is unpopular in Europe precisely because it’s not interoperable and your friend group will look at you funny if you want to use some stupid system that only works on iPhones.
Nobody uses SMS for anything here, aside from notifications from businesses and such.
Reading through the comments in this thread, I’d just like to mention how amusing it is to see so many people in the fediverse arguing in favor of walled gardens and vendor lock-in. Like, do you even know where you are?
Owh dammit what now. I haven’t read it yet but I’m already tired of it
Is there a steamdeck lemmy community? I quite liked having a place to talk about performance of some games or tweaks or releases.
There is this one: https://sopuli.xyz/c/steamdeck
Idk, I see this as a plus. It sucks when one android user in a group chat gimps file sharing for everyone.
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