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?
Texting images between android and ios is fundamentally broken. Images are compressed to potato quality and did mot always make it. When i had android i sent images in messenger and texted in sms to ios folks. Its a lot easier now were all on ios.
So I absolutely understand its simpler to just 100% use a different app.
The image compression problem is on iphone’s end, and they do it specifically to coerce you into buying an iphone.
Yep, send something in a group chat to android and iphone users, and if Android sends it, it looks good to Android users.
But iphone degrades it on receipt.
If iphone sends it, it sends a degraded copy to all the androids.
Apple tells everyone it’s because iphone is better, and iphone users accept it.
But the end result is more people move to signal or other apps. Which is a positive.
To add on to this, there are two problems with sending images between platforms here:
It uses SMS/MMS, which inherently sucks. You simply cannot send high-quality photos and videos over MMS. It was designed for flip phones in the Dark Ages. This part is on the tech and there’s nothing Apple can do about it, really.
iOS makes it especially bad. I’ve noticed that if someone tries to send multiple photos at once, iOS rolls them into a single MMS message, making the quality much much worse. Like postage-stamp-sized. Apple could just as well send each photo as its own MMS message and at least maintain the quality level that allows, but they do not. This part is strictly on Apple.
Image size limit for MMS is 1MB, even android to android
This is about the 40th most-upvoted comment on this post, and the FIRST comment I found that actually said something about the technical challenges.
Most of the above comments are like “iPhones show different colors based on OS? Weird. Seems dumb to care about that.”