I disagree with two things here.
Green IS traditionally an off-putting color, when we're talking about light: aliens, x-files, goo, and everything witchy.
But in this context the thing that's harder on the eyes is the bubble itself. So the lighter one is easier for me. Although I'd rather see no bubbles at all.
That's why I said green light, which is unusual in nature. Sure, it's a little green when it filters through leaves, but that's very hard to perceive because the yellow of the sun or the blue of the sky usually cancels that out. It's almost never enough to light up another object with green.
I don't think that's true for the reasons you put up.
Our eyes are specialized to distinct more shades of green from each other than with other colors. That's a useful evolutionary feature when you are an animal and have to hunt in the wild.
For humans that leads to the point that we're rather good in picking "unnatural" shades of green (gooish ones and self-emitting shades of green).
Yes. From the article: "To be clear, it is not that green is gross. It is the low color contrast of the green Apple picked and used against white text is gross." The original design used black text, for one thing.
I checked those background colors with this contrast calculator [0] against white:
- Contrast of your iPhone: 2.21:1 (#35c759)
- Contrast that's "poor": 2.17:1 (#65c466)
- Contrast that's "good": 2.93:1 (#3bac3c)
- Contrast of the blue: 3.95:1 (#367bf5)
Based on this I would say that the Contrast of your green and the "gross" one from the article are actually pretty close, both being very far from the contrast that blue provides.
Not even the good green from the article does match the contrast of the blue. They are being lenient I'd say, not misleading.
mmm I really doubt that was the real reason why you "dislike" the green message and that it was purposefully designed like so by Apple.
I think this is a case of learned significance, for which you know that a green bubble means a message sent via SMS rather than the "smarter" message. Added to the fact the blue is often used by tech companies due to its fresh and modern connotation, you have the full picture on why your brain prefers the blue to the green message.
That being said, I think Apple should have been more careful about making their message bubble pass contrast tests. But I doubt there was an "evil designer" carefully planning to make that bubble with lower contrast on purpose to make you dislike it.
That's almost as good as the Windows Vista/7 icon for "Network" -- computers connected to a pneumatic tube (referencing Senator Ted Stevens and his "series of tubes" comment).
...which suggests that the notion that some designer at Apple subtly decreased the contrast on green bubbles to make them look "gross" is ridiculous -- if they really wanted to make SMS messages look bad, they could be much less subtle about it...
Be less subtle? Serving what purposes? Getting slammed by the EU and the like?
They have to be very, very subtle, and ride the fine line between effectiveness and outrage, never going too much on a side or the other. The best and most enduring conspiration theories have originated from such deliberate and surgical manipulations. The goal they are after: most people will unknowingly abide and be manipulated, while the minority will go nuts proclaiming they know the truth.
Welcome to propaganda 101, aka destructive marketing.
Google offered several times to work with Apple to get full compatibility with their messages. Apple refused every time. This is Apple's deliberate choice.
Green was the original color of text messages when the iPhone was introduced. When Apple introduced iMessages four or five years later they made iMessages Blue.
And the screen had much worse color reproduction, a lower resolution, and much worse text rendering. There are a million reasons to change the color than to make your kids feel bad.
I have no idea why this comment is downvoted. This is exactly the question you should be asking if you care about Apple's intent as the article claims.
Nice theory, but the reality of how these decisions get made is usually far less interesting.
Some product owner probably wanted the iMessage enabled texter to "pop" and the designers usually take that and roll with it usually through some combination of boldening one, and deemphasizing the other to give the overall desired effect. It's a good call out for them to improve the color contrast, but you can adjust the contrast yourself through the accessibility options.
When will people realize that the point of differentiating between Android/iOS bubbles isn’t about discriminating against teenagers, but rather it’s about security. If my messages are being sent through an insecure protocol that leaks my messages to the police, carrier, and skids with a rtl-SDR (SMS) rather than a secure encrypted protocol (iMessage), I want it to be obvious.
They have every reason to make “green bubbles” look toxic and off putting, because unencrypted SMS is genuinely hazardous.
No, it’s to indicate when you are texting someone over an insecure protocol.
This is just like saying the colored HTTPS symbol in the browser toolbar on websites that support SSL was designed to make websites without SSL look uncool.
RCS isn’t anywhere nearly as widely adopted as SMS, depends entirely on the carrier setting it up properly, and didn’t get end to end encryption until relatively recently. Many years after this whole green vs. blue debacle started.
Once 99% of phones and carriers support RCS then maybe you could make this argument, but it won’t be for several years.
anecdotally, in the US/Canada, everytime I text someone running android, I get e2e encryption.
Most US carriers have rolled it out by now (or can be completely circumvented by using Android Messages app) and the green bubble teasing seems like a USA specific phenomena.
Anyhow, so what you mean to say, is that it's not about security (because it's present and accessible), but it's about appearances. And worst, the platform perpetuating the the appearances is not making any moves to secure it's messaging to non-Apple devices. Unacceptable.
The shade of low-contrast-y green is similar to the one used by some browsers not too long ago when an EV TLS certificate was used, to underline the security of the connection.
If it's the goal to implicate danger, this strikes me as a weird colour choice for dangerous messages, to be honest.
This whole "thing" around "bad" green vs blue message bubbles appears a bit, for the lack of a better word, insane to me as a non-american. The bubbles are fine. IMO, the problem is very obviously that kids can be cruel jerks and "not having an iPhone" is a social stigma for US teenagers, just like "not having a flashy cell phone with Bluetooth and MMS" was 15 years ago. Changing the colour will not fix this stigma, there still isn't an Apple on the back of the Android phones.
That makes very little sense. If it's for security it does a terrible job of conveying that, nor would it help anything since you're already in the conversation with that person.
The author is just overthinking things here. If anything, green is the color used to indicate “go”, a positive sign that has been etched into our minds. The reason is very clear as already mentioned “it doesn’t support messages”. Why isn’t that explanation enough?
EDIT: to clarify here, the author does explain his point about the color and the contrast of the text. He may have a point there but IMO, the main issue was that it’s not messages. The thing I should have added is that back when it was implemented people had to pay real money per message to send as a text message. That means everyone in the group had to feel uncomfortable sending frivolous messages when it costs someone money. I think that is the real reason for the bifurcation and not the color choice.
The article elaborates, however. It's not a problem that green is used. It's that Apple chose a lightness/shade that is less accessible.
Given their attention to detail in design (see the rabbithole of their Human Interface Guidelines - https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...), I agree with the author in that this was an intentional design choice that Apple made.
I don't mean to sound like an asshole here but did you read the article? The author outlines that the contrast applied to the green is less readable than the blue, to the point where it falls below accessibility guidelines.
I personally am not convinced by the theory that Apple is doing this deliberately (though it doesn't sound impossible to me either!) but either way it's something they should change.
Well seeing that every one of the authors images don’t jibe with reality - ie his images aren’t what are actually on iPhones in terms of saturation - it kind of makes his entire thesis moot
Yes and no: a screenshot of an iPhone isn't really a great representation of what you see when you're outdoors in daylight, for example. The general point still stands that the contrast is better in the blue than it is in the green and Apple could normalize them with no issues.
Seeing that the change in saturation happened when Ives took over the iPhone UI when iOS 7 was introduced, it was just one of many poorly thought out decisions that were made under Ives leadership.
To be fair, he could’ve cut to the chase sooner. Since it was a UI UX article, HN readers probably aren’t aware that it’s a contrast between fonts and background, not blue vs green or green vs dark green.
It opens with an image of two green bubbles, one higher contrast than the other. The higher contrast one is labeled "Good" and the lower contrast "Gross".
After a two sentence paragraph expressing how the green/blue technical differentiation has become a social one, it then asks the question "Why is green worse than blue?" The next line: "The answer is color contrast."
What could they have realistically done to cut to the chase sooner in a meaningful way? The only real thing is ditching those two context building sentences. But it's two short sentences, providing relevant context.
Title is kind of on point too because it is indeed a trick - a dark pattern - which is part of the topic of User Experience which the website uxdesign.cc specializes in. Also, it would have been hard to put the explanation inside title without making it too long.
A large problem with this whole idea is that there is no one single blue or green involved.
iMessage shades the bubbles depending on position, and shows both the blue and green bubbles as darker at the bottom of the screen, and lighter at the top.
That's definitely not iOS 7. Those screenshots are from a notched device, which means at least iOS 11, and based on the app drawer on the bottom it looks more like iOS 12 or above.
Summary: the green bubbles have lower contrast than the blue bubbles. Lower contrast is associated with lower accessibility, according to published Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Tricks, purpose, and grossness are speculative.
At first, it sounded like a stretched out conspiracy theory. When I looked at the "correctly" contrasted green in the first image that was darker, it made more sense.
The lighter greyish green gives off a lower standard, almost as if the Android user was a guest user or in free trial mode.
Ye article is complete bullshit and makes-up some fictional examples: for instance the bubbles supposedly on a “brighter screen” are shown as totally desaturated and ‘blown-out’ but unfortunately for the author’s thesis, screen brightness does not affect UI elements in this way, at all.
Edit: Haha thx for the downvotes but the article is still lying with phony made-up images.
It does affect your visual impression in the eye, though. If you're using a bright screen in a dim environment, your eyes will be hurt by the bright light, you flinch and that will reduce the perceptive contrast.
> It does affect your visual impression in the eye, though. If you're using a bright screen in a dim environment, your eyes will be hurt by the bright light, you flinch and that will reduce the perceptive contrast.
See a few posts above where someone did the hard work of taking real screenshots instead of the totally bullshit fictional ones the author has in the article.
This seems to be mostly a US American thing, mainly because of the same reasons BBM was a thing: lots of chats over SMS used to be a thing, and then chats over iMessage, which like BBM, you can only join if you have a device from a specific vendor. That means that you can only be in a special social circle if you buy the same stuff. That won't change because of some colours, because it's not the colours causing the tribalism, it can exist perfectly fine without it.
In Western Europe, South America and Asia it's mostly just some specific app (WhatsApp for example, or Signal, or WeChat or LINE) and as a fallback SMS. And if SMS turns from one colour bubble to another colour it doesn't really do anything for users on either end. This deep integration with colours and status symbols does remain in specific areas like middle school where it is still seen as important to try to project wealth.
Exactly. If your complaint is about being locked in but the platform you use is the one everyone has to use because of network effect or otherwise you yourself are locked in with that platform.
The network effect only results in lock-in if there's an obstacle to using multiple networks at the same time. Obviously no-one is going to carry around two phones, so that's how Apple achieves lock-in. By contrast, keeping two or more messaging apps running is trivial.
That's just like, your opinion, man. SMS/MMS is decentralized, open, and works on every modern mobile phone out of the box. No other text messaging technology does this yet.
Open for Verizon to read/modify, you have no way of knowing the other half’s identity (was their number given to someone else in the meanwhile), no encoding is specified/due to non-ASCII characters taking more SPACE (in 2022) so auto-SMSs still today will just force ascii text, making it often unreadable. Like, it is literally a single digit number of bytes difference.
Also, you need like.. a carrier plan to access, wouldn’t really call that open. Any network based messenger can work over my home or even McDonald’s wifi, without any third-parties
Did you mean WhatsApp doesn't have anywhere near the same lock in as the Messages app? I don't know what you mean by "same lock in as Apple". I also don't know what you would mean by lock in with the Messages app. What's locked in? I can use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, WeChat, or any number of communication apps on my iPhone effortlessly.
Apple's messages app isn't really an app; it comes preinstalled on the phone, you can't remove it or substitute it with another app, and you can't install it on non-Apple hardware.
The lock-in is obvious: if you're part of Apple-oriented chat groups you can't switch to Android without losing access to those groups, degrading the experience for everyone, or convincing each one of those groups to make the switch to a multi-platform alternative. Claiming not to see this is disingenuous.
> Apple's messages app isn't really an app; it comes preinstalled on the phone, you can't remove it or substitute it with another app, and you can't install it on non-Apple hardware.
I'm not sure, but I don't think you can actually uninstall the default SMS from Android phones either without having another app installed at a minimum and then I bet similar to Messages if you were to somehow uninstall that app then the default app would appear since it's probably part of the core operating system (similar to other basic functionality like settings or a phone app to receive calls).
I don't know what you mean by you cannot substitute Messages with another app. If I didn't want to use Messages I would just disable all settings and remove it from the home screen and use whatever I wanted instead just fine.
You are correct that you cannot install Messages on non-Apple hardware. Not all software is open source or available for all platforms. For example I cannot install Playstation software on my Xbox, nor can I buy a Nest Thermostat and install a competitor's software on it (without hacking both of course). There are games that are made that aren't created with support for macOS. Etc.
> if you're part of Apple-oriented chat groups you can't switch to Android without losing access to those groups
> if you were to somehow uninstall [the Android SMS] app then the default app would appear since it's probably part of the core operating system
No. Why would it?
> I don't know what you mean by you cannot substitute Messages with another app.
On Android, if you don't like the SMS app you can replace it with another app that has all the same functionality (and more). Does Apple let you do that?
> What is an Apple-oriented chat group?
Please engage with the discussion. One that uses Apple's proprietary SMS extensions, obviously.
I can run WhatsApp on my iPhone. I cannot get my kids' school parents-group not to use WhatsApp. It was a pain to get even my best friends in Europe to use anything except WhatsApp.
I am glad that the EU actually has another definition of letting people use what is floating their boat: Force big-tech player to open up protocols, so users can send messages from any messenger to any other messenger.
Using Facebook to do messaging? No thanks! Sure, when communicating with international friends I use WhatsApp because that appears to be what the rest of the world uses, but here in the States? No. We don't trust Zuckerberg. And yes, iMessage group chats are very much a thing here in the States and SMS group chats in general. And also yes, there's always that techie friend with an Android and makes your whole conversation go "green." Thing is, only middle schoolers really seem to care. I just know it means the communication isn't secured end-to-end.
I didn't like FB well before it became fashionable, but I don't understand your logic here: what is that exactly that you can't entrust WhatsApp to send, but you can trust Apple, or your mobile carrier?
I'm not really answering your question, but in the States, there is a lot more trust placed in Apple over Facebook. This isn't that surprising - Apple has a much stauncher stance on privacy than alternatives.
I wish Signal would be more popular, but it's just not. I can't really ask new people I meet to communicate over Signal because it's a burden to get others to install some new application.
Im tired of super secure apps that ask for your phone number and even publish it to your contacts. Wake me up when Signal doesnt depend on a phone number any more.
Apple's iMessage is secured end-to-end, your mobile carrier can't see the message. As soon as the box goes green then any intermediary, including your mobile carrier and your friend's mobile carrier, can read the message and/or make it available to law enforcement.
In a U.S. court of law Apple has stood up to authority and pointed out they can't provide the messages requested as they're locked even to Apple. Facebook on the other hand has acquiesced to U.S. law enforcement. That tells me that even if Facebook has secured end-to-end messaging, which I don't think they've ever claimed, they have backdoors.
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted. WhatsApp actually uses the Signal Protocol. Probably the best protocol they could use. It's described pretty detailed in a whitepaper publicly available on the WhatsApp website: https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security-Whitepap...
Ofcourse WhatsApp is not open source, as opposed to Signal (the app). You can never be truly sure if the protocol is implemented without backdoors because you can't verify the code. But I agree, WhatsApp is a pretty solid app.
I don't know about GPs logic, but my logic is pretty simple. I don't use any infrastructure that Mark Zuckerberg had his fingers on. That was clear to me after the first time I saw him.
> but here in the States? No. We don't trust Zuckerberg
Completely false. I have multiple group chats in Messenger. The people who “don’t trust Zuckerberg” enough to not use his messaging products are a tiny minority of people in the US.
Well, I would fear verizon or whatever much more than Zuckerberg, especially that sms is plain text (not iMessage though).
Nonetheless, it is a self-made problem in the US, which wouldn’t even make sense in the EU because we don’t have such a high percentage of apple devices.
This is a common excuse I hear in college to not use FB messenger or Whatsapp. But those same people usually have no issues using Instagram DMs. For most people, it's just a cover story to mask the real reason: Facebook messenger and whatsapp are uncool in the US
I've never been anywhere where I legitimately had signal but no data. When it seems to be connected buy isn't, sms mostly also won't go though. I also think there are less "remote" places in europe in general.
It could be worse. Service is so famously bad in Germany that they invented a word for it - Funklochrepublik, which basically means "radio hole republic."
You just don't. Their adoption of Whatsapp(at least in Spain), seems to have been driven by a period in time when WhatsApp was coming up that the plans sold by cell service providers were near unlimited data, but only X amount of calls/texts allowed to be sent per month.
In the USA we had opposite plans during this time. Unlimited talk/text, but strict data caps.
In most of the world you do have either wifi or data coverage.
Usually, if you don't have data for signal (as opposed to run out of data in your plan) reasons, then you don't have signal at all, even for SMS, either...
Well, with imessage being on topic, apple seems to be really terrible at changing to sms when someone is not available online — I ran out of internet data once and tried to text my girlfriend on imessage assuming it will just send an sms, and it just waited for like 10 minutes before telling me it couldn’t be sent. The other side is even worse - I would have assumed apple checks whether the other half is expected to come online anytime soon and if not, send an sms instead. Nope, you just don’t get a message and are expected to long press and send as sms manually.
And I have been to a number of islands across Polynesia and Micronesia where the cellular service simply does not exist; however, there is always Wi-Fi in hotels. SMS is of no use in such places.
> in specific areas like middle school where it is still seen as important to try to project wealth.
Surely it's not middle school when people try to project wealth the most.. kids care more about who has an iPhone than adults but adults project wealth _a lot_ more than kids overall: fancy cars, homes, holidays etc. More expensive things are also nicer than their cheaper counterparts but I think most people would be lying if they don't say having access to them also gives them some status boost, if only internally. Can't turn off the monkey in the head easily.
Yeah all my group conversations in Ireland are on whatsapp now, but I think this is mostly due to the fact that carriers still charge extra to send photos over sms. It's just not worth it to use sms anymore.
> This deep integration with colours and status symbols does remain in specific areas like middle school where it is still seen as important to try to project wealth.
Are the kids wrong?
When I look at my app’s stats, Android users are worse in every way.
More expensive to develop for, pay less or none at all, and their halo effect is sometimes negative: they might word-of-mouth my app to more Android users instead of more iOS users.
As iOS developer i disagree, You can develop android app on any platform that support JDK you pay a one-time registration fee of €25, Google Play is faster at approving apps (anecdotal evidence from working on team that support both iOS and Android)
iOS apps have to be compiled on recent Mac with latest version of macOS, you pay a yearly fee of €100 and AppStore review process is more in-dept especially for new apps
You can make everyone equal (and thereby eliminate "status") by making everyone worse off. For a lot of things that's exactly the choice society makes.
I agree that this is a middle school level analysis, but I've seen it a couple times in practice during my career.
1. In the dating scene, I have heard women remark that it was a red flag (Android users are stereotypically poor... despite a large number of techies using Android)
2. A manager at my old company was advised to get an iphone for communication with VCs. One of our old leaders had heard commentary from a VC at one point about the text message colors.
It has nothing to do with "toxic femininity", it's classism. And no one's "banning" you from using this term, you're just getting downvoted for your performative "Cancel Culture" signalling.
This seems to be related to both gender roles and class. The culture around the male role in a diadic relationship is classist. I wouldn't use the term toxic femininity, but I think in spirit it has some merit. The complaining about what words you "can say" is annoying for sure.
yes it does. It is well known that women have a proclivity to climb the social ladder and marry upwards, therefore desiring wealth etc. Duckduckgo hypergamy.
I obviously used the term in a sarcastic manner, to show how stupid it is, together with its sister term
Not in question. I guess the issue is that SMS bubble color is such a weak indicator of success that it should call into question somebody who regards it as noteworthy.
The parent is saying that the choice of phone is a poor indicator of success (likely because Androids can cost just as much as the most expensive iPhone and vice versa, old iPhones can cost as little as the shittiest Android).
If you wanted to keep a second "burner" phone. Your own prior generation phone would be substantially less suspicious option compared to buying a second device. iPhone users may well in fact prefer an iPhone either a relatively cheap model if they are of the affluent set or a used model purchased for cash. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this would eliminate all burner phones.
Lets do some speculation to firm up the idea. 55% of US users have an android, 45 an iphone and our overall probability of talking to someone who already has a girlfriend is on the overall pretty high say 50% with half of those having a second phone and 80% of those being cheap androids.
The overall percentages of users using each platform is actual the rest is speculation. I have actually probably WAY overestimated the numbers to prove that the strongest argument is basically still bad.
Take 1000 suitors. 500 are cheating bastards. Your chance are 50/50. You apply your first pass green bubble filter and filter out 550 including many good matches.
Lets look at how this effects the cheater pop. We start with 500. 250 aren't using a burner phone and 113 passed the green bubble test another 50 passed because their burner is an iphone.
Your first pass filter only reduced the cheating bastard percentage from 50% to 36%.
Now if we reduce the cheating bastard percentage to a hopefully more realistic 25% we are talking about it reducing the percentage from 25->18.
The worst thing about this algorithm is that it makes it impossible to bubble up especially good choices who nonetheless fail the green bubble test. It's also one that potential bad choices can trivially game by buying a 4 year old iphone on facebook for $90. It's the worst of all possible worlds.
> For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
Talk to people like human beings and you should be able to more reliably pick out the cheating bastards.
If she does not need to deal with someone might have a burner number, she is not going to deal with someone who might have a burner number. The end.
> Talk to people like human beings and you should be able to more reliably pick out the cheating bastards.
She does not need to talk to people who put themselves into a pile of "might have a burner number" because her deck would be more than full without those.
It's really weird to redefine buying the phone OS used by 80% of the planet and 55% of the US uses as a willfully suspicious act. It's not about how many people you have time to date its picking a deliberately substandard algorithm when there are seventeen more readily at hand. It's about being bad at the game of life and then justifying bad strategy with bad logic. I would advise your friend to pick a better strategy.
Which doesn't at all prove that its a good strategy. A moderately attractive female that is reasonable well put together has sufficient options that she could probably concoct an absurd strategy filtering by hair color and astrology and still do extremely well. This wouldn't prove that astrology is a great way to date. It proves that if you start far enough ahead of the game you can run the race by hopping on one foot.
Because a VC that is more concerned with the type of phone you use than your product/service/company is probably a VC you should stay away from.
Imagine explaining to investors in your VC - "You know that XYZ company that just IPO'd for several billion dollars? Yeah I passed on their series A because the founder didn't have an iPhone despite the business itself being really solid". If I was an investor in that VC I'd sue the partners into the ground over such trivial bullshit.
Yeah, but the whole point is that if it IS explicitly stated or even implied, then the whole concept of a VC's fiduciary duty to its investors gets thrown out the window because of some partner's personal biases that have no impact on a given company or product. That's unethical and dubious at best, and illegal or outright fraud at worst. All because someone didn't like that someone else was using a different kind of phone. That's nuts if you think about it.
Its ever so fun to have to deal with middle school with green bubbles. Apple is directly responsible for some kids getting bullied, but I guess it works out for them since we had to buy some more Apple devices.
Apple knows exactly what coloring the bubble differently will do. The bully is just a marketing instrument to the Apple executives. Normally, I would blame only the bully, but this seems willful on Apple's part. They want kids to feel bad and tell their parents they need an iPhone. They don't give a damn that they're just another point of friction in people's days.
Do you think there would be less bullying in a world without different coloured bubbles?
If the Apple's own messages were the same color as SMS or other avenues and Apple made a best faith effort to make sure messages worked, then there would be one less avenue of bullying.
Do you think the bubbles cause bullying?
Yep. Its status and a lot of bullying comes from the world reaffirming your status over others.
I'd imagine the bubbles are just an excuse, which would immediately be replaced with something else in their absence.
> Android users are stereotypically poor... despite a large number of techies using Android
I haven't lived in a country where text bubbles used to be a thing, but I noticed this. People, even people who are smart and kind in other aspects, still cling to the easiest social cues. Doesn't matter if you wear a Margiela t-shirt or what you drive; your tinder date or a person who you just met in a bar will look at your phone and take notice. Personally, I was quite happy with Samsung flagship phones, and then not less happy with pretty cheap Xiaomi ones — they literally do anything I want in a phone. But after getting frustrated with how people read social cues, I moved back to iPhones and simply got myself the most expensive one, just for the sake of being easier to read for other people.
Obviously, it would be nice to be so laidback and independent as to not care what other people care about your wealth, but sadly, I'm not on that level yet.
I have ascended to the even more-conceited plane of "I don't bother with social signifiers" (which ironically is a signifier in itself- but in my case, I mostly do not care). Then again, I'm not currently in the dating pool, so YMMV
"social reasons" is too broad to say conclusively. If i was desperate to get an "in" with a specific circle, then perhaps? I'm pretty utilitarian, so the probability is low: my current peer circle probably uses cars as a social signifier, and unbothered in that area as well.
Women who are in their 20s or 30s and at least moderately attractive are deluged with male attention. It's not necessarily irrational for them to use quick and dirty filters, even if that often produces false positives.
You assume that somebody who bases an opinion on somebody else on his wealth is obsessed with it. You would be right if and only if you were taking about conscious decision-making only. But people don't work like that. We're affected by a lot of biases that we might deny or not even aware of. It doesn't make sense to label somebody who is affected by this bias as a person necessarily obsessed with wealth; most likely, they are a very nice person who honestly thinks that they don't care for how much somebody else makes.
I don't think people here in Europe think Androids are cheap. And in fact many aren't. I also doubt most people can correctly identify them.
It's kinda funny but I've had even Apple Watch owners thinking that I wear an Apple Watch even though it's an Amazfit GTS 2 mini. It's weird, it hardly looks like one. The one button is much smaller than the Apple's crown and it's smack bang in the middle. It's also a much smaller watch.
>But after getting frustrated with how people read social cues, I moved back to iPhones and simply got myself the most expensive one, just for the sake of being easier to read for other people.
This doesn’t match my experience. Almost everyone I work with has an iPhone.
Anyway, having a good income isn’t the whole story. It’s probably also about willingness to conform to subtle, arbitrary social norms. Plenty of women are more attracted to a guy who dresses well, despite the fact that plenty of techies wear free hoodies. I think that’s a better analogy.
I think using Android can be either a low income signal or a Grey Tribe [0] cultural signal, and people on dating sites might want to screen out either (or both).
Like you said, it’s about arbitrary norms, but we make assumptions about others all the time based on which norms we follow. An analogy from a different angle is that texting your Tinder match from an Android phone is a bit like applying for a tech job with a @hotmail.com email address.
.. people use SMS on tinder ? I had overall a couple hundred matches and going through classic text has been exceedingly rare, 80% of the time conversations move on to instagram, and otherwise to fb messenger or whatsapp
Guessing you are not in the US? I am and all matches I have had on hinge have moved onto text and I have had a girl comment on the green bubbles. I don't even have fb messenger or whatsapp installed.
A manager at my old company was advised to get an iphone for communication with VCs.
This doesn't seem very different from a Director of Sales telling the salespeople to upgrade their wardrobe.
Image is important in business. Some people may be uncomfortable with that, but it's a fact. Companies, and people, spend trillions of dollars a year to project an image.
It just happens that blue text bubbles are more in style than green text bubbles.
But Google fell into the same trap that all large companies do: If you can't innovate, litigate.
I use an iPhone. Not for any philosophical reason. I tried switching to android 3 times over the years since the first iPhone came out. Same plan, same provider, grandfathered in, same house, same spot. Each android phone did not get the same level of cell service in my house as the iPhone. I have side gigs I do contracting for, I have had cases of missing calls where the androids have literally cost me $100's of dollars, phone didn't ring... just a voicemail notification showing up hours later.
After the 3rd attempt, last being a nexus 5, I gave up. I'm sorry but I draw a line when a device messes with my income regardless of my ideological stance on open source and not having a windows device or even an Apple laptop in the house for the last 13 years.
With that said the Pixel 7 Pro looks nice, and I would love to give it a try but I'll only do that if I have it on a separate dedicated line to try out besides my main one that have had for 20 years. Not sure it's worth the effort at this point.
> After the 3rd attempt, last being a nexus 5, I gave up.
coincidentally i think the nexus 5 was also my 3rd and final android. i actually really liked that phone. then i took an international flight and after landing it was suddenly bricked. wouldn’t turn on at all. so strange.
> 1. In the dating scene, I have heard women remark that it was a red flag (Android users are stereotypically poor... despite a large number of techies using Android)
This is a red flag against the women in question, not the Android user. That attitude/behaviour is a great indicator of a gold digger. You'd be dodging a bullet by avoiding these women.
The only other people that share that attitude are teenagers. So if you go along with this horseshit and buy an iPhone just to feel more comfortable dating, you're courting women with the maturity and intelligence of the average teenager.
"Smart" and "decent" are desirable qualities, but it is questionable whether or not they can provide a better life for a woman than wealth. Poverty is known to be a true killer of any kind of romance and love. It doesn't seem far fetched to agree that being wealthy and enjoying a stress-free lifestyle can be an aphrodisiac.
Also, I think that poverty is actually more correlated to stupidity and rudeness. I've read that stress can literally make your brain shrink from the excess of cortisol. Rich people are generally labeled with undesirable properties, which (at least in my case) often comes from a personal bias - it feels unfair to watch someone else have everything I want, so at least they're a bad person and I'm not, so I got that going for me, which is nice.
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To sidetrack a little bit:
> That's a very stupid criteria.
This is completely redundant - your point would be perfectly conveyed without this sentence. HN guidelines phrase it this way:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
This is a clickbait. On my iPhone the green color is much darker than what the author shows in the article. Here are some images with the hex color codes for example:
A comparison between blue and green bubbles on your phone would be more relevant. Color space handling makes direct comparisons between screen grabs (from different devices) tricky.
A reasonable start would be screen grabs of both blue and green bubbles, grabbed from the same phone in the same way. (And vertical placement; see the other comment.)
It's actually really cherry-picked samples. All messages (blue and green) in the Messages app fade out slightly as you scroll. The author picked a blue message from the bottom of the screen and a green one from the top. If only they scrolled around a bit... they would have noticed.
This article is weird to me. On one hand, it’s interesting science about color perception. Good stuff.
But on the other hand, it assumes an unsubstantiated motive for why it is as it is. I’ve worked with designers a bunch, and they have all kinds of reasons for why they choose as they do. I would not put this past apple at all. But given there’s no quotes from the original designers, I’d go with “Do no attribute to malice that which you can attribute to incompetence.”
Might it might it not also be just conditioning? Users have learned to associate green messages with all of the limitations that SMS impose. Hence they perceive it as bad. If that was true, they could’ve picked a higher contrast version instead, and people would still feel the same way.
The bubble chat interface itself is gross. Terrible. Disgusting. Unusable. Distracting. Eye-hurting. Illogical. Counterproductive. Log-unfriendly. Code-offensive. Intolerable. Since day one.
I'd love to write an article, but currently have no platform (server, site, blog), time and physical power to do so, sadly.
I would propose full-width scalable interface with basic formatting (like Telegram has), without wasted space... but it has to be drawn, words can't show. (
There's more to it, unfortunately. As if it wasn't obvious, I've seen private studies confirming that balloon/bubble/whatever comic-like interface was carefully invented to limit people's attention timespan and granulate thoughts.
For example, on your average phone you have 3-4 short messages and TONS of empty space around. You don't have the whole line of conversation before your eyes, you have ridiculous limits to text width and height, etc.etc. which makes it irritating to read and write something longer than "Hi", forcing you to write very short messages. (I won't go deep into this, to not to be instantly labeled a conspiracy theorist, but it has enormous psychological impact, not just UX).
Interesting .. I guess it comes down to preference
I think the white space is awesome .. It helps show the conversational nature of the messages .. I personally do not want long SMS messages .. If the conversation is long, then I typical switch over to audio as it is much more efficient .. Additionally, I don't want to type that much without a keyboard
I guess I also look at is "pick the right tool for the job" .. If you want a long convo, use e-mail .. I mean it has called SHORT messaging service from the jump .. I guess I want my mobile convos to be more back and forth and not structured more formally .. Again, I see this all as preference
Yeah, short messages are one thing, but it was cloned to more "heavy" messengers like whatsapp, telegram or even xmpp. It's part of the "let's clone something from Apple" trend, I think. But regardless, I'd still want to see more lines of a conversation whithout having to scroll too much.
353 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadBut in this context the thing that's harder on the eyes is the bubble itself. So the lighter one is easier for me. Although I'd rather see no bubbles at all.
I don't think that's true for the reasons you put up.
Our eyes are specialized to distinct more shades of green from each other than with other colors. That's a useful evolutionary feature when you are an animal and have to hunt in the wild.
For humans that leads to the point that we're rather good in picking "unnatural" shades of green (gooish ones and self-emitting shades of green).
https://youtu.be/VQKMoT-6XSg?t=1863
https://www.oreilly.com/api/v2/epubs/9780133016529/files/gra...
iOS 4, green Aqua-ish bubbles with black text: https://d2bs8hqp6qvsw6.cloudfront.net/article/images/750x750...
iOS 5, introducing blue iMessage bubbles (still good contrast in both colors): https://images.anandtech.com/doci/4956/IMG_0907.PNG
The change in contrast came with Ive's "flat" iOS 7:
https://i.insider.com/5df902c5fd9db27769749a5f?width=1300&fo...
- Contrast of your iPhone: 2.21:1 (#35c759)
- Contrast that's "poor": 2.17:1 (#65c466)
- Contrast that's "good": 2.93:1 (#3bac3c)
- Contrast of the blue: 3.95:1 (#367bf5)
Based on this I would say that the Contrast of your green and the "gross" one from the article are actually pretty close, both being very far from the contrast that blue provides.
Not even the good green from the article does match the contrast of the blue. They are being lenient I'd say, not misleading.
[0]: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
I think this is a case of learned significance, for which you know that a green bubble means a message sent via SMS rather than the "smarter" message. Added to the fact the blue is often used by tech companies due to its fresh and modern connotation, you have the full picture on why your brain prefers the blue to the green message.
That being said, I think Apple should have been more careful about making their message bubble pass contrast tests. But I doubt there was an "evil designer" carefully planning to make that bubble with lower contrast on purpose to make you dislike it.
They have to be very, very subtle, and ride the fine line between effectiveness and outrage, never going too much on a side or the other. The best and most enduring conspiration theories have originated from such deliberate and surgical manipulations. The goal they are after: most people will unknowingly abide and be manipulated, while the minority will go nuts proclaiming they know the truth.
Welcome to propaganda 101, aka destructive marketing.
This isn’t some great conspiracy.
I wonder if the contrast has changed over the years. It could be a worse green today than originally.
The original iPhone had a resolution of 320x480 with much worse color reproduction.
Some product owner probably wanted the iMessage enabled texter to "pop" and the designers usually take that and roll with it usually through some combination of boldening one, and deemphasizing the other to give the overall desired effect. It's a good call out for them to improve the color contrast, but you can adjust the contrast yourself through the accessibility options.
They have every reason to make “green bubbles” look toxic and off putting, because unencrypted SMS is genuinely hazardous.
This is just like saying the colored HTTPS symbol in the browser toolbar on websites that support SSL was designed to make websites without SSL look uncool.
When I text other android users, my messages are encrypted. When I text an iPhone, they are not.
Stop supporting closed protocols and bad-faith actors.
Once 99% of phones and carriers support RCS then maybe you could make this argument, but it won’t be for several years.
Most US carriers have rolled it out by now (or can be completely circumvented by using Android Messages app) and the green bubble teasing seems like a USA specific phenomena.
Anyhow, so what you mean to say, is that it's not about security (because it's present and accessible), but it's about appearances. And worst, the platform perpetuating the the appearances is not making any moves to secure it's messaging to non-Apple devices. Unacceptable.
If it's the goal to implicate danger, this strikes me as a weird colour choice for dangerous messages, to be honest.
This whole "thing" around "bad" green vs blue message bubbles appears a bit, for the lack of a better word, insane to me as a non-american. The bubbles are fine. IMO, the problem is very obviously that kids can be cruel jerks and "not having an iPhone" is a social stigma for US teenagers, just like "not having a flashy cell phone with Bluetooth and MMS" was 15 years ago. Changing the colour will not fix this stigma, there still isn't an Apple on the back of the Android phones.
EDIT: to clarify here, the author does explain his point about the color and the contrast of the text. He may have a point there but IMO, the main issue was that it’s not messages. The thing I should have added is that back when it was implemented people had to pay real money per message to send as a text message. That means everyone in the group had to feel uncomfortable sending frivolous messages when it costs someone money. I think that is the real reason for the bifurcation and not the color choice.
Given their attention to detail in design (see the rabbithole of their Human Interface Guidelines - https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...), I agree with the author in that this was an intentional design choice that Apple made.
I personally am not convinced by the theory that Apple is doing this deliberately (though it doesn't sound impossible to me either!) but either way it's something they should change.
After a two sentence paragraph expressing how the green/blue technical differentiation has become a social one, it then asks the question "Why is green worse than blue?" The next line: "The answer is color contrast."
What could they have realistically done to cut to the chase sooner in a meaningful way? The only real thing is ditching those two context building sentences. But it's two short sentences, providing relevant context.
Doesn't really feel like a valid criticism IMO.
Or admonishing us for not reading the article, because we've misunderstood it based on the title.
iMessage shades the bubbles depending on position, and shows both the blue and green bubbles as darker at the bottom of the screen, and lighter at the top.
A side-by-side screenshot of iOS 7, when this design was introduced:
https://i.insider.com/5df902c5fd9db27769749a5f?width=1300&fo...
The lighter greyish green gives off a lower standard, almost as if the Android user was a guest user or in free trial mode.
Edit: Haha thx for the downvotes but the article is still lying with phony made-up images.
See a few posts above where someone did the hard work of taking real screenshots instead of the totally bullshit fictional ones the author has in the article.
In Western Europe, South America and Asia it's mostly just some specific app (WhatsApp for example, or Signal, or WeChat or LINE) and as a fallback SMS. And if SMS turns from one colour bubble to another colour it doesn't really do anything for users on either end. This deep integration with colours and status symbols does remain in specific areas like middle school where it is still seen as important to try to project wealth.
And sms group chats? I only know about sms group chats from US posters.
You can just assume everyone has Whatsapp here, and just message them over that.
Yea but that's a problem too.
SMS by contrast is an open standard.
Exactly. If your complaint is about being locked in but the platform you use is the one everyone has to use because of network effect or otherwise you yourself are locked in with that platform.
And SMS is irrelevant.
Also, you need like.. a carrier plan to access, wouldn’t really call that open. Any network based messenger can work over my home or even McDonald’s wifi, without any third-parties
The lock-in is obvious: if you're part of Apple-oriented chat groups you can't switch to Android without losing access to those groups, degrading the experience for everyone, or convincing each one of those groups to make the switch to a multi-platform alternative. Claiming not to see this is disingenuous.
I'm not sure, but I don't think you can actually uninstall the default SMS from Android phones either without having another app installed at a minimum and then I bet similar to Messages if you were to somehow uninstall that app then the default app would appear since it's probably part of the core operating system (similar to other basic functionality like settings or a phone app to receive calls).
I don't know what you mean by you cannot substitute Messages with another app. If I didn't want to use Messages I would just disable all settings and remove it from the home screen and use whatever I wanted instead just fine.
You are correct that you cannot install Messages on non-Apple hardware. Not all software is open source or available for all platforms. For example I cannot install Playstation software on my Xbox, nor can I buy a Nest Thermostat and install a competitor's software on it (without hacking both of course). There are games that are made that aren't created with support for macOS. Etc.
> if you're part of Apple-oriented chat groups you can't switch to Android without losing access to those groups
What is an Apple-oriented chat group?
No. Why would it?
> I don't know what you mean by you cannot substitute Messages with another app.
On Android, if you don't like the SMS app you can replace it with another app that has all the same functionality (and more). Does Apple let you do that?
> What is an Apple-oriented chat group?
Please engage with the discussion. One that uses Apple's proprietary SMS extensions, obviously.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/24/dma-political-agreement/
As a user I cannot see any downsides.
I wish Signal would be more popular, but it's just not. I can't really ask new people I meet to communicate over Signal because it's a burden to get others to install some new application.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32539762
In a U.S. court of law Apple has stood up to authority and pointed out they can't provide the messages requested as they're locked even to Apple. Facebook on the other hand has acquiesced to U.S. law enforcement. That tells me that even if Facebook has secured end-to-end messaging, which I don't think they've ever claimed, they have backdoors.
Given that I don't see why more of us Americans aren't using WhatsApp! :)
Completely false. I have multiple group chats in Messenger. The people who “don’t trust Zuckerberg” enough to not use his messaging products are a tiny minority of people in the US.
Nonetheless, it is a self-made problem in the US, which wouldn’t even make sense in the EU because we don’t have such a high percentage of apple devices.
This is a common excuse I hear in college to not use FB messenger or Whatsapp. But those same people usually have no issues using Instagram DMs. For most people, it's just a cover story to mask the real reason: Facebook messenger and whatsapp are uncool in the US
Some of Europe has very effective telecom infrastructure, but that's far from universal.
In the USA we had opposite plans during this time. Unlimited talk/text, but strict data caps.
Usually, if you don't have data for signal (as opposed to run out of data in your plan) reasons, then you don't have signal at all, even for SMS, either...
At least where I live, 4G got deployed on the low bands freed up by the digital TV switchover and hence has the best reception in remote areas.
Trusting your private conversations to ~Facebook~ Meta is also a signal.
Surely it's not middle school when people try to project wealth the most.. kids care more about who has an iPhone than adults but adults project wealth _a lot_ more than kids overall: fancy cars, homes, holidays etc. More expensive things are also nicer than their cheaper counterparts but I think most people would be lying if they don't say having access to them also gives them some status boost, if only internally. Can't turn off the monkey in the head easily.
Are the kids wrong?
When I look at my app’s stats, Android users are worse in every way.
More expensive to develop for, pay less or none at all, and their halo effect is sometimes negative: they might word-of-mouth my app to more Android users instead of more iOS users.
> pay less or none at all
Maybe just make the app paid only?
As iOS developer i disagree, You can develop android app on any platform that support JDK you pay a one-time registration fee of €25, Google Play is faster at approving apps (anecdotal evidence from working on team that support both iOS and Android)
iOS apps have to be compiled on recent Mac with latest version of macOS, you pay a yearly fee of €100 and AppStore review process is more in-dept especially for new apps
Maybe because there is always a free alternative that is better than yours.
Whereas iOS users only has the App Store, and if they don’t pay they don’t get app.
1. In the dating scene, I have heard women remark that it was a red flag (Android users are stereotypically poor... despite a large number of techies using Android)
2. A manager at my old company was advised to get an iphone for communication with VCs. One of our old leaders had heard commentary from a VC at one point about the text message colors.
I obviously used the term in a sarcastic manner, to show how stupid it is, together with its sister term
You're on HN. Half of us use Android.
Seems like premature analysis which would be better and easier done after more conversation rather than prejudging half the population.
If she does not need to deal with people who might have a burner number, she would be stupid to deal with people who might have a burner number
Lets do some speculation to firm up the idea. 55% of US users have an android, 45 an iphone and our overall probability of talking to someone who already has a girlfriend is on the overall pretty high say 50% with half of those having a second phone and 80% of those being cheap androids.
The overall percentages of users using each platform is actual the rest is speculation. I have actually probably WAY overestimated the numbers to prove that the strongest argument is basically still bad.
Take 1000 suitors. 500 are cheating bastards. Your chance are 50/50. You apply your first pass green bubble filter and filter out 550 including many good matches.
Lets look at how this effects the cheater pop. We start with 500. 250 aren't using a burner phone and 113 passed the green bubble test another 50 passed because their burner is an iphone.
Your first pass filter only reduced the cheating bastard percentage from 50% to 36%.
Now if we reduce the cheating bastard percentage to a hopefully more realistic 25% we are talking about it reducing the percentage from 25->18.
The worst thing about this algorithm is that it makes it impossible to bubble up especially good choices who nonetheless fail the green bubble test. It's also one that potential bad choices can trivially game by buying a 4 year old iphone on facebook for $90. It's the worst of all possible worlds.
> For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
Talk to people like human beings and you should be able to more reliably pick out the cheating bastards.
> Talk to people like human beings and you should be able to more reliably pick out the cheating bastards.
She does not need to talk to people who put themselves into a pile of "might have a burner number" because her deck would be more than full without those.
Imagine explaining to investors in your VC - "You know that XYZ company that just IPO'd for several billion dollars? Yeah I passed on their series A because the founder didn't have an iPhone despite the business itself being really solid". If I was an investor in that VC I'd sue the partners into the ground over such trivial bullshit.
Some topics can be deal breakers, you don't have to marry the first VC you talk to, or court them all.
Do you think the bubbles cause bullying?
I'd imagine the bubbles are just an excuse, which would immediately be replaced with something else in their absence.
If the Apple's own messages were the same color as SMS or other avenues and Apple made a best faith effort to make sure messages worked, then there would be one less avenue of bullying.
Do you think the bubbles cause bullying?
Yep. Its status and a lot of bullying comes from the world reaffirming your status over others.
I'd imagine the bubbles are just an excuse, which would immediately be replaced with something else in their absence.
Maybe, but it wouldn't be Apple's fault.
I haven't lived in a country where text bubbles used to be a thing, but I noticed this. People, even people who are smart and kind in other aspects, still cling to the easiest social cues. Doesn't matter if you wear a Margiela t-shirt or what you drive; your tinder date or a person who you just met in a bar will look at your phone and take notice. Personally, I was quite happy with Samsung flagship phones, and then not less happy with pretty cheap Xiaomi ones — they literally do anything I want in a phone. But after getting frustrated with how people read social cues, I moved back to iPhones and simply got myself the most expensive one, just for the sake of being easier to read for other people.
Obviously, it would be nice to be so laidback and independent as to not care what other people care about your wealth, but sadly, I'm not on that level yet.
It's kinda funny but I've had even Apple Watch owners thinking that I wear an Apple Watch even though it's an Amazfit GTS 2 mini. It's weird, it hardly looks like one. The one button is much smaller than the Apple's crown and it's smack bang in the middle. It's also a much smaller watch.
I hope you're kidding.
/s, ... but I start thinking that's why Galaxy Flip sold well than I expected.
This doesn’t match my experience. Almost everyone I work with has an iPhone.
Anyway, having a good income isn’t the whole story. It’s probably also about willingness to conform to subtle, arbitrary social norms. Plenty of women are more attracted to a guy who dresses well, despite the fact that plenty of techies wear free hoodies. I think that’s a better analogy.
Like you said, it’s about arbitrary norms, but we make assumptions about others all the time based on which norms we follow. An analogy from a different angle is that texting your Tinder match from an Android phone is a bit like applying for a tech job with a @hotmail.com email address.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
This doesn't seem very different from a Director of Sales telling the salespeople to upgrade their wardrobe.
Image is important in business. Some people may be uncomfortable with that, but it's a fact. Companies, and people, spend trillions of dollars a year to project an image.
It just happens that blue text bubbles are more in style than green text bubbles.
But Google fell into the same trap that all large companies do: If you can't innovate, litigate.
I use an iPhone. Not for any philosophical reason. I tried switching to android 3 times over the years since the first iPhone came out. Same plan, same provider, grandfathered in, same house, same spot. Each android phone did not get the same level of cell service in my house as the iPhone. I have side gigs I do contracting for, I have had cases of missing calls where the androids have literally cost me $100's of dollars, phone didn't ring... just a voicemail notification showing up hours later.
After the 3rd attempt, last being a nexus 5, I gave up. I'm sorry but I draw a line when a device messes with my income regardless of my ideological stance on open source and not having a windows device or even an Apple laptop in the house for the last 13 years.
With that said the Pixel 7 Pro looks nice, and I would love to give it a try but I'll only do that if I have it on a separate dedicated line to try out besides my main one that have had for 20 years. Not sure it's worth the effort at this point.
coincidentally i think the nexus 5 was also my 3rd and final android. i actually really liked that phone. then i took an international flight and after landing it was suddenly bricked. wouldn’t turn on at all. so strange.
This is a red flag against the women in question, not the Android user. That attitude/behaviour is a great indicator of a gold digger. You'd be dodging a bullet by avoiding these women.
The only other people that share that attitude are teenagers. So if you go along with this horseshit and buy an iPhone just to feel more comfortable dating, you're courting women with the maturity and intelligence of the average teenager.
this is indicative of someone with poor judgement AT MOST.
Also, I think that poverty is actually more correlated to stupidity and rudeness. I've read that stress can literally make your brain shrink from the excess of cortisol. Rich people are generally labeled with undesirable properties, which (at least in my case) often comes from a personal bias - it feels unfair to watch someone else have everything I want, so at least they're a bad person and I'm not, so I got that going for me, which is nice.
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To sidetrack a little bit:
> That's a very stupid criteria.
This is completely redundant - your point would be perfectly conveyed without this sentence. HN guidelines phrase it this way:
I have 3 daughters and 1 son.
Yes, thats exactly whats going on in the US as well
(and yes, we know that Google has recently adopted some other open source messaging standard that now Apple hasn't.)
https://imgur.com/a/7k5dMtm
https://ibb.co/sKfrZ16
But on the other hand, it assumes an unsubstantiated motive for why it is as it is. I’ve worked with designers a bunch, and they have all kinds of reasons for why they choose as they do. I would not put this past apple at all. But given there’s no quotes from the original designers, I’d go with “Do no attribute to malice that which you can attribute to incompetence.”
IMO this is only good advice there's no obvious motive for malice.
When big corporations are involved, cynicism is absolutely warranted.
(I think the current one is perfect for 1:1 conversations .. Multiple people is more of an issue visually)
I'd love to write an article, but currently have no platform (server, site, blog), time and physical power to do so, sadly.
I would propose full-width scalable interface with basic formatting (like Telegram has), without wasted space... but it has to be drawn, words can't show. (
For example, on your average phone you have 3-4 short messages and TONS of empty space around. You don't have the whole line of conversation before your eyes, you have ridiculous limits to text width and height, etc.etc. which makes it irritating to read and write something longer than "Hi", forcing you to write very short messages. (I won't go deep into this, to not to be instantly labeled a conspiracy theorist, but it has enormous psychological impact, not just UX).
I think the white space is awesome .. It helps show the conversational nature of the messages .. I personally do not want long SMS messages .. If the conversation is long, then I typical switch over to audio as it is much more efficient .. Additionally, I don't want to type that much without a keyboard
I guess I also look at is "pick the right tool for the job" .. If you want a long convo, use e-mail .. I mean it has called SHORT messaging service from the jump .. I guess I want my mobile convos to be more back and forth and not structured more formally .. Again, I see this all as preference