Tell HN: My son is being bullied for owning an Android phone
My son has a Galaxy S20 running Android, and he said to me recently he has been bullied for having such a phone because it's 'lame'. I tried to explain it's a modern enough and capable phone that can do everything the latest iPhone can do, sometimes even better. He claims all his friends have the latest iPhones and they shun Android.
I own an S20 too and tried to explain how you can side-load apps from F-Droid, bypassing Google Play, but he's too young (12) to understand such concepts. He just wants to play a few games, do instant messaging, and do casual surfing.
How do I convince him that this peer pressure is unacceptable and that iPhones are not automatically 'better' just because they're marketed as a premium brand are are nothing more than expensive jewelry?
276 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 392 ms ] threadWhether the phone is any good or not is besides the point. The point is that he's being bullied for it. Perhaps you could try raising the issue with the kids' parents?
I'd also suggest that there's an extent to which taking a principled stance on these issues isn't worthwhile. Such bullying can be really damaging to kids (as I know from my personal experience as a child), and hepling them to fit in can be the best way of protecting them from this stuff. That doesn't mean you accept the line of reasoning they are hearing. You should still provide a strong rebuttal to that. But it might mean that you support them to do things that wouldn't otherwise be rational simply because they want to fit in.
EDIT: I also agree with another commenter who says "Focus on his self confidence". If he's confident in himself then he'll be able to navigate the social situation much better.
I am certain this would get the right kind of attention from the bully's parents the second little Johny makes dinner talk the most uncomfortable day in HIS family's life.
My Australian boss would impolitely tell them to go away.
The other side already started it with the bullying... ;)
I wonder what that kid's therapist will say about those features viz-a-viz bullying in 20+ years.
Best I think you can do is emphasize working (at 12, allowance or chores) to earn the fancy things you want, and not caving yourself to the demands of his friends. He might be disappointed, but its not his money.
There’s nothing wrong with expensive jewelry. Your son isn’t being bullied because the iPhone has more features than the S20.
Bullying’s bad but focusing on explaining the technical benefits of the S20 show a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation on your part.
If you’re not equipped to help him deal with the bullying, you should consider getting him an iPhone. It’s probably the easiest way out of the situation and there are worse things in the world than being accepted socially. He’s going to have plenty of time in life to be miserable and build character. If buying an iPhone today can make things better, why not?
He's being bullied because he's the odd-man-out, and every single text message from a non-iPhone user looks a different color.
His parent's concern about sideloading and F-droid also makes it clear that this family isn't great with the awareness or social skills; awkward parents == awkward kids.
It's mostly an iMessage thing as I understand, and all iPhones work with iMessage.
Death to the evil Apple empire.
They never said winning was easy.
Freedom is painful and unsexy.
But it's right.
It's the sea of sheep around us who is wrong. :triumph:
Ironyposting https://youtu.be/R706isyDrqI
I also had an Android phone from 7th grade to 12th grade, and definitely faced the same attitude/behaviour your son experienced.
First, you should address the bullying. That is the most important part, kids are vicious and the phone might just be an easy excuse to pick on your son. You should raise this issue with other kids' parents as nicoburns said.
Second, it can definitely be a bit isolating being the only one or the few kids with an Android phone (especially in the States) a lot of social activity revolves around the Apple Ecosystem (iMessage, iMessage Games, FaceTime, etc...). I found that when I got an iPhone I felt a lot more "connected" to my peers simply because we shared the same platform, its unfortunate but it is the reality.
Third, and this may be controversial, I would get your son an iPhone, I assume the dependence for cell phones has only gotten increasingly higher post-covid and feeling left out at that age can hurt pretty bad. You could perhaps make him "earn" it by doing chores, getting good grades, etc...
I wish US kids would move to Whatsapp like the rest of the world but that's what we have here.
The drawback is the phone number requirement, but this is true of all the other chat apps. If there was one that was functionality equivalent but accounts didn't require a number then I would switch.
Obviously, this goes back to the root issue as there are philosophical reasons to straight prefer certain technologies—like the ability to side-load apps on your pocket computer—that you should try not to compromise on just because of peer pressure.
XMPP would be preferred, but isn't quite as simple as iMessage/WhatsApp at the moment, and Matrix isn't the same. I do see that some of the XMPP clients are getting pretty slick and I could probably move the family to something like that soon enough.
It's a bunch of XMPP software (Conversations, Siskin, Prosody), with minor patches, under a common branding (the Snikket parrot), plus a web portal.
It's aimed at the friends&family use case, with an easy invitation-based onboarding workflow. You can either self-host a Snikket Server (= Prosody + TURN + certificate automation) or sign up for the hosted beta (which is either bring-your-own-domain or a domain under snikket.chat).
Note that snikket.org is not, by itself, an XMPP service where you can just sign up. You either need to run your own instance, or you need to sign up for hosting.
https://eagernomad.com/most-popular-messaging-apps-by-countr...
> hardly an upgrade.
It's a huge upgrade. It's not perfect but it beats being forced to buy iPhones by a mile. Facebook already has the address book of most people anyway. The extra metadata they get from WhatsApp is marginal at best.
I suppose if the low-hanging goal is better than iMessage lock-in then sure. Saying Facebook has a lot of data already doesn't make it excusable--especially with younger generations not even having or wanting accounts (though Instagram, same parent, yadda). I actually don't think this is marginal either as it's not difficult to use Facebook from a browser or just not share your contacts, but a requirement is a different story, if this data wasn't valuable, why would they have payed billions to acquire a chat app with E2E enabled?
Sadly that is the low-hanging goal. There's pretty much zero chance we will ever get a perfect e2e encrypted, federated, decentralised, open, spam free, popular IM system, but I would say WhatsApp is furthest towards that overall. If you exclude "popular" then Signal is probably the best but in IM systems "popular" is probably the most important characteristic.
Not having to buy a really expensive phone to use it is another important characteristic. If WhatsApp ever gets a foothold in America I guarantee Apple will open iMessage up to Android.
We're not in an ideal spot and self-hosting is more complicated than it should be. That said, there still are options to join public Matrix and XMPP servers that cover the all the above features and would be accessible even on smaller mobile platforms like KaiOS, Capyloon, and all Linuxes.
But also… what if Apple converted iMessage to use one of those open protocols (like the reverse of how Google and Facebook's chats were XMPP until they decided there's more to gain making it proprietary after scaling with FOSS)? Sure tim@imessage.apple.corp would still give them a 'vanity' URL like the color of a message bubble, but at least everyone could participate and have all the same features on a technical level.
We've definitely made some of these concessions with our kids more lately. They don't have phones yet, but they do have iPads, and it is already apparent how pervasive the iMessage ecosystem is. If they were on Android they'd be the only ones not in their friends iMessage and Facetime groups, which would be pretty isolating.
Another commenter talked about spending $300 as a targeted fix to a problem. The idea that just doing the simple thing is sometimes the best choice resonates with me. I recall being bullied in a PE class in highschool. After so much uncomfortable intervention by teachers I was like, "oh ffs can't you just move me to the other class so I'm away from these assholes?". And they reluctantly did, and things were better. No it didn't address any root causes, but it make my life much nicer for 4 months which was very appreciated.
It doesn’t have anything to do with the technology and trying to convince your son Android is better really does your son no good and might make him feel that you care more about technological arguments than how it is directly affecting him.
Adults do this too, btw.
And kids are assholes, so if they can get away with teasing somebody about anything, they are going to turn the dial up to 11 on it.
i.e. they can talk shit all day about my Pixel phone, whatever. I'll ponder why it matters to them as I drove home in my 7-series.
Also wouldnt hurt to buy him a Ferrari and get some hot supermodels to hang out with him from time to time.
How much of this is just SMS? Is it Apple’s fault that SMS doesn’t have group chat, etc?
People forget that the iPhone only had SMS the first 3-4 years of its existence. It was a green bubble from day one. So it’s not like they’ve planned this from day one. They needed to differentiate between SMS and iMessage so they started switching colors. I do wonder if anyone has checked the shade of green though. I bet you they’ve made it subtly more visually annoying.
Also, yes RCS exists but the feature set is spotty across carriers and it’s not end to end encrypted.
At 12, kids are just starting to execute their us vs them muscles. Anything that causes you to stand out against the group can compound this social isolation. There’s plenty of time for your son to develop his individuality later but it takes quite a lot to undo the damage from bullying at this age.
And an S20 cant do this somehow?
Is this the american green bubble shit?
It seems like I’m that kind of situation we should probably just go with whatever the person being squeezed feels like and they’ve explicitly stated that they don’t care about sideloading or understand what it is - and there’s no conceivable way that participation in your circle of friends should depend on it or even does depend on it. And that he just wants to do things that iPhones are perfectly well suited for.
You can get slight older iPhones that’ll continue getting updates for a while yet for remarkably little these days and iPhones offer, dollar for dollar, better CPU performance than Android devices by some margin.
It is no expensive jewellery it is just a tool.
The people around him have settled on one kind of tool that works for them so just get him the same tool.
You’re the one trying to burden him with expensive jewellery, a device with worse CPU performance per dollar, with features he doesn’t care about but missing features that he needs just to be able to more effectively interact with the people around him.
That’s jewellery.
If OP is looking for an explicit answer to that read between the lines question the simple one is: You don’t and you can’t, the end.
As a wise person once said: "Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen! It's not going to happen!"
Wow, talk about missing the point.
My parents were well-to-do but frugal immigrants. I got railed on constantly in the faddish 80s for my home haircuts, my second-hand gear, and my sneakers from the clearance bin. Nothing my parents told me about function over form helped alleviate the ignominy. I honestly don't know the best approach, to gut it out, or to succumb to consumerism.
A bit of a Froid-ian slip there.
I know HN doesn't appreciate comedy, but I couldn't resist and will gladly take the down votes.
I believe the comedy has to be universal because we come from so many different cultures here. HN dislikes comedy that is based on some biases or bigotry.
I use an android, but none of this. Nobody normal cares. Unironically. I install apps from google play, use firefox for the adblock and messenger, telegram, whatsapp, discord, snap for messaging.
When did smartphone start to mean apple? I feel like just a few years ago EVERYONE used snap as a teen/young adult. Is it really imessage/facetime only now?
And they really don't care that much. If he really wants to he can say that it's because of his big dick.
Get your son an iPhone if you can handle it financially. It's not capitulation, there are other bigger shits your son will need you to deal with that money can't address. Focus on those.
There are a couple ways you can approach this particular issue.
1. You can capitulate to the demands that your child has, and get him an iPhone of some appropriate variety. You can attach some strings to this, maybe he needs to work or do something else and this can be his reward, or you could just give it to him. Sometimes it's best to pick your battles, and you could have a conversation with him about that.
2. You can continue as you have been doing to try and teach your son that the kids are wrong, and that he can be resilient against this kind of bullying. (I don't think I recommend this strategy)
3. You can tell some other authority figures about what's going on. The outcome of this will largely depend on who they are, and how likely they are to recognise/care about the bullying.
EDIT:
The most important thing is to talk to your son about this, and listen to what he has to say. You might think you're an expert on phones, and you probably are. That doesn't matter. Let your son explain how he feels, and work through a plan to make the situation better. Bullies prey on insecurity. Help your son understand what's happening and let him know that you are a person who can help.
IMO, option 3 can also be highly ostracizing depending on the circumstances. Maybe the bullying based on the phone will stop, but it's also possible the kids decide that "OP's son is a snitch. So full of shade. We don't want him around."
There's a whole slew of conversational skills that would be useful to develop in OP's son for dealing with adverse situations like this. Especially in deescalation and conversational redirection techniques.
I was also bullied as a kid and when my kid will have similar issue, I will try to explain him how bullying work and what gives then satisfaction, so he could stay confident and show something unique about himself.
As I think OP is technical person that knows well android ecosystem, maybe he could even build some cool app (something that just looks cool, depending what kid would think would impress other kids) - eg maybe some chat app that with gptchat with prompt to pretend to be some celebrity/YouTuber/etc?