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?
Genuine question here: why? Text messaging that comes with the phone is easier to use than installing 20 different apps to talk to 20 different people. Is this a younger generation thing? “I just like it better” was the only response my daughter gave for this. That’s nice and all if it’s one person but if everyone does is, that’s a lot of work. I don’t even talk to that many people yet I have to use a different app to talk to every person I know.
SMS used to be really expensive and limited feature wise. Sending messages over IP ment that you did not have to care about how many messages you sent and you could send media with non potato resolution. Media over the phone network (MMS) was basically limited to small images.
Since the messaging apps were developed by third parties (and not your phone company) there was a market for several of them. The phone companies tried to counter with RCS, but being phone companies and not internet savvy pioneers, it was a slow process to get wide adoption.
This makes sense. I was a late adopter of cell phones, mainly because I’m asocial and the thought of someone being able to contact me wherever I was is a terrifying thing. I didn’t even really get into it until smartphones, because that’s what made it worth it. Anything I want to know, right now? Yes please.
I never used it to send things to others until reddit got crazy popular and even I heard about it.
Cellphone network fees have historically been ridiculously expensive, when I was young a single SMS message cost about 80c, whilst for 10x that fee I could get enough data to send hundreds of WhatsApp or similar data-based messages.
In time providers tried to draw more subscribers to their networks by making the data used by messaging apps like WhatsApp free, so even if you had no prepaid airtime (in Africa most people use prepaid airtime) you could still send messages with these apps even though you couldn’t SMS.
These days messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram (the latter especially) are just simply more feature-rich than SMS, and you’re not locked into a specific hardware platform such as iPhone & Mac with iMessage.