We're literally on a platform designed to escape these closed ecosystems and walled gardens. A platform built around open communication standards.

And still there's a downright bizarre contingent of people around here that seem to be chomping at the bit to defend or downplay Apple's iMessage shit.

I read that it was a 16 year old kid which makes it more fascinating

yeah people should use this a a filter for people they should be avoiding.

This reminds me of the blackberry ping days, everyone and their mom acting like a diva for having a sidekick blackberry just to use ping.

Those were better days financially.

It’s because it breaks all the nice extra functionality of iMessage. iMessage is closer to Discord chats; You can do things like react to messages, send live emojis, spoiler/emphasize text, edit/delete sent messages, see when someone is typing, see read receipts, automatically send check-ins when you arrive at a destination, draw doodles, send full quality media, share galleries natively, etc… But as soon as someone with an android joins the group chat, all of that goes out the window and you’re stuck with boring old SMS.

Is it intentionally hostile on Apple’s part to bar androids from joining? Yes. But the reactions from Apple users aren’t entirely unjustified, because they’re left with a noticeably reduced feature set as soon as someone forces them to use green bubbles.

Apple fanboys don't care one bit. As long as they can look cool and feel like part of the cool kids, they'll buy.

Remember this is the same company that has to either comply with the EU bridging regulation between messaging platforms or withdraw from the market.

Money.

iPhone user here, because Apple likes money.

Scum company

Well, because it's Apple.

87% of teenagers use Apple

Do you mean US American teenagers, or North American teenagers, or who exactly? Surely that can't be global?

Right, I don't understand why these weird hacky services are making headlines. If you want to have a blue bubble, just buy an iPhone. They're not actually THAT expensive, you can usually buy last year's model for under $500 if you wait for a deal and you're willing to commit to a carrier. Or if you really can't afford that, you can get an older iPhone basically for free. Even a 3 year old model gets you a blue bubble.

Or, if you're not an insecure child that gives in to peer pressure, get whatever phone you want.

"It's installed by default and all my friends are on it" - 50% of Americans

They don't need to worry about the fact that the other half of Americans are not able to comfortably message them, or participate in group chats, because those are people poorer than them that they might not even want to interact with anyways. Some of them might even be not white.

This becomes even more extreme as ages become younger, with around 98% of college age students and younger having iPhones (this is obviously biased to higher income colleges in metropolitian area but the data is still useful). The peer pressure of not having an iPhone is genuinely incredible (trust me, i experience it). I have genuinely had people stop wanting to be friends with me once they learned I had an Android phone.

Apple has a monopoly so powerful that they influence the social circles of almost every grade schooler and college student in America. This is why they don't want to give it up.

Saw a few comments in the initial threads about it confidently claiming Apple wouldn’t be able to keep Beeper Mini out since doing so would mess with iOS too.

Super weird to be so sure about that when they obviously didn’t know shit about it.