The Wall Street Journal ran a doozy of a story by Tim Higgins last weekend: “Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble”

Daring Fireball: Seeing Green

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2022-01-14 21:30:07

The Wall Street Journal ran a doozy of a story by Tim Higgins last weekend: “Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble” (News+ link). Few Americans don’t have U.S.-centric blind spots — I’m certainly guilty of that on numerous fronts — but this take is so U.S.-centric it beggars belief. The article’s subhead says it all:

The iPhone maker cultivated iMessage as a must-have texting tool for teens. Android users trigger a just-a-little-less-cool green bubble: “Ew, that’s gross.”

Soon after 19-year-old Adele Lowitz gave up her Apple iPhone 11 for an experimental go with an Android smartphone, a friend in her long-running texting group chimed in: “Who’s green?”

The reference to the color of group text messages — Android users turn Apple Inc.’s iMessage into green bubbles instead of blue — highlighted one of the challenges of her experiment. No longer did her group chats work seamlessly with other peers, almost all of whom used iPhones. FaceTime calls became more complicated and the University of Michigan sophomore’s phone didn’t show up in an app she used to find friends.

100 words in and already so much to correct. How this ran in the WSJ’s Technology section is beyond explanation. Messages is Apple’s messaging app for iOS and Mac; iMessage is Apple’s proprietary messaging platform. Messages doesn’t render texts from Android green, per se — it renders all SMS messages as green. Messages has no idea what type of device sent an SMS, it just knows it’s an SMS message. An SMS sent from an iPhone user will be green, too.

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