If anyone is "stirring up" anything it's Apple which is disgustingly playing with the psychology of teenagers and is happy with pushing them to be mean to each other over green bubbles.
This is literally the reason Apple changes the bubble color. iMessage is encrypted by default and uses normal data instead of MMS. That’s the indicator.
This entire spiel about bubble color envy is ridiculous. Features are the separation. The media will whip things up with their sample size of a handful of cherry picked anecdotes. But almost every teen has an iPhone and uses iMessage in the USA. Apple has over 80% of that market.
What Google wants is for Apple to implement Google’s proprietary RCS implementation, not RCS proper. Because RCS proper lacks a lot of features that people take for granted with iMessage. That is presumably one reason Google forked it and requires it to run through their proprietary middleware.
This is literally the reason Apple changes the bubble color. iMessage is encrypted by default and uses normal data instead of MMS. That’s the indicator.
This entire spiel about bubble color envy is ridiculous. Features are the separation. The media will whip things up with their sample size of a handful of cherry picked anecdotes. But almost every teen has an iPhone and uses iMessage in the USA. Apple has over 80% of that market.
What Google wants is for Apple to implement Google’s proprietary RCS implementation, not RCS proper. Because RCS proper lacks a lot of features that people take for granted with iMessage. That is presumably one reason Google forked it and requires it to run through their proprietary middleware.
Edit: Don’t get me wrong. I would love for an open standard to overtake the proprietary bits from both Apple and Google. But Google is disingenuous here. They are complaining because, despite their efforts, they can’t crack the market. Teens aren’t bitting for Android. iMessage has network effect going on, so Google is trying to crack that open since they can’t get a compelling overall product and ecosystem for a valuable demographic.
I’d rather there be open standards. But that means Google RCS has to change as well.
Can you show media produced by Apple that encourages bullying?
People on iMessage don’t like “green bubbles” because a number of features are missing — real-time location sharing, message thread replies, high quality media, games directly in iMessage. Some, but not all, of this is fixed in RCS.
Google could try solving this with a unified messaging app of their own, but they’ve failed to build a cohesive product around this without getting bored, and Samsung would inevitably try to build and run their own for no good reason, fracturing the Android community.
Before Samsung starts trying to throw stones, they ought to look at their house first. They’re doing more to fracture Android than Apple ever could. To my knowledge, their object tracking tags won’t interoperate with Google’s service. They push two app stores on phones. They push their own separate tap-payment ecosystem, Samsung Pay.
While I agree with most of what you said (about Google and Samsung), Apple is pretty clearly encouraging the stigma when it comes to iMessage. They wouldn't outright tell people to bully, but they are doing as much in an underhanded way.
Tim Cook says the solution[1] to the issues is to have the people you are talking to change to an iPhone. Hard to see this as anything other than encouraging, or at least accepting bullying.
Messages in iMessage used to be green, but when the blue messages were introduced, they changed the green ones to make them less readable and break their own guidelines[2]. There is no good reason to do this other than to encourage upset at green messages.
The Epic vs Apple lawsuit made information public[3] that Apple purposefully doesn't make iMessage cross-platform in order to lock users in.