Even if that's a real thing and not an imaginary or minor phenomenon hyped up for clicks, it is hardly anti-trust-worthy.
70% of American teenagers may have access to iMessage due to it being on their phones but there is a 0.0% chance that, in aggregate, iMessage is in their top five most-used messaging apps.
I can't speak to the anti-trust issue but it is a real thing. My daughter couldn't join the group chat used by her (all iPhone) cheerleading team. We ended up missing last minute changes to practice locations more than once.
And, of course, there was some teasing from the other team members about how my daughter's parents were too cheap to buy them a proper phone.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their SMS but by the content of their character."
I have teen girls in Oregon. iMessage is decidedly the number one messaging app. The others aren't even close. There's no universe where my daughters use anything but iPhones. For better or worse, their friend group deliberately excludes those who cannot use the full functionality of iMessage. In case you've forgotten, teen girls are not terribly "equity" minded, particularly when it comes to tech.
I'm not sure why you're so confident in that 0.0% assertion. iMessage is integrated with the default/ubiquitous messaging app on iPhones, and I think it's reasonable to assume that teenagers are messaging mainly other teenagers who are likely to have iPhones (and thus using iMessage).
What do you think is beating out iMessage here apart from SMS? Snapchat, WhatsApp, various social net DMs? The biggest non-iMessage usage numbers I can imagine still don't exceed what I'd expect from iMessage, just based on its ubiquity in that demographic.
> Even if that's a real thing and not an imaginary or minor phenomenon hyped up for clicks, it is hardly anti-trust-worthy.
I'm in a group chat with (former) coworkers who repeatedly (albeit playfully) shame the one group member who forces us all to use green bubbles. It's a real thing
This whole green bubble equal shame thing is 100% on people.
The reason there are 2 different colors is so people can tell when they are using SMS because SMS are capped / cost money in most of the world - while iMessage messages are unlimited and free.
Your comment came across as defending the position that Apple is in the wrong for not allowing iMessage to be accessible from all platforms, my crude definition of "the aggressor" my apologies if that is not how you meant your comment to come across.
This just in, teen prefers to message with friends via Discord, but uses iMessage to message parents who are also on iMessage and not discord. We must file an anti-trust lawsuit against Apple, stat!
No where have I argued for antitrust. I'm just saying iMessage is probably the most used messaging app in the US, others are claiming it's not without any data.
> I'm just saying iMessage is probably the most used messaging app in the US
> others are claiming it's not without any data.
So quick question, why do you get to claim something without data but others have to back up their claims with data?
Anyway, I can't find anything that is specifically about the US in 2023 (so far) that isn't requiring a payment for a large sum, but everything else I found seems to back up the claims by everyone else.
Most of them don't even include iMessage in the top 10, and the one that does has it in like 8th place with one caveat, facetime itself is 2nd to Facebook Messenger which absolutely dominated the list.
its more than a shame. emoji, gifs and images are a core part of teens' communications (I have one, I know all too well), and iMessage's green bubble is also a guarantee that these things won't work, so its not just a shame, it is a hard road block.
Based on all the messages I get from my work colleagues (mostly android users much more into memes and things than I am), gifs and emojis and other features work just fine these days with MMS messaging on iPhone.
When iMessage has to send a pic or vid to a group that contains non-iMessage recipients, iMessage will fallback to MMS and may need to recompress the pic/vid to get under the MMS media limit.
MMS, introduced in 2002, has much lower limits for pictures/video than if the messaging apps were to send the media over data/internet.
Also these MMS media limits aren't hardcoded, the limits are set by the sending and receiving carriers.
videos taken on your or their phones don't show up postage stamp sized and blurry/bricky any more? that's usually how a green bubble drags an iphone group down
although the "liked your message" type stuff is also annoying.
