I have been a grown man on both sides of that conversation: left out of group chats due to being a green bubble, and now tacitly approving of not including green bubbles in otherwise pristine-seas-of-blue chats.
It's less about the background color and more about the endless series of interoperability paper cuts that exist with green bubbles. Will my reaction emoji come through as intended? Will my shared media get downsampled to feature phone quality? Will referencing the person's name in chat work the same? etc etc etc.
Interop is always a pain, but the sooner Apple can be forced into making any concessions the better.
It would help if Google wasn't a complete joke in the messaging space though. As much as I want iMessage interop with Android users, I have no faith or trust in any Google-based messaging app or initiative. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me dozens of times ... well I'd be an idiot to trust Google messaging again.
The fact that a huge number of perfectly good third party chat apps exist and yet most Apple users prefer iMessage is a huge testament to iMessage just being a really well made product. I wouldn't put up with the obnoxious interop and lockin issues if it weren't!
As an Android user who texts with other Android users, RCS works just fine. Automatic e2e encryption whenever it's available, reactions work (and support every unicode emoji, not just the 6 Apple supports), threading works perfectly, photos and videos come through in full quality.
Recently Google Messages started automatically translating the shitty little 'So-and-so hearted "<previous message>"' SMS messages Apple sends out from iMessage into reactions as well.
It's genuinely quite good. I prefer it over Signal when I know the other person has an Android too.
It's less about the background color and more about the endless series of interoperability paper cuts that exist with green bubbles. Will my reaction emoji come through as intended? Will my shared media get downsampled to feature phone quality? Will referencing the person's name in chat work the same? etc etc etc.
Interop is always a pain, but the sooner Apple can be forced into making any concessions the better.
It would help if Google wasn't a complete joke in the messaging space though. As much as I want iMessage interop with Android users, I have no faith or trust in any Google-based messaging app or initiative. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me dozens of times ... well I'd be an idiot to trust Google messaging again.
The fact that a huge number of perfectly good third party chat apps exist and yet most Apple users prefer iMessage is a huge testament to iMessage just being a really well made product. I wouldn't put up with the obnoxious interop and lockin issues if it weren't!