This seems to be mostly a US American thing, mainly because of the same reasons BBM was a thing: lots of chats over SMS used to be a thing, and then chats over iMessage, which like BBM, you can only join if you have a device from a specific vendor. That means that you can only be in a special social circle if you buy the same stuff. That won't change because of some colours, because it's not the colours causing the tribalism, it can exist perfectly fine without it.
In Western Europe, South America and Asia it's mostly just some specific app (WhatsApp for example, or Signal, or WeChat or LINE) and as a fallback SMS. And if SMS turns from one colour bubble to another colour it doesn't really do anything for users on either end. This deep integration with colours and status symbols does remain in specific areas like middle school where it is still seen as important to try to project wealth.
I agree that this is a middle school level analysis, but I've seen it a couple times in practice during my career.
1. In the dating scene, I have heard women remark that it was a red flag (Android users are stereotypically poor... despite a large number of techies using Android)
2. A manager at my old company was advised to get an iphone for communication with VCs. One of our old leaders had heard commentary from a VC at one point about the text message colors.
> This deep integration with colours and status symbols does remain in specific areas like middle school where it is still seen as important to try to project wealth.
Are the kids wrong?
When I look at my app’s stats, Android users are worse in every way.
More expensive to develop for, pay less or none at all, and their halo effect is sometimes negative: they might word-of-mouth my app to more Android users instead of more iOS users.
Yeah all my group conversations in Ireland are on whatsapp now, but I think this is mostly due to the fact that carriers still charge extra to send photos over sms. It's just not worth it to use sms anymore.
> in specific areas like middle school where it is still seen as important to try to project wealth.
Surely it's not middle school when people try to project wealth the most.. kids care more about who has an iPhone than adults but adults project wealth _a lot_ more than kids overall: fancy cars, homes, holidays etc. More expensive things are also nicer than their cheaper counterparts but I think most people would be lying if they don't say having access to them also gives them some status boost, if only internally. Can't turn off the monkey in the head easily.
Whenever I see this iMessage/SMS, blue/green topic come up I descend into an internal debate that, as I get older, I am becoming increasingly familiar with.
The debate is that one where I am forced to reconcile whether I am too far removed from popular culture to see how this is a real issue versus accepting that the issue is entirely contrived.
It's certainly an issue with a lot of teenagers. Speaking broadly, social status and brands say a lot at that age, and you could miss out on friends or social occasions based on it.
As an adult of course the green/blue bubbles simply don't matter, we grow up and realise that, but it certainly is a significant issue if it's affecting young peoples lives.
So I'd say it's somewhere inbetween what you descibe, perhaps a bit contrived, but also could have a significant impact on some people.
Side note - I have heard of people saying they won't date green or blue bubble people, but of course if someone takes that point of view as an adult then it's a good indicator to show how they think.
It's a really really really short article. Really short. Please.
It gets to the point in the second paragraph: the green bubbles have bad contrast. It mentions the design of the green bubbles rank as "very poor" by accessibility standards.
The green texts isn't just branding or aesthetics. iMessage with non iphones is a legitimately degraded experience and the green texts exist to remind you of that, but even if they weren't green the experience would still be bad because apple realizes that forcing people to buy their phone if they want to have texts that send in under 5 seconds is an incredibly successful strategy. Having long form conversations over SMS just doesn't work given the time they take to send, and tons of iPhone users refuse to get a messaging app.
I would love to see a survey of mobile phone users to see if this matters to them. I’ll take a guess it doesn’t matter because Google would be flaunting the results.
As for negative effects on kids. There’s more than just phones. Clothes, cars, vacations, social media posts, tutoring, sports. Maybe we should put everyone in uniforms, don’t allow kids drive to school, ban sports, and forbid them from talking about their vacations. And everyone was equal.
...which suggests that the notion that some designer at Apple subtly decreased the contrast on green bubbles to make them look "gross" is ridiculous -- if they really wanted to make SMS messages look bad, they could be much less subtle about it...
I have just compared the “gross” bubble from the article with my “real” bubble. Made a screenshot of both and used the ios color picker.
“Gross”: #7EC170
Real from the bottom of the message reel: #65C466
Real from the top: #73E173
No issues with contrast in either case. Also keep in mind that those color hexes will slightly vary depending on where exactly you decide to pick since bubbles are filled with gradients.
Not sure where author gets his bubble from but in real life they look as “good” bubbles at the bottom of the screen that makes me think the article itself is gross.
It’s worth pointing out that text message bubbles were always green from the first iPhone as well. Coloring iMessages as blue was done so you knew whether you were getting billed for that text or not.
I'm not so sure, I just looked at some chats in iMessage, both to other iPhones and Android phones, and there's no doubt to me that the blue bubbles give much better contrast and readability, even comparing only messages at the bottom of the screen.
Yeah seems really far-fetched. The whole idea that Apple did the green bubbles with the purpose of branding kids with Android phones as poor as some way of bullying them into getting an iPhone is borderline conspiracy theorist, possibly stemming from some anti-capitalist sentiment.
It's kids being kids and seems like an exclusively US thing.
This is a clickbait. On my iPhone the green color is much darker than what the author shows in the article. Here are some images with the hex color codes for example:
It's actually really cherry-picked samples. All messages (blue and green) in the Messages app fade out slightly as you scroll. The author picked a blue message from the bottom of the screen and a green one from the top. If only they scrolled around a bit... they would have noticed.
A comparison between blue and green bubbles on your phone would be more relevant. Color space handling makes direct comparisons between screen grabs (from different devices) tricky.
Besides the cherry-picked colors of green from the top of the screen, the author assumes turning up the screen brightness reduces contrast in the same way that applying a brightness filter in photoshop does. That’s obviously not true - a given colorspace has less dynamic range if you make everything brighter in photoshop, but turning up your screen backlight brightness makes everything brighter by a constant factor, which doesn’t change the dynamic range.
Assuming a perfect screen, yes. But at some point the brightest pixels on the screen will get no brighter, but all the other pixels will. So the dynamic range decreases. Similar happens when dim enough.
A large problem with this whole idea is that there is no one single blue or green involved.
iMessage shades the bubbles depending on position, and shows both the blue and green bubbles as darker at the bottom of the screen, and lighter at the top.
The colors of both blue and green messages fade as they scroll up. Looking at my phone right now, the lighter contrast the author seems to be calling out is only shown on a message that is scrolled up. This is the same with blue imessage bubbles, they also fade and have lower contrast when scrolled up.
Yes. From the article: "To be clear, it is not that green is gross. It is the low color contrast of the green Apple picked and used against white text is gross." The original design used black text, for one thing.
It's not the color or contrast of the bubbles that make me think negatively, it's the fact that once I see a green bubble in a group text, I know it's going to be a bad experience.
Any photo, video, or reaction gif that people send will be compressed down a couple of pixels and replies will often be out of chronological order.
I take so much shit for 'ruining the group chat' when it's always the complainants devices that is blocked from sending high resolution pics to poor people.
Drives me fucking bonkers when I point out that their reactions to it are precisely why it's not being fixed.
At the time the green/blue distinction appeared in Messages, it was widely reported that the green color for SMS messages represented the fact that most cellular plans in the US at the time charged a fee for each SMS message sent, or had a higher monthly rate for "unlimited" texts. It would seem that very few people remember the days before "unlimited data/text/minutes".
(US currency is typically associated with the color green in a way that probably doesn't apply elsewhere in the world. Also, the actual color of green on US paper currency is quite different from the green bubbles... but I digress.)
Might it might it not also be just conditioning? Users have learned to associate green messages with all of the limitations that SMS impose. Hence they perceive it as bad. If that was true, they could’ve picked a higher contrast version instead, and people would still feel the same way.
A few weeks ago I went over my SMS history, going back several months.
About 99% of the SMS I get is bots. The vast majority was spam (making me wish I could disable SMS altogether), then some alerts (e.g from my bank) and 2SV codes.
This article is weird to me. On one hand, it’s interesting science about color perception. Good stuff.
But on the other hand, it assumes an unsubstantiated motive for why it is as it is. I’ve worked with designers a bunch, and they have all kinds of reasons for why they choose as they do. I would not put this past apple at all. But given there’s no quotes from the original designers, I’d go with “Do no attribute to malice that which you can attribute to incompetence.”
in HNs case, I suspect it's deliberately intended to lower interaction with grayed out text (to avoid pile-ons and low-quality/flamey discussions rooted on such comments)
Summary: the green bubbles have lower contrast than the blue bubbles. Lower contrast is associated with lower accessibility, according to published Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Tricks, purpose, and grossness are speculative.
As a counterpoint to everyone saying they've never heard of anyone caring about the bubbles; back when I was in college my fraternity sent out big group messages via iMessage only.
If you wanted to know about events and didn't have an iPhone, you needed to check your email or hear about it second hand. No one wanted to deal with broken MMS, formatting, etc, so that's how things were handled.
Some folks with Android phones were annoyed, but the official stance is that your email should be the place you check for this stuff anyways.
The bubble chat interface itself is gross. Terrible. Disgusting. Unusable. Distracting. Eye-hurting. Illogical. Counterproductive. Log-unfriendly. Code-offensive. Intolerable. Since day one.
The main annoying thing when added to a mixed group of SMS and iMessage group chats is that you cannot leave them, or add anyone after the fact without creating an entirely new chat with all the contacts from scratch.
It was commented on frequently when I was online dating, to the point that it got annoying. I've had a few friends mention it and jokingly tell me to give in and get an iPhone. I'm mid-thirties.
Me either, and the adults I know, don't even seem to know the difference.
I often get people trying to send me videos or files via SMS (I have an Android, and I guess it normally works for them when sending to other Apple users).
(I say adults, because I often hear kids use it as a status symbol or way to exclude other kids from group messages. I will have to ask the kids I work with what they think about message color bubbles.)
Kids do it, I've heard it, it's an actual thing in that age group, adults don't care. It's like having a collection of gobots instead of transformers if you're an 80s kid.
I really hate this conspiracy. Before iMessage all messages on iPhones where green. And when they needed to differentiate they chose to make the new ones blue.
As noted in one of the article comments: One of the first settings I change on my iPhone is "Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Increase Contrast" for this very reason. It darkens both the blue iMessage and green SMS colors, but I mostly do it because I do find that green color "gross" and annoying/distracting.
I disagree with two things here.
Green IS traditionally an off-putting color, when we're talking about light: aliens, x-files, goo, and everything witchy.
But in this context the thing that's harder on the eyes is the bubble itself. So the lighter one is easier for me. Although I'd rather see no bubbles at all.
I don't think that's true for the reasons you put up.
Our eyes are specialized to distinct more shades of green from each other than with other colors. That's a useful evolutionary feature when you are an animal and have to hunt in the wild.
For humans that leads to the point that we're rather good in picking "unnatural" shades of green (gooish ones and self-emitting shades of green).
At first, it sounded like a stretched out conspiracy theory. When I looked at the "correctly" contrasted green in the first image that was darker, it made more sense.
The lighter greyish green gives off a lower standard, almost as if the Android user was a guest user or in free trial mode.
If I were at Apple and my job was to make non iMessage messages bad I would also make them a little bit off center. Maybe even randomly off center. I vuess people like me with OCD would never again message someone without an iPhone LOL
Solution: The EU should mandate that all chat messages be yellow with black text. (Coming off the success of USB-C, now is the time for them to maintain their momentum!)
Nice theory, but the reality of how these decisions get made is usually far less interesting.
Some product owner probably wanted the iMessage enabled texter to "pop" and the designers usually take that and roll with it usually through some combination of boldening one, and deemphasizing the other to give the overall desired effect. It's a good call out for them to improve the color contrast, but you can adjust the contrast yourself through the accessibility options.
You don't have unlimited text messages on your mobile plans?
I've never ever heard anyone care about, discuss, or even mention chat bubble color. All of this sounds like something that only US American teens and kids would react to, like they judge people by their skin color or what kind of clothes they're wearing.
White / green, blue / black, are the hardest combinations to read due to distribution of cone cells in the retina (though fine if it is light blue / black, or dark green / white). This is compounded even more by pentile on certain Apple phones once they moved to OLED.
This article is absolute nonsense from start to finish. If this was remotely true, they'd have done a side by side of a low contrast blue with good contrast green, but they didn't, because everyone would have seen exactly how wrong the article is.
Also, I suspect the association of blue as modern and green as outdated might also stem from LEDs. Early LEDs were green or red. It took many years until blue LEDs became available, and those, at first, were much more expensive.
What are the chances that the EU will come in a year and mandate that “all messages must have the same color” and use it as an excuse that having some blue bubbles and some green colors is harming the mental health of children?
Very slim, as this is appears to be a very american problem. It's normal for teenagers (and people in general) to have an Android phone in Europe. It isn't anymore in the US.
More than likely it would start in California. I say we start a petition that the colors be indistinguishable. Be the change that you want to see, I'm looking at the man in the mirror.
I have a problem with the thesis statement that people think green bubbles are "gross", which uncritically parrots Google's "Get the Message" PR campaign.
I know that iPhone-using teens don't care about this in SoCal, the virtue signalling capital of the world. Their group chats with friends are all green, so if anything's "gross" it's the blue bubbles of their parental conversations.
In the meantime, RCS is missing really basic capabilities. For example, RCS encryption only works for 1:1 conversations, so things like family chats are not private. Even Android publications are asking if RCS is too little, too late.
> which uncritically parrots Google "Get the Message" PR campaign.
You're misunderstanding the order of events here. "I don't talk to green bubbles" has been a thing for at least five years now, which Google has very recently used in an ad campaign.
> In the meantime, RCS is missing really basic capabilities. For example, RCS encryption only works for 1:1 conversations, so things like family chats are not private.
As opposed to iMessage, but certainly not as opposed to SMS which is what RCS would actually be replacing on the iPhone. Apple would rather have EVERY conversation with an android user unencrypted rather than work towards a solution.
But I want to know is, who cares? I have yet to find a single person who says to me that they think it’s unfair that their text messages come across as a green bubble on my iPhone instead of blue.
The author is just overthinking things here. If anything, green is the color used to indicate “go”, a positive sign that has been etched into our minds. The reason is very clear as already mentioned “it doesn’t support messages”. Why isn’t that explanation enough?
EDIT: to clarify here, the author does explain his point about the color and the contrast of the text. He may have a point there but IMO, the main issue was that it’s not messages. The thing I should have added is that back when it was implemented people had to pay real money per message to send as a text message. That means everyone in the group had to feel uncomfortable sending frivolous messages when it costs someone money. I think that is the real reason for the bifurcation and not the color choice.
The article elaborates, however. It's not a problem that green is used. It's that Apple chose a lightness/shade that is less accessible.
Given their attention to detail in design (see the rabbithole of their Human Interface Guidelines - https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...), I agree with the author in that this was an intentional design choice that Apple made.
I don't mean to sound like an asshole here but did you read the article? The author outlines that the contrast applied to the green is less readable than the blue, to the point where it falls below accessibility guidelines.
I personally am not convinced by the theory that Apple is doing this deliberately (though it doesn't sound impossible to me either!) but either way it's something they should change.
why does this even matter? As a european i just don't get it, i use a iPhone have in the past used Android most of my friends and family use Android no one cares.
Basically US teens/kids assume you're poor and not cool if you have a green bubble. It really is as simple as that. It's exactly as shallow as it sounds and is not actually as big of a deal as the article makes it out to be.
The problem for us was not the color of the bubbles but the issue of android users not being able to join imessage group chats. My family solved the problem by using whatsapp.
Ye article is complete bullshit and makes-up some fictional examples: for instance the bubbles supposedly on a “brighter screen” are shown as totally desaturated and ‘blown-out’ but unfortunately for the author’s thesis, screen brightness does not affect UI elements in this way, at all.
Edit: Haha thx for the downvotes but the article is still lying with phony made-up images.
It does affect your visual impression in the eye, though. If you're using a bright screen in a dim environment, your eyes will be hurt by the bright light, you flinch and that will reduce the perceptive contrast.
At this point the fact they're using this as a product differentiator is so blatant they may as well make a fart sound when they appear if they're green.
To be fair, he could’ve cut to the chase sooner. Since it was a UI UX article, HN readers probably aren’t aware that it’s a contrast between fonts and background, not blue vs green or green vs dark green.
Green was the original color of text messages when the iPhone was introduced. When Apple introduced iMessages four or five years later they made iMessages Blue.
I have no idea why this comment is downvoted. This is exactly the question you should be asking if you care about Apple's intent as the article claims.
mmm I really doubt that was the real reason why you "dislike" the green message and that it was purposefully designed like so by Apple.
I think this is a case of learned significance, for which you know that a green bubble means a message sent via SMS rather than the "smarter" message. Added to the fact the blue is often used by tech companies due to its fresh and modern connotation, you have the full picture on why your brain prefers the blue to the green message.
That being said, I think Apple should have been more careful about making their message bubble pass contrast tests. But I doubt there was an "evil designer" carefully planning to make that bubble with lower contrast on purpose to make you dislike it.
When will people realize that the point of differentiating between Android/iOS bubbles isn’t about discriminating against teenagers, but rather it’s about security. If my messages are being sent through an insecure protocol that leaks my messages to the police, carrier, and skids with a rtl-SDR (SMS) rather than a secure encrypted protocol (iMessage), I want it to be obvious.
They have every reason to make “green bubbles” look toxic and off putting, because unencrypted SMS is genuinely hazardous.
The shade of low-contrast-y green is similar to the one used by some browsers not too long ago when an EV TLS certificate was used, to underline the security of the connection.
If it's the goal to implicate danger, this strikes me as a weird colour choice for dangerous messages, to be honest.
This whole "thing" around "bad" green vs blue message bubbles appears a bit, for the lack of a better word, insane to me as a non-american. The bubbles are fine. IMO, the problem is very obviously that kids can be cruel jerks and "not having an iPhone" is a social stigma for US teenagers, just like "not having a flashy cell phone with Bluetooth and MMS" was 15 years ago. Changing the colour will not fix this stigma, there still isn't an Apple on the back of the Android phones.
That makes very little sense. If it's for security it does a terrible job of conveying that, nor would it help anything since you're already in the conversation with that person.
Yeah no. The iMessage white-on-blue isn’t a significantly better contrast ratio. I would actually prefer black text here.
Low contrast UI elements are the calling card of Alan Dye’s design team. The iMessage and SMS contrast ratio doesn’t rank because there are so many other UI issues that have crept in from this team over the years. If the blue provides a slightly better contrast ratio, it is bound to be incidental and if I were a betting man, I would bet that someone actually likes the green used for SMS.
This entire message style by the way is a direct descendant of iChat AV where you could actually choose your message color. When Apple developed SMS and then iMessageS for iPhones, they chose basically iChat’s design, and picked their favorite bubble colors and what we have today evolved from that.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
oneplane|3 years ago
In Western Europe, South America and Asia it's mostly just some specific app (WhatsApp for example, or Signal, or WeChat or LINE) and as a fallback SMS. And if SMS turns from one colour bubble to another colour it doesn't really do anything for users on either end. This deep integration with colours and status symbols does remain in specific areas like middle school where it is still seen as important to try to project wealth.
chinchilla2020|3 years ago
1. In the dating scene, I have heard women remark that it was a red flag (Android users are stereotypically poor... despite a large number of techies using Android)
2. A manager at my old company was advised to get an iphone for communication with VCs. One of our old leaders had heard commentary from a VC at one point about the text message colors.
greenbub1|3 years ago
Are the kids wrong?
When I look at my app’s stats, Android users are worse in every way.
More expensive to develop for, pay less or none at all, and their halo effect is sometimes negative: they might word-of-mouth my app to more Android users instead of more iOS users.
nottorp|3 years ago
And sms group chats? I only know about sms group chats from US posters.
You can just assume everyone has Whatsapp here, and just message them over that.
seanalltogether|3 years ago
dj_mc_merlin|3 years ago
Surely it's not middle school when people try to project wealth the most.. kids care more about who has an iPhone than adults but adults project wealth _a lot_ more than kids overall: fancy cars, homes, holidays etc. More expensive things are also nicer than their cheaper counterparts but I think most people would be lying if they don't say having access to them also gives them some status boost, if only internally. Can't turn off the monkey in the head easily.
yieldcrv|3 years ago
Yes, thats exactly whats going on in the US as well
(and yes, we know that Google has recently adopted some other open source messaging standard that now Apple hasn't.)
ahaseeb|3 years ago
jeremy0x4a|3 years ago
The debate is that one where I am forced to reconcile whether I am too far removed from popular culture to see how this is a real issue versus accepting that the issue is entirely contrived.
idk1|3 years ago
As an adult of course the green/blue bubbles simply don't matter, we grow up and realise that, but it certainly is a significant issue if it's affecting young peoples lives.
So I'd say it's somewhere inbetween what you descibe, perhaps a bit contrived, but also could have a significant impact on some people.
Side note - I have heard of people saying they won't date green or blue bubble people, but of course if someone takes that point of view as an adult then it's a good indicator to show how they think.
d23|3 years ago
It gets to the point in the second paragraph: the green bubbles have bad contrast. It mentions the design of the green bubbles rank as "very poor" by accessibility standards.
That's why it matters.
colinmhayes|3 years ago
randomdata|3 years ago
adrr|3 years ago
As for negative effects on kids. There’s more than just phones. Clothes, cars, vacations, social media posts, tutoring, sports. Maybe we should put everyone in uniforms, don’t allow kids drive to school, ban sports, and forbid them from talking about their vacations. And everyone was equal.
henriquez|3 years ago
detritus|3 years ago
drewzero1|3 years ago
s3p|3 years ago
stjohnswarts|3 years ago
rsfinn|3 years ago
nrvn|3 years ago
“Gross”: #7EC170
Real from the bottom of the message reel: #65C466
Real from the top: #73E173
No issues with contrast in either case. Also keep in mind that those color hexes will slightly vary depending on where exactly you decide to pick since bubbles are filled with gradients.
Not sure where author gets his bubble from but in real life they look as “good” bubbles at the bottom of the screen that makes me think the article itself is gross.
abracadaniel|3 years ago
simonh|3 years ago
somedude895|3 years ago
It's kids being kids and seems like an exclusively US thing.
malshe|3 years ago
https://imgur.com/a/7k5dMtm
zzot|3 years ago
tpmx|3 years ago
gigglesupstairs|3 years ago
https://ibb.co/sKfrZ16
pixelnudger|3 years ago
aoeusnth1|3 years ago
sliken|3 years ago
pdpi|3 years ago
iMessage shades the bubbles depending on position, and shows both the blue and green bubbles as darker at the bottom of the screen, and lighter at the top.
tpmx|3 years ago
A side-by-side screenshot of iOS 7, when this design was introduced:
https://i.insider.com/5df902c5fd9db27769749a5f?width=1300&fo...
badwolf|3 years ago
The colors of both blue and green messages fade as they scroll up. Looking at my phone right now, the lighter contrast the author seems to be calling out is only shown on a message that is scrolled up. This is the same with blue imessage bubbles, they also fade and have lower contrast when scrolled up.
edf13|3 years ago
tpmx|3 years ago
iOS 4, green Aqua-ish bubbles with black text: https://d2bs8hqp6qvsw6.cloudfront.net/article/images/750x750...
iOS 5, introducing blue iMessage bubbles (still good contrast in both colors): https://images.anandtech.com/doci/4956/IMG_0907.PNG
The change in contrast came with Ive's "flat" iOS 7:
https://i.insider.com/5df902c5fd9db27769749a5f?width=1300&fo...
randomdata|3 years ago
angulardragon03|3 years ago
https://www.oreilly.com/api/v2/epubs/9780133016529/files/gra...
Hamuko|3 years ago
https://youtu.be/VQKMoT-6XSg?t=1863
freeplay|3 years ago
Any photo, video, or reaction gif that people send will be compressed down a couple of pixels and replies will often be out of chronological order.
joshenberg|3 years ago
rsfinn|3 years ago
(US currency is typically associated with the color green in a way that probably doesn't apply elsewhere in the world. Also, the actual color of green on US paper currency is quite different from the green bubbles... but I digress.)
occamrazor|3 years ago
malshe|3 years ago
null_object|3 years ago
leobg|3 years ago
jaywalk|3 years ago
brap|3 years ago
About 99% of the SMS I get is bots. The vast majority was spam (making me wish I could disable SMS altogether), then some alerts (e.g from my bank) and 2SV codes.
The other 1% were delivery people.
Exactly 0.0% were people in my contacts.
travisgriggs|3 years ago
But on the other hand, it assumes an unsubstantiated motive for why it is as it is. I’ve worked with designers a bunch, and they have all kinds of reasons for why they choose as they do. I would not put this past apple at all. But given there’s no quotes from the original designers, I’d go with “Do no attribute to malice that which you can attribute to incompetence.”
nerdponx|3 years ago
IMO this is only good advice there's no obvious motive for malice.
When big corporations are involved, cynicism is absolutely warranted.
samatman|3 years ago
samatman|3 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33178848
sangnoir|3 years ago
alfor|3 years ago
From Itune and podcast that always try to sell me something instead of just letting me use my library to mail or safari to iCloud.
Seems to me they are good at pushing the boundaries in hardware and integration, but the software make me run in the other direction.
Is there value in their software?
jmbwell|3 years ago
xnx|3 years ago
viridian|3 years ago
If you wanted to know about events and didn't have an iPhone, you needed to check your email or hear about it second hand. No one wanted to deal with broken MMS, formatting, etc, so that's how things were handled.
Some folks with Android phones were annoyed, but the official stance is that your email should be the place you check for this stuff anyways.
IYasha|3 years ago
snarf21|3 years ago
(I think the current one is perfect for 1:1 conversations .. Multiple people is more of an issue visually)
intrasight|3 years ago
nrb|3 years ago
extragood|3 years ago
MerelyMortal|3 years ago
I often get people trying to send me videos or files via SMS (I have an Android, and I guess it normally works for them when sending to other Apple users).
(I say adults, because I often hear kids use it as a status symbol or way to exclude other kids from group messages. I will have to ask the kids I work with what they think about message color bubbles.)
stjohnswarts|3 years ago
isitmadeofglass|3 years ago
ogab|3 years ago
jasonjamerson|3 years ago
But in this context the thing that's harder on the eyes is the bubble itself. So the lighter one is easier for me. Although I'd rather see no bubbles at all.
martin_a|3 years ago
I don't think that's true for the reasons you put up.
Our eyes are specialized to distinct more shades of green from each other than with other colors. That's a useful evolutionary feature when you are an animal and have to hunt in the wild.
For humans that leads to the point that we're rather good in picking "unnatural" shades of green (gooish ones and self-emitting shades of green).
0898|3 years ago
Double_a_92|3 years ago
pipeline_peak|3 years ago
The lighter greyish green gives off a lower standard, almost as if the Android user was a guest user or in free trial mode.
de6u99er|3 years ago
phendrenad2|3 years ago
dimitrios1|3 years ago
Some product owner probably wanted the iMessage enabled texter to "pop" and the designers usually take that and roll with it usually through some combination of boldening one, and deemphasizing the other to give the overall desired effect. It's a good call out for them to improve the color contrast, but you can adjust the contrast yourself through the accessibility options.
lizardactivist|3 years ago
I've never ever heard anyone care about, discuss, or even mention chat bubble color. All of this sounds like something that only US American teens and kids would react to, like they judge people by their skin color or what kind of clothes they're wearing.
cma|3 years ago
thenerdhead|3 years ago
umanwizard|3 years ago
The footnote is a link to a WSJ article that doesn’t back up that sentence at all, i.e. makes no claim that the issue is most prevalent in the US.
drcongo|3 years ago
leobg|3 years ago
scarface74|3 years ago
enragedcacti|3 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/eu-digital-markets-act...
schroeding|3 years ago
stjohnswarts|3 years ago
CharlesW|3 years ago
I know that iPhone-using teens don't care about this in SoCal, the virtue signalling capital of the world. Their group chats with friends are all green, so if anything's "gross" it's the blue bubbles of their parental conversations.
In the meantime, RCS is missing really basic capabilities. For example, RCS encryption only works for 1:1 conversations, so things like family chats are not private. Even Android publications are asking if RCS is too little, too late.
https://www.androidpolice.com/android-iphone-rcs-give-up-mes...
pkulak|3 years ago
You're misunderstanding the order of events here. "I don't talk to green bubbles" has been a thing for at least five years now, which Google has very recently used in an ad campaign.
enragedcacti|3 years ago
As opposed to iMessage, but certainly not as opposed to SMS which is what RCS would actually be replacing on the iPhone. Apple would rather have EVERY conversation with an android user unencrypted rather than work towards a solution.
rubyist5eva|3 years ago
Overtonwindow|3 years ago
Why is this even an issue?!?
yalogin|3 years ago
EDIT: to clarify here, the author does explain his point about the color and the contrast of the text. He may have a point there but IMO, the main issue was that it’s not messages. The thing I should have added is that back when it was implemented people had to pay real money per message to send as a text message. That means everyone in the group had to feel uncomfortable sending frivolous messages when it costs someone money. I think that is the real reason for the bifurcation and not the color choice.
volleygman180|3 years ago
Given their attention to detail in design (see the rabbithole of their Human Interface Guidelines - https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...), I agree with the author in that this was an intentional design choice that Apple made.
afavour|3 years ago
I personally am not convinced by the theory that Apple is doing this deliberately (though it doesn't sound impossible to me either!) but either way it's something they should change.
moolcool|3 years ago
arikr|3 years ago
sainotbot|3 years ago
1ko|3 years ago
at_a_remove|3 years ago
Low contrast is now "gross." Yikes!
denismurphy|3 years ago
stjohnswarts|3 years ago
booleandilemma|3 years ago
dirtyid|3 years ago
stjohnswarts|3 years ago
null_object|3 years ago
Edit: Haha thx for the downvotes but the article is still lying with phony made-up images.
martin_a|3 years ago
PaulHoule|3 years ago
bombcar|3 years ago
whywhywhywhy|3 years ago
wrs|3 years ago
daniel-cussen|3 years ago
[deleted]
lifeformed|3 years ago
LAC-Tech|3 years ago
Or admonishing us for not reading the article, because we've misunderstood it based on the title.
nerdponx|3 years ago
pipeline_peak|3 years ago
bfgoodrich|3 years ago
[deleted]
samiam_iam|3 years ago
bongobingo1|3 years ago
swamp40|3 years ago
Subliminal messaging work better than poor contrast.
scarface74|3 years ago
This isn’t some great conspiracy.
1over137|3 years ago
I wonder if the contrast has changed over the years. It could be a worse green today than originally.
nixpulvis|3 years ago
croes|3 years ago
frabia|3 years ago
I think this is a case of learned significance, for which you know that a green bubble means a message sent via SMS rather than the "smarter" message. Added to the fact the blue is often used by tech companies due to its fresh and modern connotation, you have the full picture on why your brain prefers the blue to the green message.
That being said, I think Apple should have been more careful about making their message bubble pass contrast tests. But I doubt there was an "evil designer" carefully planning to make that bubble with lower contrast on purpose to make you dislike it.
unknownaccount|3 years ago
They have every reason to make “green bubbles” look toxic and off putting, because unencrypted SMS is genuinely hazardous.
MAGZine|3 years ago
When I text other android users, my messages are encrypted. When I text an iPhone, they are not.
Stop supporting closed protocols and bad-faith actors.
schroeding|3 years ago
If it's the goal to implicate danger, this strikes me as a weird colour choice for dangerous messages, to be honest.
This whole "thing" around "bad" green vs blue message bubbles appears a bit, for the lack of a better word, insane to me as a non-american. The bubbles are fine. IMO, the problem is very obviously that kids can be cruel jerks and "not having an iPhone" is a social stigma for US teenagers, just like "not having a flashy cell phone with Bluetooth and MMS" was 15 years ago. Changing the colour will not fix this stigma, there still isn't an Apple on the back of the Android phones.
staticassertion|3 years ago
asdajksah2123|3 years ago
SllX|3 years ago
Low contrast UI elements are the calling card of Alan Dye’s design team. The iMessage and SMS contrast ratio doesn’t rank because there are so many other UI issues that have crept in from this team over the years. If the blue provides a slightly better contrast ratio, it is bound to be incidental and if I were a betting man, I would bet that someone actually likes the green used for SMS.
This entire message style by the way is a direct descendant of iChat AV where you could actually choose your message color. When Apple developed SMS and then iMessageS for iPhones, they chose basically iChat’s design, and picked their favorite bubble colors and what we have today evolved from that.
E.g.: [1] https://osxdaily.com/2011/02/14/prevent-annoying-im-text-sty...
(note the drop-down menu with “Lime” selected, you can Google around for other colors).
[2] https://flylib.com/books/en/1.463.1.538/1/