💬 The Blue and Green Bubble Texting War

Issue 23 - Technology

What’s your favorite color, Green or Blue? Well, Apple would like you to pick Blue. In recent years the Blue and Green bubble situation has drummed up a lot of attention in the tech community, but why? In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into this topic!

The Evolution of Texting

Back in the day as early as 1992, a service called SMS which stood for “Short Messaging Service” was released to the world. You could exchange messages with others up to 160 Bytes, and if your message was too long, it would be divided into multiple messages. So, we all used this for about 10 years, and then in about 2002 MMS was released. MMS was an acronym for “Multimedia Message Service” and was exactly what it meant. You could exchange messages that were of different media types and the cap was about 600KB.

Now, these two services became very popular and were supported on different messaging apps such as the “Messages” app on iPhone. Once again, our standards evolved, and we wanted to send things that were even bigger files. So, in 2011, Apple invented iMessage (“Internet Messaging System”). This service works over the internet and all of a sudden, we got read receipts, typing indicators, reactions, encryption (very secure), and the ability for your messages to sync up with other devices since it’s over the internet. However, the caveat is that this service cannot be used on other operating systems.

The Problem

To start this section off, it’s important to note that most people will only use the default app for most everything (i.e. messaging, mail, weather, browser, etc.). So when someone goes to text another person who’s also using an iPhone, the messages are converted into an iMessage and a whole suite of features is unlocked like the reactions and things like that. However, when the recipient is using an Android phone, the iPhone defaults to the old, super-limited SMS format, and you get those Green bubbles. The experience becomes worse because when the iPhone user tries to like a message, the phone still has to get the information to the Android somehow, so it sends a whole new message like: “Luke liked your message”. Another example of this sort of thing that is going on is when an iPhone user tries to send a video; as before, it still has to get the information across, so it defaults to MMS (still very old). Now, the iPhone has to compress the video/photo so when it gets over to the Android, it’s going to look very pixelated.

Why Apple is Okay With This

The iPhone is popular in the United States. Approximately 65% of people in the U.S. use an iPhone as their daily driver. Apple is good at getting you to buy their phone and building artificial “walls” around you so that you don’t leave. Photos, iCloud Drive, Apple Software, and iMessage are just some of the walls to name a few. So to switch to an Android phone, you’re leaving all your things behind, and you’re also then becoming a green bubble. On top of this, iPhone users have created a community of “iPhone-only features” so Android users feel kind of left out. We hear this kind of headline all the time, about people making fun of Androids, and Apple would just like these people to get an iPhone. In 2013 there were a couple of meetings where the topic of bringing iMessage to other platforms came up, however, Apple executives thought that this would be a bad idea because then parents, for example, could give their kids Android phones (as cheap beginner phones), therefore not benefiting Apple.

---

By the way, if you are enjoying this article, please be sure to share and subscribe. I have a promotion going on which allows new and existing subscribers to get a 1-month free trial to Skillshare (the best place to learn any new skill)

---

Is There a Way to Fix It?

Yes, technically there is a way to fix it by just using a multi-platform app, but there are two problems with this.

1. The Default - People are hooked to the default messaging app on their devices. So even if you did find another app, it would be pretty difficult to move all your contacts and your social circle to a completely different app managed by another company, however, this brings up the following new problem…

2. Centralization - So even if you did find a new messaging app, would you want to have all your data, contacts, and more with one company (using WhatsApp owned by Meta)? It’s not very secure for anybody.

Someone else may think about this solution: What if Google made its own messaging app? It seems like a great idea, right? Google is the developer of Android, and they could add another service so that everyone could be happy. Well, I would say that Google has tried many times now (Google Voice, Hangouts, Talk, Allo) all of which have been unsuccessful. Also, this solution encounters the problem of the default app anyway.

RCS

Now in addition to SMS, MMS, iMessage, etc., a new standard is called RCS (Rich Communication Service). RCS is like the next step for smartphone manufacturers to integrate into their phones and they can make their implementation of RCS. Theoretically, if a company has enough servers, it could make its own.

So Google comes along and builds their implementation or RCS called “Google Chat” which is running on Google’s services, and is built into the default messaging app on Android, “Google Messages”. Google is trying to standardize this new technology into all phones.

From Apple’s perspective, they’re thinking “we already built iMessage with all these nice features”. They’re thinking that Google has just built another messaging app (the most successful one yet). So really, it could just end up being iMessage and Google Messages at the end of the day.

Thanks for reading this article, and I hope you learned something new about texting. I’ll talk to you next week!

—Luke Rapaka