It's still surprising to me how shitty people are about this, and how people hold this attitude almost with a sort of pride. It's not a joke either, people actually give a shit about this. Incredible.
This article was quite eye-opening, I have to say. I will have to grill my iPhone-owning friends about this... I wonder if they've noticed, or if it's explicitly called out in the UI.
I wonder if this isn't so much for convincing people to switch to Apple so much as giving people a greater attachment to Apple. I use an Android phone, and I didn't even know that the iphone showed a difference between iMessage messages and SMS messages. So the color doesn't have an effect on me.
However, if you have an iPhone and don't like the green bubbles, you become a sort of brand ambassador -- you'll both have a greater chance of staying on iPhone (because you associate the "green bubbles" of other phones with being inferior, you won't want to get an inferior phone), and you'll also try to convince your friends to get an iPhone.
iMessage is an out and out embrace, extend, extinguish play not at all unlike Microsoft of the 1990s. It exists alongside standardized text message formats, and subverts the user's expectations of them by behaving differently in some cases.
Two big items are that it's designed to add group texting features in a way that makes non-iMessage clients not respond correctly (reply instead of reply all, but only sometimes) making users of competing standards seem rude in social situations. On top of that, it will lose your data if you unsubscribe (http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-must-go-to-court-over-disappe...)
Does this actually exist outside of, well, the minds of children? I'm genuinely interested, I've never heard of this before.
The images in the article seem to all be from immature young adults. Children will find the most petty, ridiculous things to differentiate themselves with, it's what they do.
e.g. 'gay' as a playground insult.
Also, what happens if a message is sent while data is disabled from an iPhone? Does it go through as an SMS and appear in green to the iRecipient?
