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This is exactly right. Green bubble chats require more effort and are less fun.

You can't leave a green bubble chat. You can't send messages from your computer or non-iPhone devices (Apple has message forwarding, but it's unreliable). Pictures look awful, videos look worse. Read receipts don't work. Tapbacks/emoji/stickers/memoji/etc don't work. It's a drag to remember all these limitations.

I grudgingly got an iphone in 2019 for work. I no longer work there but now I'm locked into blue bubble chats with family. I've been trying to use Beeper to solve this it's not reliable enough yet.

(if RCS wasn't such a dog's breakfast, I might make more of an effort. Even when Messages supports RCS, the experience will still suck)




  Pictures look awful,
The CTIA recommended allowing up to 5MB for pictures back in 2013. That would handle full-size JPEGs with reasonable compression most DLSRs. What does your carrier support?

https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018832773-Tw...

> videos look worse.

Same as above.

> Read receipts don't work

MMS read receipts have been a thing since at least 2004. Wanna bet your carrier still doesn't support them?


You’re suggesting I should get my friends to switch carriers??

Why should it be up to the carrier? I guess that’s why it’s so broken.


Why not just use whatsapp?


The other replies already brought up that WhatsApp is not common in the US, but I'll also add that if your beef with iMessage is the evil corporate overlord, moving to WhatsApp kinda seems like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.


Because in US, it's just not a common application everyone has so you get a ton of "I don't have whatsapp, just text me!" from friends.


I've gotten almost everyone I know to use WhatsApp. Not switch necessarily, but use. There's only a few stragglers left. It's not a hard sell, at least in a big city where you're bound to know a lot of foreigners or people with foreign friends/family, so adoption starts well above zero.


Good grief, if I were ranking corporations by trust, I'm definitely not switching from Apple to Facebook of all things.


No reason not to except it's just not very big in the US.




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