The Blue-Green Divide

I forwarded this WSJ article to
a thread with only iPhone users.

The political extremes live in red and blue echo-chambers, but to the under-30 crowd the more meaningful divide is blue vs green and has nothing to do with politics.

Apple got creative in its protection of iMessage’s exclusivity. It didn’t ban the exchange of traditional text messages with Android users but instead branded those messages with a different color; when an Android user is part of a group chat, the iPhone users see green bubbles rather than blue. It also withheld certain features.

There is no dot-dot-dot icon to demonstrate that a non-iPhone user is typing, for example, and an iMessage heart or thumbs-up annotation has long conveyed to Android users as text instead of images.

This pic of a Thanksgiving turkey went
to a mixed Android/iPhone group.

Apple later took other steps that enhanced the popularity of its messaging service with teens. It added popular features such as animated cartoon-like faces that create mirrors of a user’s face, to compete with messaging services from social media companies... customers were particularly fond of replacing words with emojis and screen effects such as animated balloons and confetti.

Avid teen users said in interviews with The Wall Street Journal that they also liked how they could create group chats with other Apple users that add and subtract participants without having to start a new chain.

Since your humble blogger very rarely uses emojis and never plays iMessage games, the blue-green divide seems like a contretemps in a teapot. The great MLK said something like you should never judge a man by the color of his bubble but by its content, and if not, he should have said it.