this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Privacy
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Asking people to leave things means they're losing a line of communication to friends, family, and interest groups who still use those things. It's probably more productive to ask people to add the services you prefer rather than leave the ones they're used to.
I've encountered some resistance from Americans who use iPhones and hate the idea of adding a third-party messaging app. None of them seem very interested in justifying that position.
Companies like Apple spent a lot to create a switching cost in almost every product. The "bubble" color is also a HUGE thing in the US, and is often times the sole reason for not wanting to leave iMessage.
It's not the bubble color. It's what the bubble color signifies. ie: no rich communication services, no high quality video or audio calls, no stickers, no videos, low quality images, etc.
It’s not just that. I find SMS to be slower in terms of call and response vs iMessage. It’s like my android friends take longer to reply.
Very possible this is just latency intentionally introduced by Apple to make the experience worse. They've been known to do things like that.
They also intentionally degrade the quality of video feeds from non-Apple users, and intentionally degrade the quality of received MMS images.
Well pre-RCS they routed android users differently because they were not compatible. Google did something similar, but in reverse, adding back things like reactions, etc. to make android users not feel like they were getting a 2nd rate experience.
Certainly, but installing additional messaging apps on a phone has almost no cost on either iPhone or Android. It's interesting that iPhone users seem to dislike the idea more.
The having to do something is the cost, because they have a perfectly good messaging app already, "why can't you just use that?"
And that cost is more on Apple's platform because Apple has been designing it that way since the beginning. It's the whole reason android users got a different color bubble, not because they had to, but it was a way to identify the person that wasn't using an iPhone and make them stand out. Making it almost unimaginable to switch to Android for youth who care so much about not being "out" of the group.
And Google has identified this, and put a lot of cringe-worthy effort into addressing it at their Pixel event this time around.
Only running on one brand of phone would be the obvious reason here. Installing an additional app seems like a slightly smaller ask than buying a different phone.
As someone whose only apple devices are ipads, the big lockin isn't imessage vs an SMS client. It's FaceTime vs, Zoom/GMeet/Jitsi. Mind you, it is nice being able to use iMessage with my wife when I have internet, and then swap over to SMS quickly. Sure, my two devices don't have a persistent conversation, but her device does.
Is the advantage availability among your contacts, or something about the UX?
Holistically it's UX.
If my wife or others in my life who use Apple want to contact me, they don't have to go into a specific app and hope that I'm looking at it. They can go into iMessage, click the camera, and poof, a video call starts up. The only software I use that does that otherwise is Discord, and that's not integrated with SMS/MMS. It's the connection too (which is just as much part of UX) - I've had problems with Zoom or others due to connection strength, but not with FaceTime.
The fact that it's a "just-works" solution is important.
Do the others not ring your phone? I don't video call often, but when I do it's usually with Signal, and that definitely rings my phone.
No, my phone (Android) usually has notifications/ringers muted
This sounds like a pretty unusual configuration. I don't imagine most people can be reached more reliably using an app that only runs on their tablet than apps that run on their phone.
You can do the exact same thing with any of hundreds of different messaging apps. The only advantage is that they're using the same messaging app, because it comes installed by default, you can't remove it, and they don't allow you to replace SMS with anything else. If you use an Android phone, it most likely comes with Google Messages pre-installed, which does the exact same thing.
In other words, it's nothing to do with "user experience" and everything to do with being in a particular ecosystem.
On Android, I prefer QKSMS, actually.
I use Arch BTW
Cool. My spare OS is Archbang.
Literally all of that UX is the same and better in other apps though.
For example, every single part of your description applies to video and text conversations with my SO and friends, except we all use Signal. It "just works", and better than Facetime because it doesn't matter what device my SO and friends have.
With Facetime it doesn't "just work" at all with the large number of people I know who don't have Apple. That's a huge disadvantage which means that Facetime UX sucks.
You just said what they said but the opposite. Both are wrong. Being in the same ecosystem is not UX. It's not something that anyone can design around.
So you don't consider it an impact on the experience of using a product when it either does or doesn't function on your device? Sounds like a most basic concept of UX to me, but I dunno what you mean, maybe.
That's because you're taking an extremely literal interpretation. "UX" has to do with design, and as I just mentioned, this isn't anything to do with design.
I'm interpreting the term in the way it's defined according to Wikipedia:
Facetime being intentionally limited to a single platform absolutely negatively impacts it's UX by reducing utility, ease of use, and efficiency.