I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason.

In my experience, when people find out my texts are green, they oftentimes would rather switch to a different platform altogether like Instagram or just not text at all.

Is this actually a deal-breaker in friendships out there?

  • za_snake_guy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Cellphone network fees have historically been ridiculously expensive, when I was young a single SMS message cost about 80c, whilst for 10x that fee I could get enough data to send hundreds of WhatsApp or similar data-based messages.

    In time providers tried to draw more subscribers to their networks by making the data used by messaging apps like WhatsApp free, so even if you had no prepaid airtime (in Africa most people use prepaid airtime) you could still send messages with these apps even though you couldn’t SMS.

    These days messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram (the latter especially) are just simply more feature-rich than SMS, and you’re not locked into a specific hardware platform such as iPhone & Mac with iMessage.