100%.

iMessage is THE number one thing selling iphones these days, and has been for a long time.

I see this line of thinking online a lot, with people mentioning kids are excluded because they have green bubbles as if it’s some sort of highly superficial exclusion based on only wanting to talk to Apple users.

The main issue is that including a non-iMessage user changes the protocol of the group chat from iMessage to SMS and SMS can basically make group chats unusable.

I also don’t like that kids who don’t have an iPhone can’t participate in iMessage group chats, but when we make out like it’s just kids being cruel and not an actual functional incentive to not include those kids then we are losing sight of where the pressure should be applied.

it's just a new version of "preps don't hang out with goths"

Adults too

iOS/iPhones are the majority of phones in Canada and the US (~60%). However, if you take the upper half of household incomes that number skyrockets to 80-90%. Comparatively, in the UK it's 50/50. In the rest of europe android mostly has a 60-75% market share (tends to drift more towards android the more eastern you go - signalling wealth has a lot to do with it).

The reasons why are varied (everything from wealth signalling to switching being a pain and iphone mostly had a first mover advantage for quality and availability for the first several years), but it's only in the last two years that I've seen people start to use multi-platform chat apps here. Most of my peer group with other parents all default to imessage group chats for sharing photos, stories of our kids.

I am also starting to notice a loosening on apple's services. Spotify is used by more people than Apple music even amungst the apple households I know.

WhatsApp never caught on in the US since cell phones and SMS were a great deal for keeping in touch. By the time WhatsApp arrived US carriers were not raping their customers for phone calls or SMS messages (in the early days of cell phones they were - be very careful responding as the state of the world has changed many times over the years and so it is quite possible you remember a time where your country was better than the US for reasons that are no longer true!). Note in particular calls and SMS to a different state is included, and typically Canada is included as well. As such we never developed the WhatsApp habbit as it didn't give us anything.

Yes. WhatsApp isn't nearly as popular in the US as in many other countries.

Idk what the stats are on this, but anecdotally, all my friends use FB Messenger if they want cross-platform group chat, but that's slowly changing to some fragmented list of alternatives. And usually it's not for semi-important things like get-together plans.

This. In 98% of all cases I get away with only having telegram (no phone number even) most people have one or multiple IMs

I don't think seamless integration with MMS is enough to outweigh being different/not having "the real thing" or the full experience in the eyes of a young teenager. This reads as the HN version of the "but we have iMessage at home" meme (I mean this humourously, not as snark).

iMessage chats also include rich media that is either degraded in MMS (photos, videos unless you have RCS support) or just doesn't exist (like multiplayer games, invites, apple cash, etc).

This may not seem like a big deal to you, but if you remember what it's like to be a kid, you should get it. The smallest friction can be a reason to exclude someone socially.

Even that has been fixed by now in my chats with android friends. The only reason to display green bubbles anymore is to indicate lack of E2EE. But that will be coming to RCS interop soon as well.

In theory it's ok. In practice, MMS group chats are broken. It's not even an iPhone thing, as evident in Android-dominated areas still relying on WhatsApp instead.

Non-iMessage chats are also segregated by color, a visual affordance that identifies you as a member of the non-Apple outgroup. The other.

You can have many group chats though?

I do that in Signal, I have group chats with different circles of friends ,and we also regularly create short-lived purpose-built chats for events or other things...

It's a bit more friction perhaps but in the end it works well and we've been doing it for years.

Do you mean 'run' as in run the community in some sort of administration sense? Telegram cannot be self-hosted (unless I am misinformed..).

>Who runs your Telegram server?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service

Is it - hear me out - possible that you are overthinking this? People tend to use group chats for coordination and quick banter with people they already know. Not as an alternative to the phpBB boards of old.

There's far too much downside to sharing your genuine thoughts, especially on politics, or things you find funny, etc. with the entire Internet because regular people and nation-state level actors will vilify you and nowadays even have you deported for things you say publicly.

That's why we all use group chats and messaging. There's no safe alternative

>It's a clear step backwards and is representative of the covid-era stazi-like mentality people developed where they felt it was unsanity to share their views or life with the world at large...

... what? I'm in my late 30's and group chats have been a part of life for myself, my friends and my family since the late 90's. I've never wanted to share my views with "the world at large" online, but I have no problem being myself and sharing my views in meatspace, where being open and honest about who I am is far more impactful to those I interact with and the world around me than it ever has been on social media.

Within the world of the pop-web, even on this website to a point, the ability to have a truly nuanced discussion has essentially been eliminated. People would rather throw out hot takes based on disingenuous interpretations of someone's comment/statement rather than try and have an impactful, open conversation.

There is nothing preventing you from expanding your group chat roster. It is just that random strangers can't drop in; you have to add them.

You would have to sacrifice the privacy of your group if you wanted to support serendipitous membership growth. Do you want to be constantly reviewing membership requests? That's what Facebook groups look like. And you have little information to judge the requests by, since the profiles can be fake, especially today. And when complete strangers can join the group, the dynamics change.

"Perfect world social media is a means of forming connections"

What stops people from being part of X group chats? All a connection on their own?

And markets are growing.

Heh, this reminds me of a vaguely related lesson I learned recently. Sold Nvidia mid-2023. "Surely everyone understands by now just how much money they're going to be making the coming 2 years, and this is already completely priced in, it's so blatantly obvious!". Heh.

Piles of VC cash were never necessary, FWIW. Tracking, potentially. They may indeed have massively undervalued ads, or even other monetization options - Line makes millions off of emojis and such, and if they'd have been as big as Whatsapp, possibly billions. Meta too is not even tapping 5% of Whatsapp's monetization potential, FWIW. I wonder if it's intentional to prevent anti-trust concerns.

But I don't think monetization matters too much. Ms tried making the botched Skype play, and as a company there's no way they didn't understand the value of hundreds of millions of eyeballs, daily usage market share. They understood that with IE, despite it being a zero-revenue product in and of itself.

> when the mobile ecosystem didn’t support their legacy persistent-connection-style protocols

You may know more about this then I do - what's the main difference? I used them back in the day and as end-user they felt the exact same as modern messaging apps. I send a message, it gets saved on some server, the receiver gets it from there. When I used it, it definitely didn't require both parties to be online to send/receive.

Or is it about the notifications?

I remember using a lot of very low quality, buggy Skype apps on mobile over the years. I don't think it ever approached desktop quality.

To be honest it didn't even work great on laptops that got turned on and off or went in and out of connectivity. The networking piece seemed designed for an always on desktop.

Yes, that's why they should have made them work properly.

Simply put the main problem was that those old IMs required a persistent connection to the server when you "just" had to add a new protocol that can do session resumption/polling. Then make a pretty mobile UI and make it possible to find other users by phone number - imo this was the number one reason why WhatsApp and iMessage won. It's an app on your phone, so it uses your phone number, not another artificial number or name or mail address - it's something the most tech illiterate gets. Because then it's just "SMS but with groups and photos". But you could have allowed to merge it with your existing account from desktop times, so all the young hip people would've kept all their contacts.

i actually think it's good that you need to explicitly share the photo with each group. people like getting a message that they know you decided you wanted them (or their little group) to see.

if i see a photo that a friend broadcasts out once on a social feed, i see it and move on.

if a friend puts a photo in a text/group chat, i know that it's something they wanted to share with me

I think this was what Google Plus was going for.

Instead of friend graphs (mutual) or follower graphs (directed edges), they had Circles.

Circles sound a lot like group chats.

I guess "social circles" may be a better way to model social relationships than follower graphs.

>...but you have to share it specifically with each separate group

For me personally, this is a feature not a bug. I want things I see to be things that somebody wrote just for that channel. It's why I use group chat over social media.

Isn't it pretty common for the "share" function to allow selecting multiple recipients, including multiple groups?