This is a people problem, not a technology problem.

If it’s not bubbles, it’s the style of jeans, or where you come from, or which football team you support. Bullies will always find something to use.

I care about the color of the message insofar as it indicates whether it’s encrypted or not.

If not color, what should they switch to in order to still communicate this information to the user?

The article isn’t clear on how encryption will work with RCS. Guess I’ll be looking into that.

Many moons ago I worked in IT and telecoms providers would happily hand over plain text transcripts of SMS conversations. Blue bubbles for me

I guess I'll need to have it happen to me in order for me to actually understand why this is even a problem... I just can't fathom caring at all.

There was a famous psychological study looking at in-groups and out-groups (us vs them mentality). They tested people with completely arbitrary differences. Things like giving some people short pencils and others tall pencils to see what would happen. Before long, those with similar pencils colluded together finding other similarities to bind them as a group. Not only that, but they looked down on their counterparts.

The famous "Robber's Cave" study looked at this as well: https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html

They've found this pattern everywhere and with everyone, child, adult, every ethnicity. It's how we are wired. Team Apple. No fuck you, I'm team Android. Windows vs macOS. Consoles are better than gaming PCs! It goes on and on and on. Blue bubbles vs green bubbles. Even if Apple switched the colors, it wouldn't matter. People would still be pissed text messages got blue.

There's also one huge factor no one talks about: green is not Android. Green is SMS. Since there is no interoperability between Android RCS and iMessage yet, it comes in as a standard SMS.

If it’s that important to them then get them an iPhone? But then they will just get bullied if their iPhone isn’t new enough so maybe the problem isn’t the bubble color after all but the bullying.

When RCS is implemented, even if the bubble color is still green, the rich media features being available is going to eliminate the pain points of messaging between platforms. The bullies might still bubble shame but everyone else will stop caring.

In the case of children, isn't some of this on the parents involved as well? Have the parents of affected children talked to each other about it and reached out to the parents of the bullies to ask if they know their child's been bullying or however one might go about that conversation?

That said, Apple's certainly in the wrong in taking advantage of this, and in many ways it's no surprise. They're essentially a luxury brand, whose entire business model is exploiting this kind of behavior of social pressure and buying specific products to better fit into a group.

To make money

Imagine caring about the colour of speech bubbles and calling it "bullying". Some people can't be helped.

Back when BlackBerry and their unified inbox (all messages from email, AOL, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, etc. in one single list of messages) was still a thing - did people get bullied because of their choice of messenger?

You didn't buy an Apple product for your daughters? What kind of monster are you?

I know right! The text bubble discrimination is unreal!

$$$

They rely on their customers to pressure others into switching. Also their customers don't understand how anything works, so they think that Android phones are broken and don't support cool features. They're unaware that their beloved Apple is enforcing a closed system, and holding them hostage as customers, refusing to adopt other protocols.

The color thing is deeply stupid. You can’t change it because Apple won’t allow you to. They use the green because it’s ugly and they do it on purpose. Apple actively degrades your experience because they can, and because they want your experience to be worse for a reason.

That is fucking bonkers to me.

The 15 pro is my first iPhone. I cannot believe there are people that defend this. It’s just absurd. I can’t even fathom bootlicking a company decision to make their device worse for me.