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00:00All right, let's just talk about it. Blue bubbles versus green bubbles. Now, right off the top,
00:10most of this is going to sound pretty ridiculous to the 70% of you that are watching this outside
00:15of the US. Mostly because it seems like every other country sort of just points and laughs
00:20at the blue bubble versus green bubble situation in the United States. Because pretty much
00:25everywhere else, the iPhone isn't nearly as dominant. But we will talk about what some
00:29other countries are doing in a second. We'll get to that. But for now, here, it's a big
00:36deal and you'll see why.
00:41So let's go back in time. Originally, if you wanted to send someone a text message, how
00:45did you do it? Well, back in the day, as early as 1992, you just get their phone number and
00:50you send them an SMS. It's pretty simple. SMS stands for short messaging service. It's
00:55attached to your phone number. It's 160 bytes max per message. Every phone has an SMS app.
01:02Easy. Send your text. Now, of course, that was super simple. And if you're old enough
01:05like me, you remember if you had a long enough message, you have to spread it out over two
01:08texts because you hit the character limit. Eventually, we wanted to do a little bit more
01:12with our messages, maybe some emojis, some pictures, something like that once in a while.
01:16And so we added MMS. So MMS stands for multimedia messaging service. It's built on the same
01:22technology as SMS. You can send anything over 160 bytes. And this came around in about
01:272002. So a single MMS message could be up to a couple hundred kilobytes or so. And so
01:32these two combined basically blew up with the adoption of the smartphone. So now we've
01:37got phones everywhere. People send in text messages, emojis, pictures, everything back
01:41and forth. And they sort of ramped up in popularity from there. And every phone has a default
01:48messaging app, including the most notorious of them all, the iPhone, which has one with
01:53this icon. That's the Messages app. So now, Messages works fine with iPhones and everybody's
01:58texting just like normal. But eventually, we got up again to the limit of what we were
02:03able to do with SMS and MMS. Our communications get even more rich. We want to send larger
02:08image files back and forth. It's advanced. We're getting better at this whole texting
02:12thing, right? So Apple announces iMessage in 2011, which is an instant messaging service
02:20that's built right into the Messages app. Now, iMessage works over the internet and
02:26has a ton of advantages over SMS and MMS. There's now typing indicators. You can send
02:31quick reactions to messages. Files have this new massive hundred megabyte file size limit.
02:37So you can send crispy high-resolution pictures or PDFs or videos even. There's read receipts,
02:44inline replies, location sharing. There's just a ton of features. And most importantly, it's
02:48now end-to-end encrypted, which makes it much more secure than SMS ever was. And then since
02:54it works over the internet, it syncs up with all of your internet-connected Apple devices,
02:59the phone, but also the Mac and the Apple Watch and your iPad, whatever else you got.
03:04But in classic Apple fashion, it is not multi-platform. So there is no iMessage for Windows. There
03:11is no iMessage for Android.
03:17Now, the key here to the blue bubble versus green bubble war is that most people in the
03:25US just use the default messaging app that comes with their device. Like I know here
03:31on the MKBHD channel, we're all tech-savvy and we know about the other messaging apps
03:35that we prefer, that have more features and things like that. But most people just use
03:42the default app for everything on their device, actually. The default browser, the default
03:49email app, and the default messaging app. So when an iPhone user goes to message someone,
03:54first thing they do is open up the messages app. And if the person that they're messaging
03:58is also on an iPhone, immediately, boom, it gets converted into an iMessage. So you
04:03get the read receipts, the reactions, the encryption, all the features, blue bubbles.
04:09Now, when an iPhone user goes to message someone that doesn't have iMessage, well, it still
04:13needs to get to them somehow. And so the iPhone defaults back to sending it via SMS, the old
04:20super limited standard. So no read receipts, no typing indicators, no reactions, and definitely
04:26no encryption. And you for sure know when the person you're texting doesn't have iMessage
04:31because you get those nice green bubbles. And it's actually a little bit worse than
04:35just not having the features because now, if the iPhone user tries to like the text,
04:41it still has to get that information to the Android user somehow. And so it defaults by
04:45sending that via SMS too. It just sends a text to the Android phone saying, Marques
04:51liked your text, which is just kind of brutal. And worse yet, if you try to send a video,
04:57it still has to get that information to you somehow. So it defaults to MMS, which is super
05:02compressed into oblivion because of that max file size. Have you ever seen a video that
05:06gets sent between an Android phone and an iPhone? Like a totally normal looking, smooth
05:121080p video shows up as like a dumpster fire, about a hundred pixels wide when texting between
05:17iPhone and Android. It's kind of unbelievable in this high-tech world we live in that this
05:22is still so bad. And the list just keeps going and going. Like if you're in a group chat
05:26too, you can forget about it. Like, I don't know if you've ever seen a group chat on an
05:30iPhone in the messages app that mixes iPhones and SMS. It's bad. Like if three people react
05:36to one message, it creates three new text messages. You can't add people to that group.
05:43There's no inline replies in those group chats. It's genuinely bad. Basically the green
05:47bubble experience on an iPhone is trash. And Apple, well, Apple is actually fine with
05:56this. Because like I said, this is all driven by people using the default messaging app
06:06that comes on their phone. And the spice that just gets sprinkled on top of all of this
06:10is that the iPhone is incredibly popular in this country. Like I think we already knew
06:16that the iPhone was pretty popular, but I don't know if you realize how popular the
06:20iPhone is here. Like if you had to guess, what percentage of 18 to 24 year olds would
06:25you say use an iPhone in the U.S. to make it dominant? Like 20%, 30% maybe? Maybe over
06:33half? Over 50? Yeah, try 70% of 18 to 24 year olds in the U.S. Seven out of every 10 young
06:42adults and college students here are carrying an iPhone. So Apple's a $3 trillion company
06:48for a reason. They're really good at compelling people to use their products. And once you
06:54start, they're good at building the walls up around you as high as possible. So you
06:57never really want to leave. I made an entire video about the Apple ecosystem, what it is,
07:02why it works. I'll link that explain video below. But the bottom line is it's more than
07:06just neat hardware products that can act as walls in the walled garden around that
07:13ecosystem. So we already knew about the Apple watch only working with the iPhone. You already
07:17knew about AirPods being great with the iPhone and AirTags, but it turns out software can
07:22be those walls too. And iMessage is a really big wall. So switching to an Android phone
07:29would mean not just losing the iMessage features and becoming a green bubble, but also Apple's
07:36created such a social network of iPhone users using iPhone only features to communicate
07:43with each other that Android users actually feel genuinely ostracized and left out. Nobody
07:49wants that. So think about it. If 70% of young people around you own an iPhone and iMessage
07:54is the default and it's good for groups and social dynamics, yeah, most new people are
07:59just going to use that too. And if most people use it, it makes the people who don't have
08:04iPhones feel left out. Their default is definitely a worse texting experience and being left
08:10out of the group chats. And so it just puts even more real pressure on those people to
08:14just get with it, just get it over with, get an iPhone. And then the cycle continues. It's
08:19a self-fulfilling prophecy. So no matter what you think of those pressures or how crazy
08:23you think that sounds, that is real. And that is often what's being referred to when we
08:26say iMessage lock-in. iMessage is genuinely one of the biggest walls in Apple's walled
08:34garden that they've created. And it's a particularly hot topic even right now as I'm recording
08:38this, but also I feel like every year there's some, you know, expose about how we're all
08:43learning about people getting bullied for not having iPhones or those stories about
08:47how people on Tinder get statistically less dates after exchanging phone numbers when
08:52it's revealed that they're a green bubble. It's crazy. But this is a conversation that's
08:55been going on since iMessage came out and it's been getting louder and louder as more
09:00and more people get iPhones.
09:01So, what's the solution to this? Well, if you're new here, you might say, oh, well,
09:13just bring iMessage to Android. That way everybody has everything. And yeah, that's, that's never
09:20going to happen. I mean, it's a good idea. I like the way you're thinking, but never
09:22going to happen. I'd give that the same odds as the New York Knicks winning the 2022 NBA
09:28championship. Technically possible, but I wouldn't get your hopes up. Now, fun fact,
09:33there was actually a movement within Apple back in 2013, where apparently it came up
09:37in a few meetings. Legal documents around the Apple versus Epic court case had Eddie
09:41Q testify that Apple could have made a version of iMessage on Android, but apparently Craig
09:48Federighi and Phil Schiller jumped in noting that it would quote, simply serve to remove
09:53an obstacle to iPhone families, giving their kids Android phones and moving iMessage to
09:59Android will hurt us more than help us.
10:02So basically it's crystal clear that Apple higher-ups recognize the value of iMessage
10:08lock-in. So that's not going anywhere. There's no plans to bring iMessage to Android. So
10:14the natural next thought is, okay, what if, what if there was a single multi-platform
10:21messaging app that everyone could use? If it can't be iMessage, someone else can make
10:25one and then everyone can use that. I mean, this is probably already what you're seeing
10:29down in the comments section from thousands of people who didn't make it this far in the
10:32video saying, Hey, we'll just use WhatsApp or Telegram. And so to all those comments,
10:37yeah, it would be great if everyone could just have one multi-platform app that everyone
10:42uses and we could all get along and have windows and Apple devices and Android devices,
10:47all having read receipts and reactions and typing and all that stuff. Yeah, that would
10:51be pretty cool. Right? But there's two main problems in the way of that. One is that people
10:57are still, like I mentioned earlier, overwhelmingly predisposed to using the default messaging
11:03app that comes with their device. So having everyone decide to use WhatsApp, for example,
11:10involves a bunch of extra steps for all the devices where that's not the default,
11:14including the iPhone. And then you have to go out and get your entire social circle to
11:19also make that switch to use that new default app. Like, do you know how hard it is to convince
11:26everyone you talk to, to switch defaults? And actually in some countries, WhatsApp basically
11:31is a default at this point, but imagine trying to get everyone in the US to also switch their
11:37default to something different. It's just, have you ever tried to get your parents to
11:41switch default apps on something? It's impossible. And then two, even if you did convince the
11:46whole world successfully to use this one golden multi-platform messaging app, is it really
11:53a good idea to have the entire planet's messaging in the hands of one company? And should that
11:59one company be meta of all companies? Is that really a good idea? WhatsApp right now is
12:05the most popular multi-platform messaging app on the planet. There are 2 billion monthly
12:11active users on WhatsApp. It's super popular in India. Lots of businesses there use it
12:16too. And I don't know if you remember, but when Facebook or Meta went down for a couple
12:20hours in October of last year, all of their services basically went dark and people, communities,
12:28businesses that depended on WhatsApp all had to shut down for hours because they couldn't
12:33communicate or do business or anything at all. Matter of fact, there was a headline
12:37that Telegram in those six hours gained 70 million users because of how many people
12:43needed to communicate, but couldn't when WhatsApp was down. Now the next most popular app is
12:48Facebook Messenger, also by Meta. That's 1.3 billion people. But then underneath that,
12:53WeChat and then QQ, both extremely popular in China. Another option is Telegram, but
12:59you see where we're going here? There is no universal one golden ticket. And they're
13:04all of course owned by some company. And optimists might think, Oh, maybe Google is in the best
13:10position to make the perfect all-in-one multi-platform messaging app because they make Android. But
13:17a realist would probably notice that they've tried this many, many, many, many times by
13:25now, all of them unsuccessful. This could probably be a whole topic for a whole nother
13:29video. But yeah, bottom line is even if you are cool with one company handling everything,
13:33it's basically impossible to get everyone from every place using one single app. I mean,
13:38I would love my entire community of people around me, teammates, friends, family to all
13:44use Discord, but that's probably not going to happen. It's both an upside and a downside
13:49that there's a fragmentation of messaging services. It's a downside because we're not
13:54all universally using the same thing, but it's a good thing because there is still
13:58competition. But Hey, there's also one more option, three letters, RCS.
14:05Okay. So we already broke down how we saw messaging gets started with texts and SMS
14:14and then MMS. It turns out there's a new messaging standard that was first implemented in like
14:192018 called RCS, rich communication service. So RCS is a pretty obvious next step for smartphone
14:26manufacturers to support over the next couple of years. And it's another evolution of messaging
14:31features and it supports a ton of that stuff. Read receipts, typing indicators, reactions
14:37to messages, much larger file support. Google added RCS support into the default Google
14:42messages app, which it's trying to make basically the default messaging app on every Android
14:46phone coming out. And at this point, it's pretty hard to get a new phone out the box
14:50that doesn't ship with RCS support in 2022. They've all got it. Well, all of them except
14:59the iPhone. So in this war of blue bubble, iMessage perfection versus green bubble SMS
15:06madness, it seems like the best possible solution that we've got, the one that makes the most
15:11sense is for Apple to build RCS support into iMessage. It just makes a lot of sense, right?
15:18But the way that standards work is kind of funny. So as we said earlier, they shouldn't
15:22really ever be controlled by one company. So RCS itself is a set of standards developed
15:27by GSMA. It can work in a decentralized manner, which means there are actually several different
15:32RCS implementations. So theoretically, any company with the right hardware and enough
15:37servers could spin up their own version if they wanted to. Some carriers have spun up
15:41their own implementations in the past. But really, the most important one, the one to
15:45pay the most attention to is the universal profile, which has all the same, you know,
15:51all the big core features, but also works with as many different versions as possible.
15:57So Google comes along and they build what's called Google Chat, which is their own implementation
16:04of RCS using the universal profile. So it's got all the same core features and everything,
16:09bigger file sizes, reactions, read receipts and all that. But now it's running on Google's
16:14own Jibes servers. And it's not actually built directly into the core of Android for some
16:19reason, but it is supported directly by Google's messages app, which like we see, they're trying
16:26to make that the default messaging app on Google Android phones. So the version of RCS,
16:33the flavor of RCS that most people will experience, turns out is actually Google's version.
16:40So from Apple's perspective, basically it's like, all right, we made iMessage, right?
16:44So iMessage is a service we made that runs on our servers, on the app that we made,
16:52on the phones that we made. And RCS is a service that Google worked on that runs on Google
16:59servers that works in a Google app on Android phones. So it's kind of their, it's another
17:07Google messaging app really, although the most successful one yet. So we're not really
17:11sure what Google, which is an advertising company, is going to do with RCS as they continue
17:18to develop it, if they have plans to monetize it at all. We don't know that. So to Apple,
17:23it's like, well, hey, hey, if it's just another Google messaging service, we already built
17:27the better mousetrap, iMessage.
17:33So here's my take. And it's a pretty simple one, really. Even though there's going to
17:37be this pressure of blue bubbles versus green bubbles, that's not anything we can control.
17:42But Apple should add RCS support to iMessage. There's just no downside at all right now.
17:49Now, currently, you know, the way Apple moves so slow to adopt new things until they're
17:54absolutely, positively sure about it, there's almost no chance that they actually do this,
18:00but they totally should. And look, it's not a perfect solution at all, because there is
18:05none. You know, RCS doesn't cover every single little feature of iMessage. It doesn't have
18:09an emoji. There's no support for the apps and games that they've built into iMessage
18:15and Apple Pay payments. And there's only end-to-end encryption right now on one-to-one chats,
18:21not for group messages. But it is a ton of the most basic, most important ones. The
18:26read receipts, the larger file sizes, the reactions, the quick, oh, group messages would
18:31be dramatically better. You could actually leave a group chat or add new people to it
18:35if it just had RCS support. Everyone could have all these things working. And most importantly
18:40of all, especially for Apple, it supports end-to-end encryption for direct messages.
18:46And for a company that swears up and down that they care about your privacy and your
18:51security, you'd think it would be the easiest decision in the world to stop sending iPhone
18:56users messages over an old, unsafe, unencrypted SMS standard and just support the one that's
19:04new that is more secure. But given what we know about these companies, every day that
19:09Apple doesn't add RCS support to iMessage, they're sending a subtle hint, a subtle message
19:16that they value that lock-in just a little bit more. So look, the colors of the bubbles
19:21at this point have become a bit of a meme. It's a little overly played out. Yes, there
19:25are people that take it super seriously. And there's no doubt in my mind that Apple does
19:30think about the aesthetics of the colors to dissuade people from green a little bit. Fun
19:35fact, the contrast ratio of the green with the white text actually breaks some of Apple's
19:39own rules about what you can do in apps. I'll leave a link below so you can read about that.
19:43But for those wondering, the actual original story about why it's blue versus green, and
19:48it was hard to find a source on this, but I'll try my best, is that green was supposed
19:52to represent a paid message when blue was not. If it was an SMS, you were paying the
19:58carrier for it and necessarily giving money, while blue was just possibly over the internet
20:03or Wi-Fi, so free. Green, paid, blue, free. But that's almost like a backstory at this
20:09point. Apple's a very smart company, with lots of very smart people who are in charge
20:14of making sure they stay in as much control and as much power as they possibly can. And
20:19they know that the difference between the blue bubble experience and the green bubble
20:23experience is so strong that it's enough to send real pressure for people to switch to
20:29the iPhone who aren't on it, and for people to stay on the iPhone who are. And that's
20:35good enough for them. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one.
20:39Peace.