I am currently an IOS user, however, as the title suggests, I wish to switch to android. This is because I would prefer to use free software and not be locked into the apple ecosystem. That being said I am already locked into apple and would like to know how anyone else here has managed the switch.
I for one know I will face problems regarding group chats with friends and family on IOS, I will lose out on iCloud+ features, I will have to buy a replacement for my HomePod, I will need to replace apple home, etc.
How did anyone else here who has made such a switch replace or solve these issues?
iMessage is the biggest hurdle. I recommend that you ask your friends and family to switch to another messaging app to talk to you to avoid the green bubble frustration. (begrudgingly recommend Signal, though Sup. by the guy who made PixelFed looks interesting and can help grow the Fediverse)
It’s not going to be easy though.
What’s wrong with a green bubble? Just curious.
IPhone users have a good reason to not like green bubbles in their group chats, because then their group chat loses functionalities like emojis and the ability to send large images. Or so I’ve heard.
Apple is obviously unwilling to solve that because the lock-in benefits them.
That’s not all, as I currently use an iPhone I can tell you firsthand those are the least of your issues. When in a group chat with android users IOS users can’t add or remove people to or from the chat, iOS users don’t get any of the apple specific features like unsending, thread reply’s, reactions, even embedding things like links doesn’t work. The adding/removing people is the biggest issue however.
I have never understood what this green bubble is. I thought it was plainly aesthetic. Now you both tell me Apple deliberately breaks stuff in an infectious way just because an Android user is around. Apple is evil. I will never buy any stuff from them.
That’s because of a difference on protocol (iMessage vs SMS). This wouldn’t matter if they chose to support RCS which is effectively the Android iMessage equivalent and is an open standard (on paper, not necessarily in practice) but that will never happen.
It’s sad that I will never really know about it. Because for some reason they never made Voice compatible with it. I only have 2 people I really text at all, and I use my voice number for everything, not my carrier number. I use the carrier number only for things that won’t accept what they say it’s a voip number. Even though that shouldn’t have anything at all to do with their end of sending a message. I don’t understand why they even check for that. It’s not much of a problem, almost everything uses an app of some kind, I basically only get to see the actual texting app when the pharmacy says my medicine is ready to pick up. Voice number seems to work for pretty much everything else. (and by Voice number, I’m referring to Google Voice if you’re unfamiliar)
I know, and it drives me nuts when iPhone users complain that it’s my fault for owning an android phone. Like um no it’s quite literally your fault if you stick with Apple and defend their decision to make your life worse. Apple’s business model is basically Stockholm syndrome.
The crazy thing is that RCS is entirely compatible with Apple. If they would refuse to develop for it and lock down their App store to keep 3rd party developers from making apps for it themselves
RCS is not completely compatible. For one thing, it requires a carrier and a phone number. You can go out today, buy a Mac or an iPad with no cell modem, and start using iMessage purely as an IP messaging app. So they can’t just replace the existing protocol with RCS, because RCS is a bag of flaming shit. They could spend the money to develop RCS fallback in addition to their protocol, and that would be awesome, but it costs them money, and I get why they don’t want to do it.
The reality is that this is Google’s fault more than anything. They spent half of my adult life repeatedly inventing and then fucking up the act of sending 200 bytes of text to one person at a time.
I’d love for the modern world to have a great way of messaging people that just worked – used IP connections with SMS fallback, a login you could manage from anywhere, full support for all the real-time typing stuff, the rich media support, the whole thing. That would be great. Someone get on that. But if I have to listen to fucking Google whine about it one more time, I’m out. They’re like a guy with one finger left. If you didn’t know any better, you’d feel pretty sympathetic for him. But if you’ve spent the past two watching him slowly chop the other nine off one at a time with a hatchet and then whine about his bad luck for 12 hours after each chop, the sympathy starts to ebb a bit.
They’re not deliberately breaking it – they just don’t support it. “Deliberately breaking” has the connotation that it would have worked just fine, except they took some extra action to stop it. That’s not true here. It would only work the way people want it to work if Apple spent a lot of money paying developers to make it work.
I’ve wrote some lines of code and I know when it’s “just being lazy” or doing stuff “the evil way”. Imagine when Apple accidentally restricted join/leave actions in their native chat client. That would be minutes until they fix it. We are talking about years here…
Sure, but one of those things is fixing a bug in the protocol they already use for core functionality, and the other is an entirely new software development project. Adding RCS support to iMessage is adding support for an entirely new protocol. That’s what I’m getting at here. It’s not “broken”. Apple doesn’t have to “fix” RCS support. They have to build RCS support, from scratch.
This is like saying that Microsoft Windows should be able to run programs compiled for Apple Silicon on Mac OS. That might be a cool feature, and I have no problem with someone saying they think it should happen, but it’s not Microsoft being “evil” or refusing to “fix it”.
Modern programming requires a common code base and portability. Otherwise Microsoft would never be able to provide Office for macs.
Apple knows it, they simply don’t care to compile it. Protocols are easy to support. It’s a matter of parsing, encoding and decoding.
They’re one of the most profitable companies around, I think they can hire a couple devs to fix those major issues, it just doesn’t help them (it helps their customers) so they dont.
If they chose to support it there wouldn’t be any need to buy an iPhone to stop the issue, they want a monopoly and this is a perfect example of the anti-consumer practices they’re willing to sink to in order to facilitate that.
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I have no experience with this myself, but I heard somewhere that apples protocol for handling messages do not conform to standards and deliberately mishandles media in messages, making images etc lower resolution. I might be wrong though.
Sorta. It’s not that they don’t conform to standards.
It’s that they don’t adopt new standards.
The newest iPhone still handles SMS and MMS the same way the iPhone 3G did back in 2008.
It’s like if Ford refused to add CD players to their cars and insisted you use their proprietary “Ford Media Disk”
And if you don’t like that, fine! It still has a tape player!
Most of my friends & family use telegram. I’ve always liked it.
Telegram is entirely unencrypted by default, so you shouldn’t use it for anything you wouldn’t say out in public.
iMessage is absolutely an issue, and I don’t think I will overcome it if I make the switch because of how integral it is to my family. I’ve heard of software I can run on a Mac that forwards to my phone. I have an old Mac so does such software still exist and work?
Sounds like their tricks work.
Check out AirMessage, you can set it up on your Mac and as long as it’s connected to the internet, you can use the AirMessage app to get iMessage on an android.
Alternatively there’s Bubble but that requires you to Apple sign in to their system and didn’t seem very safe but it doesn’t require a mac
Airmessage seems intriguing, I think it may just work!
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Yep, look into Blue Bubbles. It’s the best of the bunch from what I can gather. I’d be running it myself if I could justify the virtual machine overhead but I just can’t 🙃