> "Beware of first-hand ideas!" exclaimed one [...] "First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation."
– E.M. Forster's 1909 short story "The Machine Stops"
^ The Machine Stops is really shockingly good at its predictions. When reading, remember that moving pictures were brand new, and color photography had just become a thing you could do outside a lab / highly specialized setups. Radio communication had just started to be used by governments. While it's describing the life of a fully-online Influencer™.
This is an unpopular take among the HN crowd, but I haven't seen it posted yet so here it is: this product will either be a huge hit, or it will be a massive failure, or somewhere in between.
As a US Android user, I don't feel very disadvantaged. I have an iPad, an M1 Mac, and a couple Airtags. If I lose something I probably won't be able to locate it until I get back home. I haven't had much trouble with getting group messages on android but maybe my use-case isn't representative.
I think the Android perks still outweigh the cost. Not that any of this isn't possible on iPhone but it's a smoother Android experience: Google Fi for phone plans when traveling internationally, some open-source apps aren't available in Apple's app store, and some apps in both stores are more expensive for iPhone (e.g. Anki). I feel like iCloud has some bad incentives as well. I think that's why live photos is a pain to turn off (I also like Google Photos).
By far the biggest barrier is group chats with others who are on iphone. Not only is the experience pretty broken for you, it essentially ends up breaking the experience for everyone else. This AirTags example just highlights that to a large portion of the US populace, Android is essentially a joke.
The worst is that group chats aren’t reliable in that some messages won’t go to all participants.
But if everyone is iMessage everything goes through. I’m sure it’s an iPhone bug, but it means that mentally I can count on iMessage chats to go through and mixed chats I’m frequently wondering and having to check with each member, “did you get that.” So it means that mixed chats are extra chatty with people confirming with “oks.”
It’s just a crappier experience with green chats and everything goes smoothly so try blue chats.
I wouldn’t cut out friends because of it, but I have a small iota of sadness when I start a chat and it turns green because of someone.
For kids it’s kind of brutal with friends literally not talking to people because they aren’t using emojis.
It’s not android’s fault, but it’s an easy pain to spare my child by buying an iPhone. Not to mention my iPhones last years longer than my android phones and one kid is even using an ancient iPhone 6 to chat with friends.
I'm not going to make apologies for SMS and MMS group chats, but in my close and extended circles (US, SF bay area) every single person has either Signal or WhatsApp. These aren't all tech people either, just people who are conscientious about privacy.
Because that's what they're used to and that what works with all of their friends.
To be clear, I completely agree, and I wish they did use a cross-platform messenger. But the reality is that, in the US, the vast majority of iPhone users use iMessage primarily.
Half of the engineers I (want to) talk to refuse to switch from IRC, and the other half refuse to use it. In the end, I use both, and so do lots of other people.
Should we expect ordinary, non-technical users to behave substantially different? It's not clear to me that we should; most people find the status quo "good enough," and the activation energy for switching is higher than the minor inconvenience of some of your social circle having a slightly worse user experience.
How is the experience broken for anybody? I've been on group chats with my wife and parents (all iPhoners) for years and it's totally fine. I recently got a Pixel and now even the stupid emotes display properly (though it was easy to know what they meant before). I had an iphone forever ago (when my parents were paying for it), and I don't recall the experience of group chats being notably better or worse.
It's more annoying that I have three apps (signal, groupme, and discord) which each have a single friend or friend group that use them but that isn't an android/iphone problem.
In mixed group chats with iPhone and Android, it is not that rare of an occurrence to have issues with texts not going through / being delayed. I also can't emote without a wall of text showing up, or edit messages after sending.
