Some news aggregator or another pointed me to WSJ‘s “Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble” over the weekend.
Soon after 19-year-old Adele Lowitz gave up her Apple iPhone 11 for an experimental go with an Android smartphone, a friend in her long-running texting group chimed in: “Who’s green?”
The reference to the color of group text messages—Android users turn Apple Inc.’s iMessage into green bubbles instead of blue—highlighted one of the challenges of her experiment. No longer did her group chats work seamlessly with other peers, almost all of whom used iPhones. FaceTime calls became more complicated and the University of Michigan sophomore’s phone didn’t show up in an app she used to find friends.
That pressure to be a part of the blue text group is the product of decisions by Apple executives starting years ago that have, with little fanfare, built iMessage into one of the world’s most widely used social networks and helped to cement the iPhone’s dominance among young smartphone users in the U.S.
After a few paragraphs recounting internal company emails demonstrated how calculated the decision was, the story continues,
From the beginning, Apple got creative in its protection of iMessage’s exclusivity. It didn’t ban the exchange of traditional text messages with Android users but instead branded those messages with a different color; when an Android user is part of a group chat, the iPhone users see green bubbles rather than blue. It also withheld certain features. There is no dot-dot-dot icon to demonstrate that a non-iPhone user is typing, for example, and an iMessage heart or thumbs-up annotation has long conveyed to Android users as text instead of images.
Apple later took other steps that enhanced the popularity of its messaging service with teens. It added popular features such as animated cartoon-like faces that create mirrors of a user’s face, to compete with messaging services from social media companies. Apple’s own survey of iPhone holders made public during the Epic Games litigation found that customers were particularly fond of replacing words with emojis and screen effects such as animated balloons and confetti. Avid teen users said in interviews with The Wall Street Journal that they also liked how they could create group chats with other Apple users that add and subtract participants without having to start a new chain.
While I was aware that iMessage came to my phone in blue and externals texts in green, I was oblivious to the other distinctions until a couple weeks ago when a group of Alabama football fans started turning a group email chain into a text message group and ran into problems because a couple of people, including our host, were Android users. That, plus at least one member being overseas, caused us to hastily move to WhatsApp instead.
Apple’s iMessage plays a significant role in the lives of young smartphone users and their parents, according to data and interviews with a dozen of these people. Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones.
“In my circle at college, and in high school rolling over into college, most people have iPhones and utilize a lot of those kinds of iPhone specific features” together, said Ms. Lowitz, the Michigan student.
She said she came to realize that Apple had effectively created a social network of features that keeps users, such as her and others, locked in. “There was definitely some kind of pressure to get back to that,” she said.
Many of the new iMessage features—such as the 3D-like digital avatars known as memojis—exist fundamentally as a reason to own an iPhone and don’t make money for Apple directly. Last year Apple also made it possible to share FaceTime connections with Android users—a slight crack in Apple’s self-reinforcing ecosystem as video calling became more prevalent during the pandemic. In recent years, however, it has incorporated some moneymaking elements including Apple Pay and e-commerce links to other businesses such as Starbucks.
“We know that Apple users appreciate having access to innovative features like iCloud synching across all their Apple devices, Tapback and Memoji, as well as industry-leading privacy and security with end-to-end encryption—all of which make iMessage unique,” Apple said in a statement.
There’s a whole lot more there but you get the point. The authors raise questions about whether this constitutes monopolistic behavior on the part of Apple. But, honestly, this just strikes me as savvy marketing to create stickiness. That’s what we’d expect companies to do. (Planned obsolescence, making it difficult for external companies to repair the phones, and other tactics are much more concerning in terms of anticompetitive behavior.)
What motivated me to post this, though, is that the oldest, who just turned 13 a few days ago and got her first real phone* for Christmas, an iPhone 13. We’ve been an iPhone family, separately and now together, for many years now so the decision to get an Apple phone was a no-brainer. Plus, she’s had an iPad since her 6th birthday, so she’s quite familiar with the ecosystem.
We knew that there was some social pressure on the phone front. She’s halfway through 7th grade and is probably in the middle of her peer group in terms of getting a phone. And, when we discussed with her getting a phone for Christmas, and the tradeoffs involved, she let on that there was some peer pressure in having the latest models. Despite being a public school, and a very large one at that, it’s a fairly affluent area so I guess that’s not surprising.
I was, however, surprised that she mentioned the blue/green bubble phenomenon this morning when I was taking her to the bus stop. Because her first week back to school had been delayed a week because of the snow, we moved back her birthday party to this weekend and she’s going to invite friends using her phone over the course of the next couple of days once she gets their numbers. Alas, she noted, some of them would have green bubbles.
Who knew?
