UPDATE: Beeper, through their Twitter account, is saying that they’re working on it and “hope to have good news to share soon”:
Work continues to fix the issue causing the Beeper Mini outage. We know how hard this has been for those who loved using Beeper Mini, and we’re extremely sorry for the inconvenience. We are feeling good, though, and hope to have good news to share soon.
I don’t get what all the fuss is with iMessage. I got my first iPhone last year with work and it texts just like my old phone did.
What other features really am I getting that I didn’t have before? Delivered and read confirmation? Laser beam effects?
High quality picture and video? Have you never exchanged pictures or video with a non iPhone user from your iphone? Pictures aren’t always horrible but video is basically unwatchable. Also end to end encryption, which is less obvious. Group chats are also borked by having a single non iPhone user in them. Android to android in most cases lately has high quality multimedia but that’s not true of mixed interactions.
Technically apple users can fix the quality issue with a change in their settings to stop compression of images sent via MMS.
As to android phones not having high quality, your def right about that. The RCS rollout was terrible. But most of the flagship devices have RCS and a lot more carriers are allowing it (here in Canada at least. I assume we’re behind the curve though)
Samsung has enabled RCS down to even their cheapest handsets, (I believe) but apple isn’t adopting that till next year, and then we’ll be able to skip the shenanigans
MMS? Now that’s a term I haven’t heard in 15 years. American texting is so weird.
Betweeen newer androids it’s RCS now and between Apple devices it’s imessage so it’s only going between the two because Apple refuses to bridge the gap because people are so used to that setup. However now a lot of my friends, coworkers and neighbors have Telegram now so don’t need to worry about the specific device.
I’ve always done all of that via Facebook messenger or discord not via text, before that it was via MSN messenger.
I suppose it makes sense to use iMessage for it, but so few people I know even have iPhones so that’s likely why we never used it.
99% of arguments I hear about iMessage are really just blue bubble vs green bubble, and that A LOT of people are extremely hung up about having to have a blue bubble.
Personally I have never gotten the bubble fixation.
When iMessage user sends messages, videos, pictures, gifs to another iMessage user, it sends over via data. Similar to Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, FB Messenger, etc.
When an iMessage user sends to an Android user, it sends it via SMS/MMS which is very limited.
The ability to reply, edit, and delete are pretty cool. Yes, you can do that with RCS too, but unfortunately you can’t do anything cross-platform.
If you’re on Lemmy, you’re already set up to “not understand”. You probably have no trouble installing a new chat app and using it.
I chat with 20-30 people in my neighborhood, all middle aged adults, and they all have iPhones. If I were to ask, only one would accommodate my request to use a different app, and it’d still be disruptive to his routine. I’m not angry at any of these folks; I blame Apple. Though they have a good product, they are totally behaving like a monopolist.
It’s not the features and never has been. It comes preinstalled, it just works, and it works perfectly with most people. No one calls it “iMessage”. They call it “texting”.
I also just don’t know that many people with iPhones. Sure I see them a lot at work now. But people with money for a nice phone tend to buy foldables and people without money seem to buy cheap androids.
I imagine it’s very different in the USA though. Australia has always been an odd market.