Beeper Mini made Android users blue bubbles. Apple shut it down after only a few days.

Apple responds to the Beeper iMessage saga: ‘We took steps to protect our users’::Beeper, like Sunbird and Texts, sought to find a way to bring iMessage to Android users. Its app, Beeper Mini, worked well. But a few days after it launched, Apple took steps to shut it down.

  • @zeppoEnglish
    11•1 year ago

    I had women in their 40s express their distaste when I had an Android phone.

    • @TurboDieselEnglish
      13•1 year ago

      Then they’re assholes. Seems pretty simple, no?

      For someone in their 40s, they’re probably stuck in the iPhone=rich/Android=poor dichotomy that Apple curated when the iPhone launched. That makes them vain and materialistic, and thus probably not people you want to be around if it’s that important to them.

      Now, if you want to get into how Apple has been changing the contrast ratios on the text for blue and green bubbles to make the green messages harder to read, as well as intentionally making the green color unpleasant, there’s something there.

      • @zeppoEnglish
        7•1 year ago

        They pretty much just both thought that Android was inferior. Kind of unfair from one, who was a photographer, considering I bought a Galaxy thinking it had a better camera than the current iPhones (it didn’t, because the processing and camera app were inferior). So she’d be like “I don’t know why you bought that thing.”. But she was aware it cost as much as an iPhone at the time.

        The other gf was a design snob (worked for a major clothing company as a color designer) and just thought that Android was complicated and tacky. Not that she ever really used it.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•1 year ago

          It’s the same problem with so much of the issues we’re facing in society people don’t know it so it becomes the “other” and therefore bad.

        • @TurboDieselEnglish
          0•1 year ago

          Don’t have the article handy but I believe it was wired that reported on the decreasing contrast between the white text and green background across several iterations of iOS.

          Edit: WSJ from 2018. I can’t find a way behind the paywall. And Medium. Also from '18

            • @zeppoEnglish
              2•1 year ago

              The latter article doesn’t cite decreasing contrast ratios, but notes

              [Apple’s] guidelines state that you should strive for a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 between the text and background colors. Apple’s white text in a blue bubble (iPhone messages) shows a 3.5:1 contrast ratio, while the white text in a green bubble (non-iPhone messages) manages only a 2.1:1 contrast ratio, less than half the recommended minimum contrast

              • @[email protected]English
                0•1 year ago

                I saw that, but that doesn’t state what the other person is stating.

                We can ascertain no intent but they assert one as malice which is why I pressed their claim.

                • @zeppoEnglish
                  1•1 year ago

                  Do you deduce that Apple did that by accident and never noticed?

                  • @[email protected]English
                    0•1 year ago

                    With no evidence to tell me they did it deliberately I can’t deduce anything, I could jump to conclusions or make assumptions.

                    I’m not really in the business of that here though, someone made a claim and said there were articles about it then produced two articles which didn’t support their claims at all.

                    It’s a lot easier to believe they did something then just didn’t give two fucks about fixing it since the colors had become ubiquitous than to believe they deliberately did it to get back at people with a handicap to drive them to use their phones, especially when iMessage itself doesn’t follow the guideline.

                    Again, all I really care about in this thread is that someone who made bogus assertions about intent was unable to support it at all.

      • @pete_the_catEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        It’s also the fact that there is essentially zero choice when it comes to iPhones. Most people don’t care about the tech inside the device, they just want something that works. In the Android world there are so many devices with different specs that it breeds confusion. People buy a cheap Android phone and are like “This thing sucks! Android is terrible!” and go get an iPhone, which works better than the garbage Android device that they used, never trying a top tier Android device like a Pixel or Galaxy.

        Back when my mom needed to upgrade her shitty Sharp Aquous Android phone I told her I would pay for it, since she’s frugal, she instinctively pointed out the cheapest one at T-Mobile. I told her that it was going to be garbage and she was going to hate it, but she insisted that she wanted that one and didn’t care. I bought her a Galaxy S6 instead, which she used for years. When I bought my Pixel 6 Pro, I gave her my Pixel 2 XL, which was still working perfectly 5 years later. She’s still using it two years later and has zero complaints.