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posted by martyb on Sunday January 09 2022, @04:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the green-with-envy dept.

https://medium.com/@_sdc/how-apple-taught-its-users-to-hate-android-through-subtle-design-cues-518cd7eda80

If you use an iPhone, you might have noticed that SMS conversations (green-bubbles) are harder to read than iMessage conversations (blue bubbles). That's not by accident — in fact, green bubbles weren't always so difficult to read.

You've probably heard of the green and blue text message bubble colors inside the iOS Messages app. On an iPhone, normal SMS text messages are colored green, while iMessage (Apple's iPhone-exclusive chat platform) conversations are colored blue. Many iPhone users shun the "green bubble" due to the fewer features provided by SMS. If you own an iPhone, you may feel the same frustration when trying to read a green-bubble chat, as they often feel harder to read than blue-bubble chats. That's no accident.

To begin, we have to take a trip back to 2011. As you may know, iMessage, along with the signature blue bubble, didn't exist until the release of iOS 5. Before iMessage was introduced, every message in the Messages app was green, as the only messaging supported at the time was SMS. Once they added iMessage to the Messages application on iOS, the blue bubbles came along with it to help differentiate between iMessage and SMS. Given that the Messages app has stuck with the same green bubble/blue bubble differentiation, it may sound like the hatred towards SMS isn't related to the color at all. However, along the way from iOS 5 to now, a tiny design change opened a user-experience chasm between SMS conversations and iMessage ones. This isn't a story about about the green or blue colors themselves — rather, it's a story about contrast, and its astonishing impact on our perceptions.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 09 2022, @03:10PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 09 2022, @03:10PM (#1211249)
    Fuck no. Just look at all the fucked up UIs with linux. Every distro screws up something else to try to be different, because really that's all most distros CAN tweak. It's not like they're going to develop new programs. Because no money for real development.

    So everyone packages the same shit, sometimes tweaking it to make it just enough different to piss people off.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 09 2022, @11:51PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday January 09 2022, @11:51PM (#1211349) Homepage
    So your argument that interfaces shouldn't be open source and thus tweakable by the user is that there are interfaces that are terrible? You didn't think enough about that, did you?
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday January 10 2022, @02:44AM

    by Magic Oddball (3847) on Monday January 10 2022, @02:44AM (#1211388) Journal

    Just look at all the fucked up UIs with linux. Every distro screws up something else to try to be different, because really that's all most distros CAN tweak.

    Such as? As long as you use one of the major existing graphical environments or window managers (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, etc.) the default experience is pretty much the same regardless of which distro it's run under; there have been a small handful of distros that created their own custom graphical environment, but that's a different issue far beyond "tweaking" an existing one.