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How in-app chat can solve the dreadful UX of iOS-Android messaging
This article was originally published on November 2, 2020, at Stream.
The Green Text.
For iPhone users, few interactions on the device elicit such suffering and stress — or outright torment — as does the subjugation of an SMS (Short Message Service) text rendered in green. And inboxes are littered with them: political text messages have flooded mobile phones in the last few months, all of which are sent via SMS. So, too, are spam hits, two-factor authentication codes, credit card receipts, appointment confirmations, and many more sterile green messages sent to iPhones absent any point of human contact. And so, to no fault of their own, people sending text messages to iOS users from Android devices — which exclusively deploys SMS — are reflexively categorized as unwelcome communication. Both parties are poorer for the experience.
Since the iPhone launched, in 2007, iMessage (debut: Oct. 2011) may just be the most delightful and influential product Apple has created. And the reasons are many; few, after all, can resist typing indicators and read receipts while seamlessly exchanging pictures, videos, and documents alongside emoji reactions. Today, iMessage is available on almost all Apple devices, platform agnosticism its defining characteristic. Users can access iMessage on mobile, desktop, tablets, and smartwatches, all with the backing of end-to-end encryption. But beyond ubiquity and the individual dopamine hits, the sum of iMessage’s parts has coalesced into an experience where just a single blue-shaded chat bubble stirs within us a much deeper emotion: trust. And this trust has less to do with data security (though the service does score well by most measures) than it does the confirmation that there is an alive, sentient human being on the other end of the line, whereas in so many cases with SMS, there is not, torpedoing any sense of confidence our messages are safe, secure, and being delivered even during those times we’re communicating with a known recipient. (To Android’s credit, incoming messages to its devices appear similarly regardless of the opposing operating system, but the presentation of reactions and attachments can still be awkward.)
The sum of iMessage’s parts has coalesced into an…
