1y ago

Drake's new song mentions Android phones and green text bubbles - PhoneArena

www.phonearena.com Drake's new song mentions Android phones and green text bubbles

Rapper Drake's new album includes a song that mentions Android and the infamous green text bubble on iMessage.

Google, which is in the middle of a campaign to get Apple to support the RCS platform, used the song to help its cause.

In the tweet, Google wrote, "The Android team thinks Drake's new song "Texts Go Green" is a real banger. It refers to the phenomenon when an iPhone user gets blocked. Or tries to text someone who doesn't have an iPhone. Either way, it's pretty rough. If only some super-talented engineering team at Apple would fix this. Because this is a problem only Apple can fix. They just have to adopt RCS, actually. It would make texting more secure too. Just sayin'. Great track tho."

39 comments

Some people are just pathetic and think that a green bubble means you’re are an inferior human being.
- I mean, that's the whole premise of Apple in the USA. This green vs blue bubble issue is not predominant in other countries.
  
  Instead WhatsApp is a plague, at least in Europe. I really hope Googles modern SMS successor takes off.

As an Android user, Google can't even standardise on a message app so it's a bit rich to expect Apple to follow Google's lead on this.
- Years ago that may have been true, but Messages combined with RCS support (and other carriers with their own apps supporting that should you not buy a Pixel) has been pretty uniform. If Apple would get on board then it would be a non issue by now.
  
  Messages doesn't even consistently fail-over to SMS if the client is unreachable through the internet. The feature exists, but it rarely works.
  Messages is bad software, and has been for quite some time. Google pointing to that embarrassing trash as their heroic standard for messaging is ridiculous.
  They have nobody to blame but themselves for green bubbles. I'm a die-hard Android user but their reputation on this front is well-earned.
  
  I mirror what Pxtl says, Messages frequently breaks where I can be messaging someone and maybe an hour or so later it tells me the recipient is "offline" and the message wasn't delivered! No fail over, just fails to send and only notifies me a random amount of time later.

And yet Google had not yet added RCS support to Google Fi "messages for web" (the service to access voice and sms without connecting to a phone) after several years.
- Is this different than messages.google.com? Because that seems to require my phone to be online.
  
  It is that site, but for Google Fi users, it has an option to switch from being an interface to your phone (which includes RCS features) to an independent online service (much like Google Hangouts used to be). But selecting that option is only supported for Fi and it will not support RCS on either the website OR the phone.
  See Options 1 and 2 here https://support.google.com/fi/answer/6188337?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid

woooooww anyway

Bro loves a good rap song about a cell phone.

Real reason he didn't answer is she was probably too old for him...

Yeah, they should just adopt so called "standard" protocol implemented in 1 app available from 1 app repository for 1 operating system, with no open server implementation available, that even being internet based is totally tied to phone carrier and supports just bare minimum of features expected in modern chat app.

Jabber has been an available standard for over 20 years. Google jumped onto it and then jumped off in their infamous cycle of ADHD on the subject of instant messaging. They have nobody to blame but themselves for the "green speech bubbles" problem -- they could have a lot more credibility here.

For the technically skilled, there is BlueBubbles to get iMessage on Android. I set this up recently and it works quite well. I'm running a MacOS Ventura virtual machine using docker-osx on one of my personal servers and pretty much all iMessage functionality is available. I modified the Android (flutter) project locally to get my own push notifications working using my self-hosted ntfy instance as a UnifiedPush provider instead of needing to use Firebase.
There is also Beeper which bridges iMessage and many other chat services in one app, but I wanted something fully open source that I can manage myself, plus I think there's still a wait-list and I didn't want to hand over my Apple ID to a third party.
It's hard trying to convince people (esp. iPhone users) to use a cross platform solution because they perceive us Android users as the problem and they know iMesssge just works. And for the non- technical, that's understandable even if frustrating. So as a software engineer, I am the one making accomodations so they can still use iMessage. But it also made for a fun project for me to learn about.
- Yup. I just got the pixel 8 today from a 13 pro. Set up blue bubbles. Just gotta have people put in my email address in my contact and it works just fine

This is from 2022 lmao
In Drake's new album he says "android her messages is lime green", and that came out days ago

I wonder home much Google paid for that mention.

Drake likes to have sex with children so... maybe care about more important shit.
- you mean r.kelly?
  never heard that about drake...

Just use Telegram
- Why would telegram be the solution? Centralized, not particularly private, not open to other standards.
  
  Ok fine, just use Matrix
  
  Just like RCS. But at least it works everywhere.
- Telegram has a lot of advantages over text and RCS, but I'd rather not be tied down to a profile like that rather then a phone number. A phone number can be brought to various services at least.

So many paths in life that resulted in you not posting this, yet here we are.
*lmao y’all took this way too seriously, sheesh
- Even if I think it's silly, it's relevant to the community and people will be talking about it?
  
  You're not wrong that people will talk about it, but can we reconsider whether or not it's relevant? I mean, it's a Drake song.
- So many paths in life that resulted in you not being a dickhead, yet here we are
  
  It’s the only path I know, unfortunately.
- Nah bro. Lemmy does not have enough content as it is.
  
  In the song, Drake raps about not answering someone's phone call and says, "She call my number, leave her hangin', she got dry cleaned. She got an Android, her messages is lime green."
  There ya go. Content.
- I think Google's reaction and reference to RCS are pretty noteworthy.
  
  That’s true, didn’t he make that song about cellphones being hotlines?
  Totally relevant to Android!

39 comments