The only "ethics" problem I see is a company using it's considerable weight to deliberately segregate users of different platforms, resulting in discrimination and bullying. I understand a lot of people here may not understand this, on account of not being a teenager or young adult, but it is a very real phenomenon.
Not even young at this point. I overheard two grown men talking about how much they hate people with green bubbles and purposely skip inviting them into group chats because of it.
I have been a grown man on both sides of that conversation: left out of group chats due to being a green bubble, and now tacitly approving of not including green bubbles in otherwise pristine-seas-of-blue chats.
It's less about the background color and more about the endless series of interoperability paper cuts that exist with green bubbles. Will my reaction emoji come through as intended? Will my shared media get downsampled to feature phone quality? Will referencing the person's name in chat work the same? etc etc etc.
Interop is always a pain, but the sooner Apple can be forced into making any concessions the better.
It would help if Google wasn't a complete joke in the messaging space though. As much as I want iMessage interop with Android users, I have no faith or trust in any Google-based messaging app or initiative. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me dozens of times ... well I'd be an idiot to trust Google messaging again.
The fact that a huge number of perfectly good third party chat apps exist and yet most Apple users prefer iMessage is a huge testament to iMessage just being a really well made product. I wouldn't put up with the obnoxious interop and lockin issues if it weren't!
As an Android user who texts with other Android users, RCS works just fine. Automatic e2e encryption whenever it's available, reactions work (and support every unicode emoji, not just the 6 Apple supports), threading works perfectly, photos and videos come through in full quality.
Recently Google Messages started automatically translating the shitty little 'So-and-so hearted "<previous message>"' SMS messages Apple sends out from iMessage into reactions as well.
It's genuinely quite good. I prefer it over Signal when I know the other person has an Android too.
To be clear, I don’t think people actually look down on green bubbles vs. blue ones, it’s just that the presence of a green bubble in a Messages chat leads to numerous issues with threading, reactions, etc. (which is also something we can blame Apple for, but different than disliking a person for using an Android phone).
If I were a profitable company and I knew I could end bullying resulting from my product without significantly harming my business, and I chose not too, would I be acting ethically?
Apple could also end bullying by giving their phones away for free so every kid in high school could use iMessage. Is it acting ethically if they don't do that? Exactly how much of Apple's products and services should be made available to everyone, and where/how do you draw the line?
To be clear, I don't have a dog in this race. I have an iPhone but barely use iMessages.
