Javed Uddin’s future was riding on a single emoji.
In 2016, Uddin, a small business owner in Houston, had been single for the past year. A friend introduced him to Maryam Baloch, a office manager and makeup artist in Chicago. The two began messaging.
However, the pair realized they were running into miscommunication problems. Uddin, using an Android-powered LG Nexus 5X, was receiving incorrect emojis from Maryam’s iPhone 6. This was likely due to phone manufacturers each using their own emoji designs, with different-looking emojis for the same expression.
Regardless of the cause, the blame fell on Uddin for not having an iPhone, where his messages would come in via green bubbles. This was because in 2011 Apple introduced iMessage, an instant messaging service that allows for richer forms of communication than plain old SMS. When two iPhones communicate with one another, it comes in via blue bubbles, includes typing indicators and has since grown to include sharing media, games and even money. At the time it was a rival to BlackBerry’s similar BBM messenger, and grew as Apple’s iPhone gained popularity.
Twelve years later, the differentiating green bubbles persist.
The messaging situation between Uddin and Baloch got so bad that she began screenshotting emojis to ensure feelings she conveyed were coming through correctly. This prompted Uddin to switch to an iPhone as quickly as he could.
“In order for things to land — in order for me to make a good impression — I really need to make sure my texting game is on point,” said Uddin. “Like, I really, really wanted this to work.”
Apple’s messaging divide is affecting how people interact. Not only that, text communications between iPhone and Android devices become a subpar experience, with both users being downgraded to SMS, a much older texting protocol, losing features like in-line reactions, thread responses and text edits. Photos and videos also come in heavily compressed. While many other cross-platform texting…
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