How Apple taught its users to hate Android through subtle design cues.
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.
As you can see, both of these bubble colors (pictured above) feel pleasant to read. This is because of the high contrast ratio between the black text and light background color. Both bubble colors have high contrast ratios, and the 7% higher contrast in the blue bubbles is negligible.
iOS 7 (pictured below) brought a new design direction for the OS, and many of the design choices in iOS 7 changed the user experience. However, you’ve probably never noticed one of the most crucial changes: the text color inside the bubbles.
Have you noticed how the green bubbles in iOS 7 feel much more difficult to read than the blue bubbles, while both are easy to read in iOS 5? It’s not just you — that’s because the text color was changed from black to white with the arrival of iOS 7. Because of this change in text color, the contrast for both types of bubbles decreased. However, this decrease of contrast was not applied equally. Even though contrast for both bubbles was lower than before, the contrast ratio of iMessage conversations was 52% higher than the contrast ratio of SMS ones.
iOS 14 (pictured below) improved on the contrast for both colors, but again, blue bubbles received preferential treatment. Because of this, there is an even greater disparity between the contrast of green and blue bubbles: iMessage chats now have 76% higher contrast than SMS ones do.
Ironically, these low-contrast green bubbles (but not their blue counterparts) even fail Apple’s own accessibility guidelines for contrast:
This subtle change in contrast has a huge effect on the user experience. Even though users may not consciously realize the decrease in contrast from green to blue, it makes a major difference in the “pleasantness” of SMS conversations. This lower contrast makes green bubbles harder to read, making the SMS experience feel frustrating and clunky.
Even though SMS has a similar core user experience to iMessage, this disparity in contrast makes SMS conversations harder to read. By making SMS conversations more frustrating to read than iMessage ones, Apple increased resentment towards SMS (and, by extension, Android users).
This change in contrast highlights how Apple is able to manipulate its users’ feelings. In this case, Apple was able to change the public perception of SMS to favor its own platform. When they first introduced iMessage, the blue color was mainly for identification purposes — it would be confusing to wonder why certain chats didn’t support certain features if there wasn’t some sort of differentiation. Due to this need for differentiation, iMessage bubbles in iOS 5 had a different color. Apple’s goal wasn’t (yet) to change the perception of SMS, so both bubbles had similar levels of contrast were just as readable. Once iMessage got off the ground, however, tactics started to shift. Given that iMessage was (and still is) one of the top selling points of the iPhone, Apple wanted to make it clear that iMessage was a newer, more advanced kind of messaging that was exclusive to iPhones. They accomplished this through subtle UI changes: by decreasing the contrast for SMS messages and making them harder to read, Apple subtly changed their users’ perception of SMS from indifference to frustration. By making green bubbles harder to read, Apple pushed their user base to shun both green bubbles and, by extension, their owners.
I’m not saying SMS is a better messaging experience. It’s not. However, given that Apple enabled iMessage by default on every iPhone and actively made the SMS experience more frustrating, I think it’s fair to say that Apple is manipulating their user base into bullying Android users to switch. Combining the default frustrating SMS experience with the high friction of downloading alternate messaging apps like WhatsApp, the only usable chat service liked by enough people is iMessage. Which, of course, requires switching to an iPhone.
And that, to me, sounds an awful lot like a monopoly.
