Althouse: "The Justice Department called out Apple for afflicting Android smartphone users with the dreaded 'green bubble' in text messages..."

March 23, 2024

"The Justice Department called out Apple for afflicting Android smartphone users with the dreaded 'green bubble' in text messages..."

"... calling it a mark of 'social stigma, exclusion and blame' as part of its landmark antitrust case against the iPhone maker. 'Green bubble' status has long been a source of mockery online, with some women even jokingly declaring that they find men who own Androids less attractive...."

The New York Post reports.

52 comments:

Kevin said...: The people who blocked your online speech are upset at the color of their text bubbles.; 3/23/24, 6:14 AM
Kevin said...: I thought it was the media’s job to comfort the afflicted.; 3/23/24, 6:15 AM
Another old lawyer said...: "I mean, have you ever? It's like, oh my God!" - Moon Unit Zappa (maybe); 3/23/24, 6:19 AM
Leland said...: Talk about social stigmas, I’ll take the green bubble over the dreaded blue D logo of the dnc.; 3/23/24, 6:28 AM
rehajm said...: The Android people wreck the group text- sometimes they choke on the pictures.; 3/23/24, 7:07 AM
RideSpaceMountain said...: Veblen goods. Women love them. Shiny shiny. Jingle jangle.; 3/23/24, 7:16 AM
stlcdr said...: If you are offended by green bubbles isn’t this just another sign you are racist? The very act of seeing green bubbles makes you racist, too. And a bigot.; 3/23/24, 7:46 AM
Robert Marshall said...: So relieved to find our "Justice" department getting around to the really important injustices plaguing our society, like the dreaded green bubble of shame. Thanks, Merrick Garland.; 3/23/24, 7:47 AM
Rocco said...: Kermit T Frog said...
It's not easy being green.; 3/23/24, 7:52 AM
Jake said...: The government has a weak case I think.; 3/23/24, 7:54 AM
Zavier Onasses said...: No idea what the "green bubble" is. Never owned or operated an iProduct or Mac computer. But behavior described seems anti-inclusive and discriminatory*.

People who harbor such hate thoughts should be fined or jailed, or both. Definitely should be a law against it. Clearly in the purview of Government.

*Another word victimized by morphed meaning. I am old enough to remember "Don't forget the Cavaliers for Roger, 'cause Roger's a discriminating guy."; 3/23/24, 7:58 AM
Bob Boyd said...: The same federal government agents who have gone to extraordinary, unprecedented, illegal efforts to censor and prosecute their opponents in the national political conversation are going to bring the hammer down on Apple because some teenager is in a green bubble?

I think this is a message to all corporations that says, "We have no end of ways to make your life hell if you don't toe the line politically."

Soon they'll have AI that will put all the good people's messages in blue bubbles and anyone it has identified as deplorable, their messages will appear in red bubbles regardless of what brand of phone they have.; 3/23/24, 8:08 AM
wild chicken said...: Funny, I tried and returned several iPhones because I couldn't get Althouse to word wrap in its browser.

Or I could get it to word wrap, but then I couldn't read comments.

I mean, what good is that?; 3/23/24, 8:22 AM
Oh Yea said...: So we are allowing 14-year-old mean girl determine what is filed in Federal Courts?; 3/23/24, 8:33 AM
Birches said...: So the justice department is made up of a bunch of twenty somethings that know the horrors of being kept off the group chat. Seriously, the green bubble stuff is something teenagers whine about.; 3/23/24, 8:43 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "Funny, I tried and returned several iPhones because I couldn't get Althouse to word wrap in its browser."

Do you mean you're trying to get the print really large and it goes off screen?; 3/23/24, 8:44 AM
Chest Rockwell said...: Yeah blogger absolutely sucks on a mobile device. Isn't there a responsive option when using it so it adapts to mobile better?; 3/23/24, 8:54 AM
Darkisland said...: One of my failures as a parent is that my daughter uses an iPhone.

I've never noticed anything different about her texts.

What is this green bubble thing?

I have a real phone. Is this something I need to worry about?

John Henry; 3/23/24, 8:56 AM
cassandra lite said...: “…some women even jokingly declare…less attractive.”

I know some of these women. And I don’t think they’re joking. Former mean girls for whom acceptance in the in crowd is everything. You see it in their social media likes and reposts, too. The idea that they’d ever like or repost someone outside the group is abhorrent. Who’d want to be associated with those icky cooties and risk being excommunicated by the queen bees?; 3/23/24, 9:01 AM
Original Mike said...: Huh. The government must have fixed all the important problems …; 3/23/24, 9:01 AM
Pat said...: I have had iphones for about 10 years and I think they are great products. I’m only on my second one, and both lasted 5 years. I found them worth the $1000 price they cost.

The dreaded green bubble is what someone’s text messages appear in if the message isn’t sent through imessage, Apple’s text service. The green bubble means that the sender is using a non-iphone or it can also happen when an iphone user is in an area where they somehow have phone service but not internet service. Apple allows some features within imessage such as “liking” messages, replying directly to a specific message (useful in group chats), and stuff like animated screen effects that happen when you text someone a message like “Happy New Year!” Or “Happy 4th of July!” On those specific dates.; 3/23/24, 9:07 AM
Steve said...: “Do you mean you're trying to get the print really large and it goes off screen?“.

Absolutely. I don’t blame you personally but how a mature platform hasn’t figured this out and corrected it is beyond me; 3/23/24, 9:07 AM
Steve said...: This litigation makes me wonder…what did Apple do to piss off Joe Biden they’ve unleashed the flying monkeys of the DOJ and left wing state attorneys general. They gone full Trump on Apple.; 3/23/24, 9:09 AM
Original Mike said...: Pretty much any website is unreadable on a Phone, given its size. I don't know how people do it, it's not worth the effort , IMO. An iPad is big enough to be useful.; 3/23/24, 9:14 AM
Sebastian said...: Where does the Constitution authorize the federal government to remove green bubbles?; 3/23/24, 9:33 AM
JaimeRoberto said...: I have an Android phone while the rest of my family has Apple, but I have yet to feel the shame of the Green Bubble. And believe me, they'd let me know.; 3/23/24, 9:39 AM
Darkisland said...: Yeah blogger absolutely sucks on a mobile device.

Works just fine on my 3 year old $250 Samsung galaxy using default Samsung browser

Maybe it only sucks on some mobile devices.

John Henry; 3/23/24, 9:41 AM
who-knew said...: According to C-net android phones are over 70% of the market. Makes me believe this is some kind of a shot across the bow for other issues the government has against apple. I'm not sure what those issues are but they sure as hell isn't what they are telling us. Just this line alone 'social stigma, exclusion and blame' shows that they are just making things up.; 3/23/24, 9:48 AM
Curious George said...: "rehajm said...
The Android people wreck the group text- sometimes they choke on the pictures."

Because Apple refused to synch up to the google rich chat services.; 3/23/24, 10:06 AM
NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...: That is without a doubt the most stupid and petty shit in the history of mankind.; 3/23/24, 10:12 AM
Yancey Ward said...: Oh, for fuck's sake. If this is the sort of thing the DoJ is basing its case on, then they have already lost. The i-Phone is 30% of the market of smart phones- if there is any stigma it is on Apple products users who are overpaying for the company's services. We went over this ground 30+ years ago with Apple computers vs Windows based ones- the long run outcome is still the same.; 3/23/24, 10:15 AM
wild chicken said...: Chest, Blogger usually works fine on my declasse android Moto.

That's why I keep going back. I would like airtag support though.; 3/23/24, 10:17 AM
Immanuel Rant said...: I would think the green bubble would be a valuable feature. If the people are so vapid as to exclude anyone on that basis, let them self-identify early so you don't waste your time on them.; 3/23/24, 10:25 AM
John said...: RideSpaceMountain said: "Veblen goods. Women love them. Shiny shiny. Jingle jangle."

It is a sign of "fitness", like peacock feathers.; 3/23/24, 10:46 AM
Original Mike said...: "Is this something I need to worry about?"

Yes. The fact that our government is meddling in something as trivial as text bubbles is absolutely something you should be worrying about.; 3/23/24, 10:50 AM
Original Mike said...: "Because Apple refused to synch up to the google rich chat services."

As is their right.; 3/23/24, 10:53 AM
Original Mike said...: "According to C-net android phones are over 70% of the market."

That fact alone should get this laughed out of court.; 3/23/24, 10:54 AM
Joe Smith said...: Our lawmakers are certifiable low-IQ morons, not worthy of any sort of respect.

They are stupid.

Vote for the least stupid of the group...usually the ones who don't believe men and women can change sexes on a whim.

Probably the easiest test.; 3/23/24, 11:04 AM
TickTock said...: Blogger reads just fine on my iPhone 12. Though I have to turn it sideways so that the lines can be longer.; 3/23/24, 11:07 AM
Enigma said...: Should this be an antitrust suit against Apple or the cell phone providers?

With Apple you can receive Android messages, they are just in green boxes and the functionality remains 100%. Apple's blue text messages were originally a work-around to pre-smartphone cell phone providers who nickeled-and-dimed everything. The phone companies charged money for each text message (which cost them $0.00000000000000000000001), they charged people for 5-second song clips as ringtones, and they locked people into 24 month phone contracts, and they had absurd charges for going over plan usage limits. Ohh, wasn't that 2004 Motorola Razr so cool! So thin!

Apple had a very, very generous iPhone feature set versus the pre-smartphone phone companies. Here, the State has shown that it will ride the coattails of growing companies that deliver cash (Apple 10 years ago; early Elon Musk), but then attack firms that have more money than future potential. This State practice dates back a very long time (e.g., see the AT&T antitrust suit).; 3/23/24, 11:26 AM
Jupiter said...: "Never owned or operated an iProduct or Mac computer."

Back in 82, I think it was, a painter I knew in NYC asked me to help him set up a computer system, to track his various artworks, which were in constant motion from show to show and gallery to gallery. I was a mainframe programmer, and we both assumed that working with "minicomputers" would be easy for me. So I bought him an Apple Macintosh, for around $2000, and figured out the rather primitive database language it provided, and he had one of his assistants enter all the data from his paper records.

Well and good, and then he asked me to print some reports. And I couldn't get it to print totals on dollar values. So I went back to the store that sold me that fucking white plastic boat-anchor, and they told me that I had the 2D model, and if I wanted a computer that could add numbers, I needed to get the more expensive 2E model. I have never since had any interest at all in purchasing any Apple product. I have noticed, that they are mostly popular with people who don't understand computers very well. You can buy a computer, that will do whatever an Apple will, and more, for about half the price. But it won't be an Apple!; 3/23/24, 12:00 PM
iowan2 said...: The only crime Apple committed is being short on the danegeld; 3/23/24, 12:18 PM
Christopher said...: Original Mike said...

Pretty much any website is unreadable on a Phone, given its size. I don't know how people do it, it's not worth the effort , IMO. An iPad is big enough to be useful.

Many different experiences and levels of eyesight out there, but I read Althouse and, for example, Instapundit all the time just fine on my Samsung Galaxy S10e, which is a little small by current standards.

On Althouse, when I first arrive at the site, if I quickly double-tap, the view zooms in so the posts take up all the screen, doing away with the right margin with that lovely bio photo and text below. Sometimes I have to manually zoom-adjust after that just a tad.

The text is still a little small, so when I'm bleary-eyed I rotate from portrait to landscape, which enlarges the text yet again. Some further pinch-zoom fiddling can be necessary.

This doesn't work on all sites. However, most sites I visit are built to detect the platform the user is viewing it on, from smartphone to tablet to laptop/desktop, and make some appropriate adjustments.

As for the green bubble, lololol, "now that we've solved all the big problems in the world." I'm on group texts with iPhone users and have no issues communicating, and photos usually go through as well. That's all I care about.; 3/23/24, 12:33 PM
Original Mike said...: I have always had Windows computers because, well, they were computers rather than some sort of media device and that's what I wanted; a computer. But Microsoft has decided I'm supposed to wrap my life around CoPilot, or whatever it's called. It's decided it needs to get up in my face. Every month it updates the browser (which bogs down the computer horribly) and wants to show me what groovy new emojis I can use and where I can go shopping, etc. This is precisely what I didn't want. I bought my first Mac a couple of weeks ago and I like it.; 3/23/24, 12:54 PM
Howard said...: Men are from Android/PC, Women are from Apple/Mac; 3/23/24, 12:56 PM
Original Mike said...: "Many different experiences and levels of eyesight out there…"

I can see the text fine, but there's so little of it on the screen at one time that it's an unenjoyable reading experience. Apparently when I'm reading, I'm taking in more then just the little snippet I'm currently "reading", I guess. I just don't like it.; 3/23/24, 12:58 PM
Christopher B said...: I ponied up for an original Mac after graduating college back in 1984, upgraded it to a Plus, and stuck with Apple products until about the mid-1990s (Scully era, IIRC, before the Jobs comeback) at which point it looked like Apple was going to die so I bit the bullet and switched to Windows. My chip-off-the-block tech nerd son started in Apple iPod support as a teenager and is now doing high-end Mac support for a bank but he turned me on to Android phones rather than iPhone. I've never regretted the choice. My wife has had iPhones and Mac laptops for years. While there were some benefits realized from device integration she had constant complaints about random software updates, or non-updates, causing breaks in compatibility and function. I'm happy to decide what I want to share between various platforms even if it means more work.

I've also been weirded out by some Apple backdoor functionality. Just this week we got to chatting with a father and daughter on a cruise, and my wife later mentioned getting a text that she assumed was from them even though she couldn't remember actually exchanging phone numbers.

I find the green bubble thing somewhat creepy. I'm in group texts with iPhone users, and the biggest issue (now seemingly fairly well known) is that an Android user can't be added or deleted individually from an ongoing iMessage group. The whole group has to be recreated. Basically it's an annoyance to iPhone mean girls who want to silently drop somebody from a text string. Photos usually aren't too much of an issue but the emojis don't transmit. I get a lot of " liked " texts.

I generally have few problems reading any website, especially text based sites, on my slightly older 'Droid.; 3/23/24, 2:30 PM
Bruce Hayden said...: It’s going to be interesting. Apple may be able to survive this if they can show that it originated due to the phone companies charging for text messages, etc. and they haven’t gotten around to fixing it.

At least interesting to me. My favorite LS prof, some 35 years ago, taught Computer Law (where I thought that I was headed), Corporations, and Antitrust. He preferred teaching seminar classes, where he could use papers, instead of standardized tests for grading. Always the entrepreneur, he was happy to assign chapters in his case books, if you didn’t have a good paper idea, which I rarely did. So, over time, I wrote chapters in his Computer Law book, including the Antitrust chapter. And got easy As in his classes. And we became friends, with his two kids bracketing mine in age (the three of them are still friends). Fresh out of LS, with an Econ PhD, he had been hired by the DOJ for their antitrust suit against IBM. And I perfectly understood why that company had been sued, as I had spent 8 years with Sperry Univac competing against them. And, at the time, it made perfect sense for me to burn one of my LS electives on Antitrust, if I was going to specialize in Computer Law.

Fast forward a bit. IBM managed to get their guy appointed AAG for Antitrust, and the lawsuit was immediately dropped (AT&T, not as devious, didn’t, so ended up with a consent decree…) That’s when he moved to academia. It didn’t matter in the long run, because the action moved to PCs. There was pressure for the DOJ to sue MSFT for antitrust. It was resisted until the company (Caldera) that had bought DR DOS sued them for antitrust for, among other things, generating an error message whenever pre-NT Windows detected that it was running on top of DR DOS, and not PC DOS (actually a clone of DR’s predecessor OS - CPM 86), at which time, Windows output an error message. The DOJ jumped in then, using a lot of Caldera‘s work. In any case, there turned out to be code in Windows that checked for the underlying OS, and generated the error message if the OS wasn’t MSFT’s (or IBM’s) DOS (this isn’t conjecture - I know the guy who found it). This potentially violated Sherman § 2 Monopolization and Clayton Tying.

My point here is that in the Caldera and DOJ antitrust cases against MSFT, a smoking gun was found. Will or would one be found in Apple’s IOS (etc)? It goes to intent - MSFT set out to utilize its monopoly position to disadvantage its competitors. Did Apple? Or was it just an artifact that they haven’t fixed yet?; 3/23/24, 3:13 PM
Kirk Parker said...: Jupiter,

The claim that some version of the Mac "couldn't add numbers" cast doubt on every other part of your account, including the part about having been a mainframe programmer.

Now, if your artist's "database" were written in something completely inappropriate for the task like Hypercard, then sure I could believe that hypercar did not have a way to sum fields across multiple cards. But that's just one app (which isn't in any way, shape, or form an actual database.) so if that's what you selected, that's on you.

At its initial release, most software for the Mac was actually written in compiled on the Lisa platform in cross-compiler mode; as far as I can tell from my cursory bit of research language options were limited to Lisa Pascal and 68000 assembler.; 3/23/24, 3:15 PM
Bruce Hayden said...: What’s weird for me, with text messaging using Apple (IOS) devices is when I am involved in group discussions. We have a group of maybe a dozen of us, who met last June to celebrate the life of a friend of ours from 50 years earlier. It’s still active, since some of us have stayed close since then, and many of us were neighbors growing up. I tend to primarily utilize my iPad Pros for text messaging, when I can, because they have full sized (soft) keyboards. Maybe 75% of this group uses iPhones and iPads, so most of the discussion is available on my iPads. Until I realize that I missed a post or two made on an Android, because I see the responses to it on the iPad I am using, but not the text message they were responding to. Or the reverse, when I respond on the iPad, and get a message that it didn’t go out (to everyone). Then, I switch to my iPhone, when I can find it (probably half the time, I answer my phone on my Apple Watch or one of my iPads). If it is a long text msg, I will sometimes copy it to an email that I send to myself using my Apple ID address first.

And that sort of thing could potentially justify Apple retaining marking non-Apple text messages differently.; 3/23/24, 3:33 PM
Big Mike said...: ” 'Green bubble' status has long been a source of mockery online, with some women even jokingly declaring that they find men who own Androids less attractive...."

So it’s worthwhile to buy an Android phone just to screen that type of woman out of the potential dating pool.; 3/23/24, 5:53 PM
Kakistocracy said...: "According to C-net android phones are over 70% of the market."

Is that even possible? I heard that Apple has a monopoly on smartphones.

Apple created the iPhone and iOS — frankly, it’s their ecosystem and they can really do anything they want. When they originally created the App store it was only for Apple apps — anyone else would need to create “web apps”. Software developers complained and lobbied Apple to allow other apps in the store and they eventually did so.

The 30% fees may seem high to developers but it’s Apple’s store — they didn’t ask you or anyone to sell on their store. It’s their store and their rules.

It’s similar to any bricks and mortar store. If you have a product that you want to sell at Walmart - it’s going to cost you. Most vendors need to pay Walmart for shelf space. And you need to sell your goods to Walmart at a discount so Walmart can up the price by 50% to make a profit. Why isn’t the DOJ suing Walmart or any other retailer?; 3/23/24, 6:25 PM