Yeah I feel like they’re 10 or 11
How old is this cousin? Maybe they don’t know how to deal with difficult information yet
‘what happened’
‘take a wild guess!’
…but aren’t the gray bubbles the ones she is sending from her phone?
I’m confused… wasn’t there a big stir about green bubbles being the lowly Android peasants?
Yes but it doesn’t brand the other person, the colour is to inform the sender that the message they sent is either an iMessage (blue) or an SMS (green).
It wasn’t intended to be some class system. When the iPhone launched, it only supported SMS and all texts were green. They wanted to differentiate iMessage conversations when they launched that a few years later, but still use the same client so people were more likely to use it. That way you know you can use more features but you also know you need a data connection. This was an important distinction when most people still had plans that had minutes, quantities of texts, and limited or no data. Also if a iMessage fails, it automatically uses SMS fallback. It’s important to know when that happens too. Colour was just a very obvious way to indicate that.
The reason iPhone users don’t like green bubble conversations now is mostly because SMS just doesn’t support all the iMessage features like higher quality pictures, video, tapback, inline reply, stickers, etc. It also is lowest common denominator for a group thread, so one person without iMessage causes the whole thread to revert to SMS.
