The “green bubble” has become part of the everyday vernacular: the term is so popular that it appeared on Drake’s seventh album. Honestly, it doesn’t matter, which premiered on Friday. The third song is dubbed The texts turn green And if you don’t know what this means, here’s an explanation of an unexpected source: Google’s Android team.
#TextsGoGreen impacted us differently, so we had to release this video explaining the unofficial letter #GetTheMessage 💚😏 pic.twitter.com/dPxt9yZjCG
– Android (@Android) June 18, 2022
The song refers to speech bubbles that change from normal blue to green when the receiving user blocks you from iMessage. But there’s another reason for texts to turn green: An Android user joins an individual or group chat.
This often leads Android users to be excluded from group chats or even school bullying. Google has asked Apple to fix the problem by adopting RCS on its iDevices. RCS is promoted by its proponents as the successor to SMS, it has many features that we expect from chat apps that just don’t work well with SMS / MMS.
Left: iMessage • Right: Messages sent via SMS appear in green
RCS allows users to send and receive high quality images and videos, display typing indicators and read receipts, as well as feedback. It works via an internet connection (mobile or Wi-Fi) and supports encryption. The proprietary iMessage protocol also does these things, but is only available on Apple devices.
When talking to an unsupported device, the app switches to plain SMS for text and feedback and sends images and videos via MMS (which is an old protocol and compresses files to small sizes of a few hundred kilobytes) . These messages appear in the dreaded green bubbles.
PS. Here is the song in question, The texts turn green:
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