Why Apple keeps Android texts green

Apple painted itself blue

Here’s the version of this story you’ve probably heard: Apple made Android texts green to embarrass Android users. It’s a good story. It’s also backwards.S1

This is Apple’s own iPhone user guide from February 2011. Look at the outgoing texts. Green. Every one of them. There’s no Android in this picture. The iPhone had been sending green bubbles since 2007, to everybody. Green meant “you sent this.” Gray meant “they sent it.”S1

iMessage didn’t exist yet. Apple announced it four months later, in June 2011: a messaging service that ran over the internet instead of the carrier network, with typing indicators, read receipts and end-to-end encryption.S3

“…to get users to switch social networks we’d need more than a marginally better app. (This is why Google is willing to pay $1 billion — for the network, not for the app.)”

Two executives, one email thread

In April 2013, two of Apple’s most senior executives argued in writing about whether iMessage should come to Android. We can read the argument because of a lawsuit that had nothing to do with text messages.S13

[The rest of the essay: the episode script, edited to read.]