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 was released on Friday. The third song is dubbed The texts turn green and if you don’t know what that means, here’s an explanation from an unexpected source: Google’s Android team.
#TestiGoGreen it struck us differently, that’s why we had to ditch this unofficial lyrics explanatory video #Get the message 💚😏 pic.twitter.com/dPxt9yZjCG
– Android (@Android) June 18, 2022
The song refers to comics that go from the usual blue to green when the receiving user blocks you on iMessage. But there’s another reason why texts turn green: An Android user joins a one-on-one or group chat.
This often leads to Android users being excluded from group chats or even being bullied. Google urged Apple to solve the problem by adopting RCS on its iDevices. RCS is touted by its supporters as the successor to SMS, it has a lot of features that are expected of chat apps that just don’t work well on SMS / MMS.
Left: iMessage • Right: Messages sent via SMS are displayed in green
RCS allows users to send and receive high quality images and videos, show typing indicators and read receipts, as well as reactions. It works over an internet connection (cellular or Wi-Fi) and supports encryption. The proprietary iMessage protocol does these things too, but it’s only available on Apple devices.
When chatting with an unsupported device, the app switches to plain SMS for text messages and reactions and sends pictures and videos via MMS (which is an old protocol and compresses files to a minimum size 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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