{"id":23739,"date":"2020-06-11T15:10:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-11T15:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/icrowdnewswire.com\/?p=2593393"},"modified":"2020-06-11T15:10:00","modified_gmt":"2020-06-11T15:10:00","slug":"android-11-may-be-the-best-texting-platform-if-you-use-multiple-chat-apps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipsnews.net\/business\/2020\/06\/11\/android-11-may-be-the-best-texting-platform-if-you-use-multiple-chat-apps\/","title":{"rendered":"Android 11 may be the best texting platform if you use multiple chat apps"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Notification aggregation instead of notification aggravation<\/p>\n

https:\/\/youtu.be\/8yKYWACmGXc<\/a><\/p>\n

The official beta for the next version of Android is out now, and if you have a spare Pixel phone, I really do recommend you check it out. If you don’t, my recommendation is not to install it — betas are never a great idea on something you truly depend on, and your main phone is likely near the top of that list. I’ve been using a build close to what Google released today for a week and I haven’t had any catastrophic crashes, but there have been some bugs.<\/p>\n

I wrote up a lot of observations and made a video detailing the new features<\/a> yesterday, but something I struggled to get across then and I think I’m going to struggle to get across now is how much better the texting experience really is. I say that even though essentially no apps fully support Google’s new pop-out “bubble” feature yet.<\/p>\n

It’s a struggle to describe because fundamentally what Google has done seems so small. It has taken boxes that used to appear in one place and make them appear in another place. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call the experience transformative<\/em>, I do think that it’s hard to understand how good it is without using it for some time.<\/p>\n

We’ll see how I feel after a few more months, but right now I find that Android 11 offers a a more enjoyable and more coherent overall messaging experience than iOS.<\/p>\n

That is a sentence I never thought I would write. In fact, if you simply Google the phrase “messaging mess” on The Verge<\/em><\/a>, you will find that it’s nearly synonymous with Google and the article with the phrase is often written by yours truly. Can Android 11 really fix all of that?<\/p>\n

Well, no, of course not. But what it has done is make a fundamental problem on smartphones more manageable. Android 11 can’t fix Google’s<\/em> messaging mess, but it has made the overall texting experience on smartphones better.<\/p>\n

The difference between Google<\/em>’s messaging mess and the overall mess on smartphones is simply that Google blew several opportunities to win at mobile messaging. Now, it’s going for something more “open” by trying to get all carriers worldwide (and maybe Apple) to upgrade from SMS to RCS in a consistent and universally compatible way — and also make it possible to layer strong encryption on top of it. It’s taking longer than hoped.<\/p>\n

RCS aside, the problem is that there are too many texting apps and you can’t really convince all your friends and loved ones to just choose one. In some parts of the world, that statement doesn’t obtain because everybody uses WhatsApp, but at least here in the US, messaging is fragmented across iMessage, SMS\/RCS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, and any number of other apps I could list here.<\/p>\n

That’s a problem for both<\/em> Android and iOS users, but it feels more acute on Android because the default option is a bad, broken experience: SMS. Or, if you’re lucky, it’s RCS — but even then your encryption options are substandard. There may be messaging fragmentation on the iPhone, but at least the default experience when you’re texting other iPhone users is pretty good.<\/p>\n

You talk to different people on different apps and it’s a hassle to remember who is in which app. Additionally, your notifications from these different apps get intermixed with everything else in your notifications. Sure, all your messages from WhatsApp might be grouped, but then it’s a news alert and then it’s Signal and so on.<\/p>\n

It’s a first-world problem, but a modern smartphone is supposed to help you with these hassles. It’s also an old problem, and smartphones have tried to tackle it in the past with decidedly mixed results.<\/p>\n

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