iMessage on Android? Inside the battle over green and blue texts
ABC News
Behind those colorful blue and green text messages is a years-long battle between Apple and a group of app developers working on ways to break down the blue/green divide.
NEW YORK -- If you send a text from an iPhone to another iPhone, most of the time that text is blue. If you send a text from an iPhone to an Android phone, that text is green.
On its surface, it may seem like no big deal, but behind those colorful messages is a years-long battle between Apple and a group of app developers working on ways to break down the blue/green divide.
The first text message was sent December 3, 1992. It was sent by software developer Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis of Vodaphone, a British Telecom company. Jarvis was at his office holiday party at the time, so the message read simply "Merry Christmas."
That holiday greeting was an SMS, also known as the short messaging service. SMS was a common technology that phone companies and software developers all agreed on: this was how texting was done.
“SMS is the protocol by which basically text messages have been sent for over a decade at this point,” says Chance Miller, the Editor-in-Chief of 9to5Mac.
