I have the most iPhone-looking Android there is: the Samsung Galaxy S22. At a glance, you might think I have an iPhone, but once you text me, you’ll realize the bubbles are green. 

It’s fun being an incognito Android user sometimes. I like to play dumb when people ask if they can borrow a phone charger without clarifying that they need a lightning cable. I quietly stew with my superiority complex that I can leave gaps between apps while arranging my home screen and change the color of any text conversation. 

But there’s a lot about it that sucks. There are plenty of group chats that I’m not in because those friends couldn’t bear the chat being green. I’ve gotten a million complaints about the lack of read receipts or typing indicators, images and videos being compressed and message reactions and replies not working. I wonder how many people didn’t text me because they despised the alien green, how many people understood Android to mean nonhuman and extended my phone’s label to me, how many people refused to simply use Instagram or Discord or some other platform because accommodating my communication was just too inconvenient. 

I had an iPhone until my sophomore year of college, but I never minded those green bubbles, never hesitated to find another platform to communicate. Hell, my best friend and I to this day text over Discord even though we both have Androids now that I’ve made the switch. So I never understood why the distaste was also directed to the user, not the company. It’s Apple’s fault, not mine. 

There’s less to complain about now that Apple has implemented Rich Communications Systems with its iOS 18 update last year, allowing iPhones and Androids to text with the same functionality and features as iMessage. Before you go praising Apple for this move, understand that a) it only happened due to pressure from the EU, b) they did it to maintain the propriety of iMessage and c) text bubbles to Androids are still green. 

I wouldn’t mind those damn green bubbles so much if it weren’t so reminiscent of the identity shift that preceded my switch from Apple to Android. Sometime in the first few years of college, I came to terms with the fact that I am autistic. And since then, I’ve learned that people do not like accommodating communication. 

It’s this strange moment where if I disclose that I’m autistic, people say they don’t mind. But their actions tell me they very much do mind. It simply becomes too much to repeat yourself when my auditory processing disorder scrambles your words in a blender. Or adding a “/j” for “joking” after a texted sarcastic comment isn’t worth avoiding the social faux pas when I inevitably don’t catch the joke. But how can I expect that from people who can’t even get past green bubbles?

So I find my solace with other Android users, with other autistic people, in spaces where digital communication is designed for authenticity. I find no other group chat more fostering of that than my D&D party’s Discord server — I await the uncomfortable stifled laughter here at such a statement. 

But despite that laughter, I know I am myself. Autism can be ugly sometimes. I melt down when I get overwhelmed and sometimes get bested by a simple sensory aggravation, but it’s only taught me how to know myself more and evaluate my needs. Some people find my interests obsessive, but I pity that they will never know what it is like to love what you love so much that it becomes a central part of your life. Those interests help me find friends who love what they love the same way I do;  once I find those people, I suddenly become the most charismatic crooner in conversation. Every social faux pas vanishes, and my autistic identity becomes a boon. 

You may not know I have an Android until you text me, and you may not realize I’m autistic until we speak. But I don’t mind that my texts to you are green if you don’t mind either; green’s my favorite color, after all.

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