Sex & Relationships

Sorry, Android users: These iPhone snobs won’t date you

Forget dreamy eyes the color of the ocean. For young daters, the color of text messages is all that matters.

When people with iPhones text each other, their messages send in blue speech bubbles. But when they text non-iPhone owners, messages send in a different hue: bright green, as if to signal that they’re talking to an outsider.

For singles, it’s more than just an aesthetic thing: It’s a dating red flag (or green flag, as it were).

“If it’s not a blue message, I’m not going to bother flirting with you further,” Brooklyn resident and freelance designer Katie McDonough tells The Post. “I’m just like, ‘Why don’t you have an iPhone?’ ”

While Android phones have a larger market share than iPhones, millennials feel a stronger emotional attachment to Apple products than any other brand, according to a 2018 analysis by marketing agency MBLM.

‘If it’s not a blue message, I’m not going to bother flirting with you further.’

McDonough, who’s 23, says she finds texting with Android users limiting for very specific reasons: She likes seeing the three dots that show when iPhone owners are typing, the receipt confirming that a message has been delivered and the ability to react to messages with a “haha” or a heart.

“It’s just a turnoff if they don’t [have an iPhone],” she says. “On Tinder, you message someone [within the app] for awhile and then you exchange numbers. You’re like, ‘I hope it’s blue,’ and it’s a relief when it is.”

In college, her then-boyfriend switched from iPhone to Android, and it made communication difficult, creating a rift between them. Their love couldn’t overcome their smartphone differences.

“I think that was when our relationship started to go downhill,” she says.

Jacob Landsman, 23, is an Android user, and he knows he might be judged for his choice by potential partners.

It’s “definitely something I’m a little scared of [happening],” says the West Village resident.

Grayson Earle
Grayson EarleTanya Rosen-Jones

His friends have mocked his Android in group text messages, but he says that if a potential match were to have a genuine issue with his smartphone, he wouldn’t be attracted to them.

“If someone wants to shame me for the kind of phone I have, they’re not worth dating, anyway,” he says.

Some believe Apple purposefully implemented the text color scheme, which has been part of the iPhone operating system’s design since iMessage launched in 2011, to create a stigma against Android users.

“I definitely think that it’s intended to create a false in-crowd thing,” Grayson Earle, an adjunct professor at The New School, tells The Post. Android texts, he says, “are designed to look less appealing” on Apple’s iMessage.

For Earle, an Android user, phone type doesn’t matter — but using a texting app that has good data privacy, such as Signal, does.

“If you’re not using good open standards for communication that are encrypted,” he says, “I don’t think we can ever get together.”