Are tech companies ruining your relationships before they even begin?

Transcript Transcribed by Hannah E.

Courtney: Hello, everyone, and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I am here with my spouse, Royce. And together, we are The Ace Couple. And today, we are going to be ranting about… Okay, now that I’m about to say this, this is going to sound very old curmudgeon of me, but bear with me: we’re going to be ranting about modern dating as well as modern technology.

Royce: Are you going to be the old man yelling at clouds today?

Courtney: I wasn’t intending to, but that may be the effect. So, this morning, we were just drinking our espresso, having a lovely morning, chit-chatting, and we got on the topic of technology, because technology is the bane of my existence. That is just a part of me. I will always hate so many things pertaining to computers. But it turned into a bit of a rant about… Royce, how would you describe it? Like, monopolies within the tech industry, and…

Royce: That was a big part of it. It is the consumer side of corporate monopolies and antitrust issues and those sort of things. Like, everything that runs off of that to make our lives worse.

Courtney: Yes. And throughout this conversation, I had to take a moment where I was like, “Hold that thought. I just read [laughs] an article about dating that I think is kind of tangentially interesting pertaining to this. So let’s get this on microphone.” But our whole conversation started because I’m striving to be a less online person. Several years ago, I was a very not online person. Then I got way too online these last couple of years, starting a Twitter account and whatnot, and I saw some horrible things. So I’m shrinking back into my tech-regressive recluse hole. But a part of that is just trying to separate all these things that demand to be connected these days. Like, I want… My ideal world: I just want a computer that I can just write and be creative on. And several years ago, I got… What is it? It’s not a membership. I didn’t buy it either. What — I got Scrivener.

Royce: You bought a license —

Courtney: I bought a license!

Royce: — to a version of Scrivener.

Courtney: So I bought a license to Scrivener. And, as a platform, as I started writing on it, I enjoyed it. However, the laptop I was using it on is ancient, and it’s very big and clunky and heavy. And, because I have EDS, because I am a disabled woman, actually transporting my laptop is sometimes a problem. It’s awkward and heavy and clunky, and sometimes just moving it from one place to another means, on a particularly slippy day, I’m going to risk dislocating my elbow. And this was a problem we identified years ago.

Courtney: So you had the brilliant thought: “Let’s just get a smaller, lighter, more compact device for you,” which ended up being a Chromebook. And size- and weight-wise, it is so much better. But the problem is it’s a Chromebook. So that means, in order to use it at all, I need to be signed into my Gmail account, which means I could be getting emails that I don’t want to get right now. My… You know, it’s — I hate that it’s all connected. I just want a computer I can open that isn’t signed up to an account that is linked with other accounts, that’s linked to the YouTube account and my, you know, everything. So…

Courtney: But then I was like, “Well, maybe, maybe, maybe I can just bite the bullet and use this, as long as I can still use my Scrivener on it.” [sighs] Royce, why can’t I use my Scrivener on it?

Royce: Well, the company that makes Scrivener, Literature and Latte — they are primarily an Apple development company. And they make Scrivener for Windows, and they don’t make it for Android, and ChromeOS is basically Android, which is a big part of this problem. And, like, theoretically, you could — I could —

[Courtney laughs]

Royce: — get into some internals in ChromeOS and, you know, dual boot a Linux distribution or something like that. I think there are some options there where you can access the underlying Unix system and potentially find a way to install it. But the issue is, is that this little Chromebook processor is already struggling to do normal tasks with the way that we have it set up, and so that whole thing is just not really viable.

Courtney: And it would be a pain.

Royce: It’d be a pain, particularly because the Scrivener company does not do syncing well.

Courtney: Even though I bought a license!

Royce: Syncing or, like, cross-platform compatibility. Like, you can’t open it in other ways very easily.

Courtney: Yeah!

Royce: All the ways to back things up and move them across devices are hacks, basically, where you, like, point Dropbox or Google Drive at the Scrivener location, because their company hasn’t solved this problem.

Courtney: Yeah. And it just seems like so often, you get locked into the same product or the same brand, because once you started using it, you have to use it for everything. And the thing was, that was a big reason why we never used Apple products, was because they were, like, the first, most egregious offender of this for a while, weren’t they?

Royce: There’s a lot of things I don’t like about Apple. Cost is one of them. But yeah, I mean, the joke about Apple users — particularly, I think, you know, a number of years ago — is having to have a little carry-on bag full of adapters —

[Courtney laughs]

Royce: — and special cords. And their devices change pretty frequently. And, yeah, Apple just existing in a walled garden — essentially, is what they call it — from a development standpoint is a longstanding thing.

Courtney: Yeah!

Royce: Where there are open standards that exist, and oftentimes, companies ignore them because they make more money if they build their own connector that’s only going to have a lifespan of a few years before something else comes out.

Courtney: Mmm. Right. So, as always, capitalism is the enemy. [laughs] But I was ranting during this conversation this morning because we were just trying to find… This is all I want, world. This is all I want: a small, lightweight laptop that I can just write on, and I can have the software I want to write, I can have the software that I need to be creative and make things without needing to be logged into my email, without needing to go onto the internet. Like, that’s all I want in my heart of hearts. And it just doesn’t exist! [laughs]

Royce: Well, there’s, like, the triangle of cost as a monetary resource, cost as a time and energy resource, and then, like, the specifications of what you want — like, the specific software you want to use — that makes this a little complicated.

Courtney: It’s so complicated for no reason, because… I started ranting, saying, like, “We’re supposed to have a free market. Isn’t the free market supposed to have all this competition and drive innovation?” And we have the technology! We have so much technology. Why isn’t this seemingly very simplified thing that I want available to me easily?

Royce: I mean, the quick answer is, we don’t have a free market, and Republican politicians tend to be liars.

[Royce and Courtney laugh]

Courtney: But it was when you said, “The answer is we don’t have a free market” — I mean, I knew that. My ranting and venting was all…

Royce: Rhetorical?

Courtney: It was all rhetorical. I know the answer to this; I’m just mad about it. But when you said, “We don’t have a free market,” I remembered this article that I read recently, and the neurons connected, and it occurred to me: is our lack of a free market ruining modern dating, because modern dating is so technology-driven?

Royce: So, before we get into that, one thing that I was going to say, as you were prefacing this episode: when you mentioned the title of the article, I was wondering, “Okay, how…”

Courtney: I don’t think I did give you the title of the article.

Royce: You prefaced what we’re going to talk about: modern dating and computer technology and things like that.

Courtney: Yeah! Yeah.

Royce: When you said that, I was just wondering, how many times in this episode are we going to age or date ourselves? And just a moment ago, you said, “Get onto a computer and go on to the internet” —

[Courtney laughs]

Royce: — as if that is a conscious thing that we still do, where you have to connect and the computer screams at you and takes over the phone line.

Courtney: That’s kind of —

Royce: A computer is always on the internet.

Courtney: That’s kind of the problem, because I want that to be a conscious thing. Don’t get me wrong. Like, the modern internet is so much better than the first version of the internet I ever went on. There are more things, more resources. It’s cleaner. There are, in many ways, so many better things there now. So, I want access to the modern internet, but I want it to be a conscious choice for me to go online, because I feel like I cannot disconnect — because even my phone needs to be logged in. Oh my gosh, do you remember when I tried to uninstall my Gmail application on my phone and I broke my entire phone?

Royce: Yeah, I was like, “Why did you do this?”

Courtney: Because I don’t want my email on my phone!

Royce: There is a different way to go about that. But yeah.

Courtney: Well, apparently, I can’t uninstall the email on my phone because my entire phone works based on me being logged into my email.

Royce: Yes.

Courtney: I hate it. I hate it so much. I want checking my email to be a conscious choice. And I know I can turn off applications and all that. I just — I want to be able to pick and choose what I do with my time, when and how, and I want to be able to be more mindful. But it’s hard to do that when everything is forcing me to be online more than I want to.

Royce: Going back to that cost triangle: to make that happen, you have to pre-invest time to heavily configure everything, and you don’t do that.

Courtney: Of course I don’t do that!

Royce: And I guess, theoretically, you could, on your laptop, turn airplane mode on and off, but then you’d have to pay attention to the icon.

Courtney: Oh my god. Oh my god. [laughs] So, yes, I’m okay with aging myself in that sense to make the point of, like, yeah, I want a world where I choose to go online. I don’t want to just inherently be passively online all the time.

Courtney: But to go back to our Apple products, this article is entitled, “Nearly a quarter of iPhone users say green bubbles are a dating dealbreaker, new survey reveals.” And I had to read the article to even know what “green bubbles” meant. But apparently, that’s when you’re, like, texting someone on an iPhone and they don’t have an iPhone. Their, like, color of text message comes through differently.

Royce: Okay, so that’s just low-key classism.

Courtney: [laughs] “Among Android users, 30 percent felt pressured to switch to iPhone.”

Royce: Which is entirely Apple’s marketing strategy. Because they could just implement the open standard for modern text messaging, and that wouldn’t be an issue. But they intentionally are not doing so.

Courtney: So, “According to a new survey, some iPhone users ‘think less’ of others represented as a green bubble while texting, which often depicts Android users. Conversely, a notable number of Android users have considered switching to iPhone. Not necessarily because they believe that it’s a better device, but because they’ve felt pressured or ridiculed into making the change.”

Royce: I mean, this is the adult version of people needing name-brand clothes in high school.

Courtney: Yeah. And the thing was, like, I obviously didn’t have an extensive online dating history. Anybody who has listened to the third episode of our podcast knows that you are, like, the first person I seriously communicated with on an online app, and then we immediately got married, and here we are. So, I didn’t deal with that.

Courtney: But I’ve never had an iPhone. Around the time iPhones were rolling out, they were just, like, not even available in my area in South Dakota. So, we would see news articles about, like, “Ooh, iPhones are making a buzz,” but we just could not have them, and I don’t remember why that was. So, the only Apple products I ever had were very brief and fleeting. I was, like, a little bit late to the iPod game, but I did at one point get an iPod Nano. And when the iPod Touch came out, someone who had an iPod Touch let me play Fruit Ninja on it. [laughs]

Royce: Oh.

Courtney: And so, I then wanted an iPod Touch. And I did get an iPod Touch, only for it to be stolen out of my car, like, literally two weeks later. And then I couldn’t afford to get another one, so I never got another iPod again for the rest of my life. [laughs]

Royce: Yeah, see, no one tried to steal my off-brand MP3 player that looked like a thumb drive.

Courtney: [laughs] And you know what? No one ever tried to steal my Walkman either. It was only when I started getting iPod products [laughs] that this became a problem. So, I obviously haven’t personally run into anyone, like, dating-wise, being like, “Oh, we just started talking, but you have the wrong device with which to talk to me on.”

Courtney: But there is such a strange cult around iProducts, Apple products. Because I’m remembering a time where — I don’t know, maybe six, seven years ago — I was at a business conference that was here in Kansas City. It was part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, and I was, at the time, very involved in the entrepreneurial scene in the area. And I was at this conference, and I just went to the cafeteria between talks. And I had my laptop with me, and I cracked it open just to respond to a few emails between things. And a guy I’d known for several years at this point comes up to me and is like, “Courtney, what are you doing?” And I was like, “I’m answering emails?” And he’s like, “No, I mean, what are you doing with that?” And he pointed at my laptop, which is, like, an HP. And I was like, “...Answering emails?” And he was like, “Courtney, you are an artist. You are a well-esteemed artist. You’ve got to get an Apple.” And I was like, “But I’m not a digital artist. [laughs] I don’t do any art on the computer. I literally sit in my studio by candlelight and I weave art and jewelry out of human hair. Why do I need an Apple?” There’s no reason for it!

Royce: For the same reason that if you are supposed to be an artist who is in public, you’re supposed to dress and look a certain way.

Courtney: Somehow, nobody’s ever given me that note.

Royce: Yeah, because you’re already extravagant. Like, you fit that aspect of the stereotype.

Courtney: [laughs] Everyone’s like, “Ah, yes, a purple top hat in the crowd. Courtney must be here.” [laughs]

Royce: But there was one time where we were walking around an art show downtown. It was just, like, during a First Fridays event where a lot of places were open and had galleries and had wine and whatnot. And me just walking around silently looking at things dressed in all black with long hair, someone assumed I was an artist who had work up. And I was like, “No, I work on computers.”

Courtney: [laughs] It is interesting, the overlap, yes. So — but this colleague of mine that I’ve known for years through business networking was, like, appalled that I was answering emails on an HP. And I was like, “I’ve never had an Apple laptop, and I don’t think I need one. I have no reason to have one.”

Royce: Also, why do you care?

Courtney: I don’t know!

Royce: Why is this such a big deal? I was actually —

Courtney: Something about image? I mean, honestly, my image is so, like, vaguely Victorian that I was surprised that his shock wasn’t like, “Oh my god, you’re on a computer in public! But your image! Your old-fashioned image!” [laughs]

Royce: It’s interesting. There’s a book and possibly a website or something like that that’s been out for a while that’s just called, like, Cult of Mac. And at least the Wikipedia page for criticisms of Apple used to have a section that was like, “Comparisons with a cult.”

Courtney: Oh! [laughs]

Royce: But, no, Apple is definitely, like, a marketing and branding company first and a product company second. And so a lot of this makes sense. It’s something that has been annoying, and it’s something that — I think Apple sits in a very weird place where they are, at the same time, one of the most profitable companies in the world, but also, at the same time, have a smaller market share. iPhones are not the most popular type of phone worldwide; Androids are. Apple devices like MacBooks have a drastically smaller market share than Windows and have for a long time. So, even though Apple has a tendency to be more egregious about antitrust and monopolistic issues, more of the, like, legal lawsuit burden has fallen on companies like Microsoft or, just recently, Google is in a big series of antitrust lawsuits right now.

Courtney: Mmm.

Royce: I actually just saw that — this is something that’s really irritated me over the years, just doing general website development, that oftentimes it’s a big pain in the ass to have to get something supported everywhere. Because Apple’s browser, Safari, is, like, the only mainstream browser that isn’t evergreen, meaning that it’s — like, everything else updates monthly, if not faster, and that is for security reasons, whereas Safari ends up getting updated in longer cycles in accordance with its operating system, which means it’s a lot slower to catch up. It also means that it tends to have more security issues. Like, for everything that Apple says about Macs being secure, there’s a long history of hacking competitions at DEF CON where people will see how quickly they can crack a Linux distro, a Mac, and a Windows computer, and at least there was a period of time about a decade ago where, due to Safari exploits, the Macs got opened up first by a wide margin.

Royce: But anyway, there are situations where we’re trying to design and build a new product, and there’s a relatively modern browser technology that we’re leveraging to do so, and then we realize, “Oh, this just isn’t supported on iPhones, period, at all.”

Courtney: Mmm.

Royce: Like, it’s a non-starter. And somehow, since the release of the iPhone in 2007, Apple has somehow gotten away with not allowing third-party browsers on their devices at all, which no other major computing platform has gotten away with. So, like, if you do have an iPhone, you’re probably thinking, like, “Oh, well, I have installed Google or Firefox.” But it’s actually like if you, you know, unmask the Scooby Doo villain, it’s Safari underneath the Chrome icon.

Courtney: Oh no! [laughs]

Royce: But —

Courtney: It’s just Safari! It was Safari the whole time!

Royce: But that has made it to where, like, either you have to go through a very different development process that could be very expensive, to try to build for the lowest common denominator, or you say, “Okay, we just don’t support iPhones,” which causes this rift in, you know, user bases —

Courtney: Mhm.

Royce: — where a person isn’t going to buy a new device to do one thing, you know? But, hopefully, some of that is changing. Microsoft has been in and out of court for decades. There’s a big antitrust lawsuit against Google right now. And actually, the EU is finally paying attention to the stuff that I just talked about with Apple. Earlier this year, they were forced, through legislation, to allow a different app store — like third-party app stores — and third-party browsers, but they only did it for users in the EU. So they had to legally implement this software, but then they intentionally didn’t roll it out to the rest of the world.

Courtney: Mmm. Wow. Yeah, it is just really frustrating. Like, I can so easily be mad at tech companies, and I frequently am. But when that ends up having, like, real-world implications, where we now have — according to this, it says, “nearly a quarter — 22 percent — admit that they look down on users that send ‘non-iMessage texts’” 22% of users are like, “Oh, you don’t have an Apple? I think less of you.” Are you kidding me?! And the thing is, too — like, I’m pretty sure Apple does not need to color-code the text messages coming in, right? Like, they don’t need to do that.

Royce: No, they’re doing that intentionally.

Courtney: They’re doing that on purpose. The big tech companies are device-shaming you, and it’s ruining your actual interpersonal relationship prospects. [laughs]

Royce: Which, honestly, you could probably run counter to that and even if you are an iPhone user, get a cheap Android phone just to respond to any iMessage, like, notifications with, and just filter out all the snobs.

Courtney: Well, that’s so interesting, too, because it says 22% look down on non-iMessage texts. But 23% — somehow an additional percent — said they “get turned off when they discover that a potential love interest comes up as a green bubble in their first text conversation, calling it a ‘dealbreaker.’” Are you kidding me? The actual question was, “Would it be a dealbreaker for someone you were interested in to use a non-Apple phone?” 23% overall said yes, which skews heavily toward men.

Royce: Oh, that doesn’t surprise me that there are more, like, elitist tech bros.

[Courtney laughs]

Royce: That actually makes more sense.

Courtney: It’s 31% of men said yes, whereas 16% of women said yes. And, of course, a study like this is usually not going to accommodate nonbinary folks. But is this just in my mind because we know so many nonbinary non-iPhone users, or are nonbinary people [laughing] less likely to use Apple devices?

Royce: That actually seems reasonable to me. I don’t think I’ve seen any statistics about it, but —

Courtney: Someone do a study about this.

Royce: Okay, so when did this article come out?

Courtney: October 4th, 2024.

Royce: Okay. And it’s probably not technical enough. Well, they would have had to have done the survey before, but the communication standard that I was referring to is RCS, or Rich Communication Services. It is something that was originally specced in 2008 and widely specced in 2016, so it’s been around for a while. That is what basically everyone, except for Apple, is using as the more modern version of SMS or MMS, which is kind of like old-style texting. So, Apple took a good at least eight years to implement this — more than that if they would have been on the ball in the original talks. But as of last month, it is actually out in the newest iPhones.

Courtney: Mmm.

Royce: Now, whether or not Apple also removes the little green part is unknown, but that should no longer be a text issue for the newest of iPhones, and it’s because Apple was pressured into fixing their shit.

Courtney: That’s amazing.

Royce: Now, I couldn’t find… All I heard was, Apple was eventually pressured into supporting this by Google.

[Royce and Courtney laugh]

Royce: I don’t know the specifics of, like, how much of this is actual, like, legal involvement, or… I mean, Google already pays Apple a lot of money to promote Google as a search engine, so maybe there is a little inside deal. I also — just searching right now, I couldn’t find if there was any, like, antitrust legislation behind that or not.

Courtney: Mhm.

Royce: Yeah, I wish I could say that I was surprised that such a little thing had such a heavy impact on people’s interpersonal relationships, but I’m not. I’ve heard people complain about that before. Or I’ve also heard people who are just in certain friendship bubbles where the dozen people they commonly hang out with all use the same type of phone, and they kind of forget that there’s a whole big world out there with different people.

Courtney: There is a whole big world out there, indeed.

Royce: Because, like, I had a… Back when I worked in an office, someone who was not on the tech side of things that I was just sitting near at one point mentioned with surprise that, like, someone around them didn’t have an Apple phone, and they were like, “Everyone uses Apple. Like, what are you talking about?” And I had to, like, not insert myself into the conversation and be like, “Well, actually, they only have, like, this percentage of device sales in the world. They’re actually a minority company.”

Courtney: [laughs] Which is a number that you just had right on top of the noggin.

Royce: At that point in time, I was probably researching device usages for some reason — device support or needing to implement something that was browser-specific. So, yes, I would have had those numbers off the top of my head.

Courtney: Oh, I wish you did. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall. But that adds, like, a new element that I hadn’t fully considered all of the implications of, to what people complain about when they complain about, you know, online dating, the dating apps. Because, I mean, our regular listeners know that occasionally, I will watch some trash reality dating shows for the sake of summarizing for you. I am in the process of a… Have we done two of those? I’m in the process of a third.

Royce: Probably.

Courtney: And, like, so many of the dating reality shows — things like Love is Blind, or — the marriage shows, I guess, more than dating — people will be like, “Wow, why do you want to do this experiment?” And almost everybody says, “Well, online dating is just so hard. It’s so hard to meet someone who’s serious on the apps.” And everyone’s blaming online dating as an ineffective way to find a life partner.

Royce: Maybe the problem was you the whole time.

Courtney: Well, there’s always that possibility. And sometimes there are some, like, villains of the season that it’s like, “Oh, they’re here for the wrong reasons.” But they’re — like, it never even occurred to me that part of having trouble finding people online isn’t just the apps themselves, it isn’t just the people on the apps, but it could be things so petty that someone will find something about you, something as seemingly innocuous as what type of phone do you have, and consider that an immediate dealbreaker, which doesn’t really have anything to do with your personality, how you would…

Royce: There are added bits of friction here and there. And I can see how, if you are casting such a wide net that you literally do not have the time and energy to seriously consider everyone, that you make up some easy disqualifiers just so you can focus your energy. It’s kind of like how, in the modern job market, a lot of resumes get tossed aside because of very simple reasons that say nothing about you as an employee, just because —

Courtney: Well, yeah, now AI is an issue with that.

Royce: — the HR department is understaffed.

Courtney: Mmm.

Royce: And oftentimes, the HR department doesn’t actually have enough communication with the people that actually do the technical job to actually be able to determine what is a good skill set versus another one, and that’s a whole issue.

Courtney: Right. Well, that’s why you’ve, like, been called into second- or third-round interviews with people, right?

Royce: Yeah! I mean —

Courtney: Like, you haven’t been in a hiring position, but you’ve been there at interviews.

Royce: At a bigger company, it’s like, okay, the person on the team who was more in charge of overseeing this process would gather, like, four of us, and be like, “We talked to HR, and they did their first-round filter. Now, the four of us need to click through 200 resumes and find five of them to bring in,” or something like that, while working jobs [laughs] at the same time. Like, fit this in in the gaps.

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: But —

Courtney: Like, “This isn’t your real job, but…”

Royce: I could see, if you are a high-visibility profile on an active site, how you just have to, like, make things up to stay afloat. But then, like, the issue isn’t that it’s so hard on the apps, it’s that your little filtering algorithm is off. It’s kind of like how people struggle to find people in real life because they oftentimes tend to fixate on appearance. You’re just fixating on the wrong things digitally. Because it’s a different medium. You have different things to look for.

Courtney: Yeah! And that = is very interesting, too, because I’d be really curious to actually know: If I had one of these folks in front of me who said, “Yes, this is a dealbreaker if I’m texting someone who’s using an Android,” I would be like, “What about an Android user do you think is not going to be compatible with your life? What about that?” Because I’m sure at least some percentage of this — if you dig deep enough, it is going to be, like, a classism thing, it is going to be an elitism kind of thing. In which case, like, that’s your problem, not theirs.

Courtney: But, like, I think about what I was looking for and what my immediate “No”s would be on dating apps, and they would all be things that I know would actually, like, long-term be lifestyle potential conflicts. Like, as a vegan, if someone reached out to me and they had, like, a deer strung up that they shot, that is probably gonna be a no for me. I’m sorry, I don’t want dead animals in my house unless they’ve been dead for over 100 years and have been artfully arranged into a piece of taxidermy, [laughing] or…

Royce: Or they died peacefully and are in our freezer.

Courtney: Also that. Yes, I know I need to bury all of those animals, Royce. [laughs]

Royce: But this conversation also has me thinking back to a very long time ago when I was trying to date. Because, again, this might just be a wider net, more attention kind of a thing, but the green text and the not supporting the full set of, like, iMessage features seems like such a small thing when I remember putting up with old-style SMS texts between incompatible carriers, where you would send a long text that would get broken up into three parts, and if they had an incompatible carrier, it would sometimes come out of order.

Courtney: I remember that.

Royce: And so you’d get, like, the middle message, and then the first one, and then the last one, and you’d have to read the whole thing and piece it together.

Courtney: I remember that.

Royce: And I was like, “Well, this is annoying, but I’m still talking to this person.”

Courtney: Yeah! It’s doable. I had so many conversations with people like that [laughing] where you just dealt with it.

Royce: You have to wait for it to load, and you just don’t send pictures, because… Maybe you do sometimes, but even if you do, they’re so bad on your phone that you can, like, barely see them anyway.

Courtney: [laughs] So, yeah, it’s really just interesting because it’s like, are you just such a fanboy of Apple as a company that you inherently think lesser of someone that doesn’t use that? Like, there’s no good interpretation for me on that. Like…

Royce: The only one that I can kind of understand is the time one. But even then, people are saying, “I’m so frustrated on the apps. People aren’t taking it seriously.” If you’re doing a fast filter to knock people out to focus on a couple of individuals, that, to me, is not really taking this seriously.

Courtney: Yeah. Which is kind of interesting, too, because so much of that, I think, is a very cishet dating app issue. Because so many queer people, Ace people, Aro people who are still, like, interested in dating and meeting people in this way, like, we already know that our dating pool has immediately been vastly narrowed for us, if that’s a thing we’re seeking for ourselves. So, a lot of people self-select out, a lot of people will present a very glaring red flag early on in the process. So, I don’t think a lot of us in our immediate community — and so many of us are nonbinary and gender non-conforming, trans — like, we have so many nuances to our own lives and identities that we know not everybody is going to be cool with that. So even just the concept of, “Wow, I have so many prospects, I have so many people out here that I just need to, mostly arbitrarily, start narrowing them down” — like, I can’t imagine that.

Royce: I have one thing to follow up on. I see that while iOS 18, which rolled out on September 16th and has gotten a couple of immediate updates this month, does support RCS — so, better functionality for Android — they still color them green —

Courtney: No!

Royce: — to distinguish them from iMessage users.

Courtney: Why are you tech-shaming them? You’re ruining potential relationships before they even begin, Apple! [laughs]

Royce: They also are in an ongoing antitrust lawsuit with the US Department of Justice. And there was a quote from Tim Cook that was quoted in this antitrust lawsuit where, a couple of years ago, someone asked Tim Cook, I believe during a conference, about supporting this feature, and he said that they basically had no interest in supporting it. And they followed up the question by saying, well, they are an iPhone user, but their mom uses Android. And Tim Cook said, “Well, you should buy your mom an iPhone.” And that quote has made it into court in this antitrust lawsuit.

[Courtney gasps]

Royce: And that might be why they have finally supported the standard.

Courtney: Whoa! No kidding.

Royce: Yeah! It’s an election year.

[Courtney laughs]

Royce: And one side heavily favors regulation and one side heavily doesn’t. But it has been proven definitively. But the only way to make things better is to force companies to make things better.

Courtney: Yeah. Because, I mean… I, having never had an iPhone, not having a desire to have one, I don’t even like how smart my current phone is — I do distinctly remember, for the brief window of time that I had an iPod, I remembered how deeply frustrating it was to actually try to consolidate all of my music on it. Because I had entire binders full of CDs, and I was like, “I want my CDs on my device now so I can listen to them where I go.” And —

Royce: And unless you know how to get around it, I assume that that device only let you download things through iTunes.

Courtney: Yeah! Like, if I was buying a single song or an album on iTunes — which I maybe did a couple of times. I did not do that regularly. I think I finally did find someone who was able to do some hacks for me to get, like, some of my music onto my iPod, so… It wasn’t everything, and I still had a binder full of CDs, like, in my car and in my house. But, yeah, knowing how just deeply frustrating that was, it’s like, why a device that I use even more often for even more things do I want to be so heavily restricted that I can’t use other companies or buy from other places?

Courtney: And it is interesting, too, because I don’t think I’ve ever been, like, Android-shamed. My anecdote about being at that business conference and someone saying that I needed to be an Apple user if I was a self-respecting artist, I need a MacBook. But this survey says that “52 percent of Android users were ‘made fun of at some point’ by iPhone users,” and 36 percent said they were ‘negatively judged.’ Twenty-six percent confessed to feeling embarrassed about their Android device.” What are we doing here? What are we doing? Society, get it together.

Courtney: It does also say that both iPhone and Android users try to find equal footing by using other messaging platforms. The example the article gives is WhatsApp. And I will say, that’s actually another thing that drives me nuts, is everyone I know communicates on different platforms, and I hate it. I have Telegram downloaded for one person I talk to. I have WhatsApp downloaded for more people than that, admittedly, because that’s the best option for some of my international friends. But, like, yeah, between Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, just straight-up old SMS messages, everyone communicates differently. So now I have all of these messaging platforms downloaded just for individual people. And I was like, “No, I just want all my texts to go to the same bucket!” [laughs] I just want to simplify. That’s all I want. And everything wants to make my life more complicated than it needs to be.

Royce: Is this a good point to bring up streaming services?

Courtney: Oh god.

[Courtney and Royce laugh]

Royce: That was a joke.

Courtney: But not really.

Royce: Well, the current state of streaming services is a joke.

Courtney: Mmm. Yep. Yeah, it is kind of interesting to, in the same episode, complain that there aren’t enough tech options for what I want, but also, simultaneously, there are too many tech options. Because there are a lot of individual options, but they’re too restrictive in their own rights.

Royce: There are too many options that are redundant and incompatible.

Courtney: Mmm, there we go.

Royce: I’ve thought about that a lot, just in terms of software in general. There are so many people writing so much code that is not unique or particularly useful.

Courtney: Mmm.

Royce: And one aspect of that is a lot of people that I know in industries around me are going through this, like, second wave of ownership bubble-bursting thing, where there are a lot of companies that started up 15 to 20 years ago that failed to do their proper maintenance, and now it’s a whole new generation of programmers’ jobs to just take the old thing and make it new again. And so, they’re not doing anything different. They’re inheriting technological debt and are just basically writing the same platform that already exists again, while trying to correct some minor flaws.

Courtney: Yep. And then, I mean, there are just… I mean, even with this podcast, I was like, “There are so many platforms!” There’s, you know, as primarily a podcast, it’s like, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, but then it’s like, there are lots of people who just listen to podcasts on YouTube and never touch those applications, so do we also need to cross-post to YouTube? And…

Royce: And podcasts are actually probably a better example than the rest of the field.

Courtney: Mhm.

Royce: Because what podcasts rely on, at their core, is an open standard called RSS. And RSS — which, in some instances, is just referred to as Really Simple Syndication — is an intentionally low-tech means of describing something that is episodic — like a podcast or something like that, a blog of some kind — and it’s a means of providing updates. And it’s been supported for a very, very long time. And so we don’t… Youtube is an exception; it doesn’t necessarily have to be an exception. But we post in two places: we update our feed, and we post a video to YouTube, and that’s it. And dozens, if not more, independent company podcasting platforms pick that up.

Courtney: Mhm.

Royce: So, people do have the choice to use what they want, and it doesn’t… There isn’t the same vendor lock.

Courtney: Right.

Royce: You can still, like, take a podcast and put it somewhere else, too, and it’s not that big of a deal.

Courtney: Yeah, that is a lot easier. And, I mean, YouTube — the main reason we do it is not just for folks who prefer YouTube, but you can put closed captioning on there. So we have transcripts on our website, so anyone can read those transcripts and listen to our episodes on the website. But some people like to, you know, have the words on the screen as they’re being said, and that is super easily done on YouTube, as opposed to other platforms.

Royce: And during the time that we’ve been running this podcast, YouTube has been trying to get podcasts as a… Google has been trying to make YouTube a more podcasting-first platform, because they recently closed down Google Podcasts.

Courtney: Mhm.

Royce: And in doing so, they’re trying to make it easier, I think, to actually just, again, update your podcast in one place and it will get sucked into YouTube. But we do do things like closed captions and setting up the episodes in specific ways, so we haven’t done that, because there’s a few things that we control very specifically on YouTube that might not translate over if we had them do it automatically.

Courtney: Well then there’s… You know, we have our little Chartable that tells us that we’ve charted in 59 countries, and that recently got bought out, and they’re closing it down. Why did you buy it just to close it? I was using that!

Royce: I feel like that whole process was under a year, if not under two. Spotify just acquired it and then sunsetted it.

Courtney: Why? I wanted that. If that gets closed before we hit our 60th country, I’m gonna be mad. I don’t know why. I shouldn’t be. I’m just being petty, at this point.

Royce: Sometimes, round numbers are nice.

Courtney: Round numbers are nice, and I’m already mad at the tech industry, so let’s just add another log onto the fire while we’re at it. [laughs] So, I guess, if you’re listening to us from one of — [laughs] from a country that isn’t one of the 59 we’ve charted in, tell your friends. [laughs] Statistically, though, you probably are listening from one of those countries.

Courtney: So, on that note, I’m going to go ahead and wrap us up with this week’s featured MarketplACE vendor [accidentally pronounced with an emphasis on the second syllable]. Ooh, vendeour, spelled V-E-N-D-E-O-U-R, vendeour. [laughs] This week’s MarketplACE vendor is Chess Comics: Comicbooks, graphic novels, and webcomics created by Chance Hess. As always, our MarketplACE is filled with Aromantic and/or Asexual owned businesses, and we’ve got so many fabulous artists on here. At Chess Comics, you can purchase some PDF ebooks, read some comics such as Tin Foil, or my personal favorite is The Pawn, which is billed as, “Misadventures of your average nerd… who happens to be a pangolin.” And I just love this art style. The cover is a little pangolin person. If you’re, like, a BoJack Horseman fan, think that kind of human-animal hybrid just sitting, like, cross-legged on a giant chess board with these big chess pieces around them. I think it is quite a mood. Links to find Chess Comics are going to be in the show notes, on our website, in the YouTube description, all those fun places, and we’ll go ahead and pop in a link to the article we cited with this ridiculous survey as well.

Courtney: As per the usual, we will talk to you all again next week. And, in the meantime, if you are an iPhone user who harshly judges us for not having an iPhone, I want you to strongly consider commenting or writing in to tell us how much you judge us, and then I want you to ultimately decide that that is silly and not worth your time or ours. Just don’t.