Friday, August 22, 2025

Messages Address Bubble Colors

Glenn Fleishman:

When you enter an email address or type one into the address field in Messages, the software does a quick behind-the-scenes check. Messages tries to determine if the address is associated with an active iCloud account. As you accept or paste in an address, you might notice that it always briefly lights up black text within a blue lozenge. If the address isn’t connected, the background changes from blue to red. This sometimes happens so quickly you don’t see it move from blue to red.

[…]

As shown in the lifecycle figure above, sometimes you will see a blue lozenge for a match—cached? preliminary?—but once you click in the message field, and shifts to green text!

More confusingly, even if you type in a non-iCloud-connected email address and the contact with which the address is associated also has an iCloud-hooked-up address, Messages forces the use of the iCloud-linked address! I haven’t found a way to force use of a non-iCloud address without removing that email from the contact card.

[…]

I found frustrating just the sheer number of things that lacked information at support.apple.com or which had “drug interaction”-like problems where features conflicted with each other.

Previously:

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Sorry I’m a bit confused, can someone explain the “drug interaction” analogy for software? I’ve never heard of that before


@Confused Different features that work in isolation but which fail or have unexpected effects when you use multiple of them at the same time.


Substantially less confused

@Michael oh that makes sense; thanks. This definitely does seem to be significantly more of a problem as of late. It must be bug creep due to their relentless yearly software cycles not allowing them time to improve stability, and the issues just start piling up.


Or, a more recent example: AppleCare One doesn’t work with Macs that have multiple user accounts.

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