Google is stepping up its marketing campaign to drive assist for the common Wealthy Communication Providers (RCS) textual content messaging customary by growing the stress on the most important holdout: Apple.
A brand new full-page unfold on Google’s Android web site is encouraging followers of open textual content messaging requirements to “Assist @Apple #GetTheMessage” and develop past its proprietary and unique iMessage platform to permit for extra full-featured textual content messaging between iPhone and Android customers.
Many hoped RCS would come to iOS 16, however there’s been no proof that Apple has any intention of natively supporting the brand new expertise. As an alternative, when somebody utilizing an iPhone sends a textual content message to an Android machine, it falls again to utilizing SMS/MMS. In the meantime, iOS 16 provides some good messaging enhancements that can solely be accessible when conversing with people who’re additionally utilizing iOS 16 units.
The ‘Inexperienced Bubble phenomenon’
This isn’t the primary salvo in Google’s battle to get Apple to embrace RCS. Earlier this 12 months, Google executives pointedly accused Apple of “using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products.”
Apple’s iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy. Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this. https://t.co/MiQqMUOrgn
— Hiroshi Lockheimer (@lockheimer) January 8, 2022
Citing a Wall Road Journal report, Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google senior vp, claimed that the iPhone’s built-in messaging platform successfully divides customers into the “haves” and “have-nots.” That is particularly prevalent amongst teenagers, who the WSJ says “dread the inexperienced bubble” — the colour used for messages despatched utilizing SMS/MMS expertise moderately than Apple’s extra feature-rich iMessage platform.
Nonetheless, the issue goes a lot deeper than colour selections, and Google’s marketing campaign clearly says “it’s not concerning the colour of the bubbles — iPhone customers get a nasty texting expertise.” It cites particular examples, corresponding to tiny and blurry images and movies, an incapability to depart group conversations, lack of encryption, and extra.
Lockheimer’s feedback aren’t merely a rival firm pointing fingers. Apple may have introduced non-iPhone customers into the fold years in the past by growing an iMessage app for the Android platform. In a revelation that shocked nearly no person, court docket filings launched in Apple’s battle with Epic Video games included e-mail conversations between Apple executives the place Apple Senior VPs Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi concurred that iMessage locks customers into the iPhone ecosystem — and that’s factor so far as they’re involved.
Particularly, Schiller famous that “transferring iMessage to Android will harm us greater than assist us,” and Federighi added that “iMessage on Android would merely serve to take away [an] impediment to iPhone households giving their children Android telephones.”
It’s not onerous to see why Apple doesn’t have a lot incentive to embrace RCS. Whereas regulatory pressures could ultimately pressure Apple’s hand, the corporate has tried to level to third-party messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Fb Messenger as examples of how iMessage doesn’t “actually” lock customers in. It’s onerous to argue that time, contemplating the widespread reputation of those providers. In lots of nations, third-party apps have develop into the de facto messaging requirements for Android customers since Google solely lately bought critical about RCS; for years earlier than that, Android’s native messaging options had been a multitude.
RCS vs. iMessage
Like iMessage, RCS provides enhanced messaging options like learn receipts and typing indicators that overcome the considerably archaic limitations of SMS/MMS messaging — requirements developed over 20 years in the past that haven’t been meaningfully up to date. Nonetheless, the place RCS differs from iMessage is that it’s an open customary, not one thing cooked up by a single firm.
As a normal, RCS isn’t even significantly new. It was proposed over a decade in the past by the GSM Affiliation, a worldwide alliance of cellular community operators, as a brand new cellular trade customary meant to exchange the growing older SMS/MMS expertise.
Sadly, since that group is made up of over 800 carriers worldwide, it by no means succeeded in gaining a lot traction till Google determined to embrace it as a part of Google Chat in 2019. Nonetheless, Google didn’t push onerous sufficient; as a substitute, it left things primarily up to the carriers, with predictable results.
At the time, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint formed a group called the Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative to try and standardize RCS independently of Google. That initiative failed two years later, although the silver lining is that this allowed Google to step in and take a more active role in ensuring RCS was implemented correctly.
This included adding features like end-to-end encryption, which is something the carriers would have been reluctant to adopt. It also ensures universal support across all Android handsets since it will be a core part of the Google Chat experience, rather than relying on carrier implementations that might favor their own messaging apps.
Apple remains the most significant holdout in adopting RCS, but Google isn’t pulling any punches in its latest campaign. It’s collected tweets and TikToks from folks frustrated with the poor experience and media articles from the WSJ, CNET, and even Macworld criticizing Apple for its failure to get with the program. Further, it’s encouraging everyone else to add their voice to the chorus by tweeting @Apple to #GetTheMessage and “stop breaking my texting experience.” Whether or not any of this actually helps remains to be seen, but it sure is quite the spectacle.
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