Google launched a marketing campaign calling out Apple texting points between iPhones and Android telephones.
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For a lot of iPhone customers, there’s a widespread annoyance on the subject of texting: A good friend switches to Android and the message bubbles within the group chat flip inexperienced.
When individuals textual content between iPhones and Android telephones, issues begin to break: Photos and movies get pixelated, messages typically don’t get despatched, or they arrive late or out of order. Typing indicators change into disabled, and reactions, like a thumbs up or coronary heart, are written out in textual content as a substitute of displayed as badges on the bubbles. Individuals have been complaining about it for years.
Google on Tuesday launched a advertising and marketing marketing campaign slamming Apple over the problem. The search big printed a web site referred to as “Get the Message,” urging individuals to name out Apple on social media for “damaged group chats.”
“It’s time for Apple to repair texting,” the web site reads. “These issues exist as a result of Apple refuses to undertake fashionable texting requirements when individuals with iPhones and Android telephones textual content one another.”
The web site additionally factors out options to Apple’s iMessage that work effectively for texting between working methods, together with the privacy-focused chat app Sign, and Meta-owned WhatsApp.
The marketing campaign is probably the most aggressive transfer but from Google in an try to persuade Apple to make its texting service extra suitable with Android telephones, breaking a decorum wherein tech giants hardly ever badmouth one another by title. Teenagers and faculty college students reportedly dread being ostracized for inexperienced bubbles, in response to The Wall Avenue Journal. Earlier this 12 months, Android’s prime boss, Hiroshi Lockheimer, mentioned Apple’s higher hand in texting was the results of “peer stress and bullying.”
Apple didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
The explanation for the problems is the expertise behind the messaging companies. Apple makes use of SMS, or Brief Message Service, and MMS, or Multimedia Message Service — two stalwart however growing older protocols that had been launched within the ‘90s and early ‘00s. Google is pushing Apple to undertake RCS, or Wealthy Communication Providers, a more recent protocol that the corporate adopted in 2019 to modernize texting on Android telephones. Getting each iPhones and Android telephones on RCS would additionally imply messages between the 2 working methods may change into end-to-end encrypted, proper now a evident safety subject.
Regardless of its standing and model consciousness, Google has lengthy struggled to construct profitable messaging apps for its platforms. The corporate has launched and shuttered a number of texting companies through the years, together with Hangouts and Allo, that failed to realize traction with customers.
For Apple, the inexperienced bubble technique is by design. “Within the absence of a method to change into the first messaging service for [the] bulk of cellphone customers, I’m involved the iMessage on Android would merely serve to take away [an] impediment to iPhone households giving their children Android telephones,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vp of software program engineering, mentioned in a 2013 electronic mail. The e-mail was made public final 12 months as a part of an antitrust authorized battle between Apple and Epic, maker of the favored Fortnite online game.
In one other electronic mail, a former Apple government put it extra bluntly: “iMessage quantities to severe lock-in.”
