Google is once more requesting Apple to address the problems with text messaging between Android and iPhones.
Customers have complained about how the leading two messaging apps—Messages, Google’s which makes use of Rich Communications Services and Apple’s exclusive iMessage—handle text messages on smartphones for years (RCS).
Both platforms enhance standard text messages by adding features like better graphics, read receipts, text effects, enhanced security, replies, and other advantages. However, text conversations between iPhones and Androids revert to standard, antiquated text messages because the systems are incompatible.
Some people find this lack of interoperability to be very annoying. On an iPhone, texts sent from Android smartphones appear in a green bubble, whereas messages sent from an iPhone to another iPhone do so in a blue bubble (standard texts show up in light grey on both platforms).
SMS (Short Message Service) and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) texts are used for communications between Android and Apple phones, which Google claims are “outdated technologies from the 90s and 00s.” According to Google, this causes photos sent in messages between Android and iPhones to be compressed and prevents users from knowing whether messages have been received and read. This distinction, according to Google, favours iMessages and iPhones and causes “peer pressure and bullying.”
Google is resuming its onslaught with a website urging Apple to adopt RCS so that the messaging systems may communicate with one another.
“The colour of the bubbles is unimportant. Video fuzziness, broken group conversations, a lack of read receipts and typing indicators, the inability to text over Wi-Fi, and other issues are to blame “The Google website states. When users with iPhones and Android phones text each other, Apple refuses to accept contemporary messaging standards, which causes these issues.
The tech news website Business Insider noted that “some users have long lamented the green message bubbles that come with cross-device messaging, as well as poor-quality compressed videos, the lack of read receipts, and other headaches” when Google’s “Apple should fix what’s broken” website went live on Tuesday.
According to Google, messages between Android and Apple handsets would appear nicer and be encrypted if Apple switched to RCS.
In response to US TODAY’s request for comment regarding Google’s campaign, Apple did not respond. However, the business has in the past criticised RCS, claiming that it does not provide complete end-to-end encryption.
Google has run this advertisement before. At the tech giant’s I/O conference in May, Sameer Samat, vice president of Android product management, bragged about how 500 million or more people used RCS on Android and made fun of the competition by saying, “We hope every mobile operating system gets the message and upgrades to RCS.”
Apple, though, made no move. At its own WWDC conference the following month, Apple introduced new features for its messaging platform, including the ability to remember or amend recently-sent messages, without mentioning RCS.
According to a post by CNET Senior Editor Mike Sorrentino, Apple could improve compatibility between Android and iOS devices, but it might not be in the company’s best interests. Moving away from iMessage might endanger Apple’s ability to maintain control over iOS, which the company frequently emphasises as a selling feature for customers.