Tim Cook said, “Buy your mom an iPhone,” in response to requests for better Android text compatibility.

The corporation doesn’t seem to have any immediate plans to repair “green bubbles.”

 

According to The Verge, Tim Cook advised a journalist at the 2022 Code Conference to get an iPhone in response to their inquiry regarding RCS text messaging. He responded, “I don’t hear our people requesting that we put a lot of attention into that,” when asked how Apple could increase communication between iPhone and Android users. Cook joked “get your mum an iPhone” when the journalist retorted that he couldn’t send specific films to his Android-using mother.

 

That will undoubtedly feed the discussion regarding a standard texting format for smartphones. For years, Google has pushed the RCS (Rich Communications Service) as a solution to improve user compatibility between iOS and Android users. Last month, Google even called Apple out for it. By doing this, it may be possible to get rid of the dreaded “green bubble” that iPhone users occasionally see while receiving text messages from Android phones.

 

According to internal documents made public during the Epic trial, Apple briefly explored making iMessage available to Android users before abandoning the idea. In a well-known statement, former Apple executive and marketing chief Phil Schiller claimed that bringing iMessage to Android “would hurt us more than assist us” and that “iMessage amounts to real lock-in.”

 

Cook did stated that Apple isn’t working on RCS “at this point,” which seemed to leave room for the possibility. In any case, users outside of the US tend to prefer non-SMS apps like Telegram, WhatsApp, and Signal, thus the green bubble problem is mostly an American one.