If it’s not for the good, it will be for the bad. At Google, they got tired of waiting and launched a campaign directly accusing Apple of breaking the messaging experience between iOS and Android and publicly calling on them to adopt a standard.
“The bad experience you have while chatting on Android is created by Apple”
Google uses this video from the ATTN channel for the campaign:
On the campaign website, it is argued that Apple’s incompatibility with this standard causes several problems. First, that messages sent between iOS and Android convert to SMS and MMS with the loss of quality of the multimedia content that this implies. Second, iMessage and its enhancements only work for the benefit of iOS users (the tyranny blue and green balloons, as some say).
What do they propose to Google to solve this? Well, the adoption of the RCS messaging standard, which would unify the intercommunication experience between the two platforms and integrate modern functions such as reactions or sending high-quality videos.
Apple has always defended it for security and privacy: in a standard it is more difficult to encrypt the data and the applications would be of lower quality. But with or without RCS, we may end up seeing iMessage integrated in some way, since it’s part of the other European project to force the merger of all messaging services.
I don’t think Google gets anything out of this campaign, but it’s following Spotify’s lead to point to Cupertino and it ended up in an antitrust lawsuit. We’ll see if Apple releases some sort of response to this or just goes on its own.
