Tim Cook recommends getting an iPhone to fix green speech bubble issues

Google’s ongoing campaign to get Apple to add RCS — the search giant’s modern replacement for the SMS and MMS text messaging standards — has clearly had no impact on Apple CEO Tim Cook.

During a Question Time session at Vox Media’s Code 2022 event on Wednesday night (via The edge) Cook was asked what Apple founder Steve Jobs would think of using the RCS standard on iPhones. Cook said this wasn’t something iPhone users were asking about, instead suggesting that anyone bothered by messaging issues should get an iPhone.

“I don’t hear that our users demand that we invest a lot of energy [RCS] at this point,” Cook said. “I’d like to turn you into an iPhone.”

Vox Media’s LiQuan Hunt, who asked the first question, went on to point out the lack of interoperability in messaging between iPhone and Android, noting that people like Hunt’s mom can’t see videos he sends her.

“Get your mom an iPhone,” Cook said.

No surprise – platform lock-in is the point

The answer has caused a stir among tech writers, spawning several blog posts (like this one) about messaging between iPhones and Android devices. But here’s the thing: This is absolutely no surprise. We’ve known since the Epic Games study that Apple relies on iMessage to keep people on their iPhones. Emails shared during the trial revealed that Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said that “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove it [an] Obstacle to iPhone families giving Android phones to their kids.” Federighi wasn’t alone, as the general consensus among Apple execs was that iMessage was key in getting people engaged with the iPhone platform.

Here are the basics of what’s going on and why it’s such a problem. Phones used SMS and MMS as the standard for text and picture messaging for years. Except that SMS and MMS are old and lack some features expected from modern messaging platforms like high definition video and picture sharing, SMS over Wi-Fi and more.

So Apple added iMessage to its products. iMessage is a closed messaging system that activates automatically when you send a message from one Apple device to another. However, since iMessage is only available on Apple devices, iPhones fall back to the SMS standard when texting someone with a non-Apple smartphone. The change between standards is marked with blue text bubbles for iMessage and green bubbles for SMS. This is where the problems come in – for iPhone users, texting with Android users becomes a terrible experience. Group chats are interrupted, images and videos appear blurry or low-resolution, and popular iMessage features stop working.

That difference is part of what keeps iPhone users on the iPhone. It creates pressure from iPhone users on other smartphone users to get an iPhone and become part of the Blue Bubble crew. It’s even problematic among adolescents, where it has become common for children to be excluded from groups because they have a green bubble.

There are solutions, but Apple won’t like them

To be fair, this seems to be a distinctly North American issue, as the split between iPhone and Android launches is roughly in the US and Canada, while smartphone users in other places like Europe or China are largely based on messaging platforms from Third-party providers such as WhatsApp or WeChat available on all smartphones. Still the iMessage problem is one problem and one with multiple solutions (none of which Apple will go along with).

The first is RCS. It’s not iMessage and doesn’t try to be. Google worked with carriers (but later dared to do it themselves) to roll out RCS to replace the aging SMS and MMS standards that have been the backbone of SMS for years. RCS is modernizing texting and improving things like group messaging, and Google is working to end-to-end encryption for RCS chats as well. The clear solution for most people (Cook aside) would be to replace SMS with RCS everywhere, including iPhones. Then iPhone users could still benefit from using iMessage when chatting with other iPhone users, but messaging Android users wouldn’t be such a disruptive change.

Judging by Cook’s reaction to the idea, that’s not going to happen.

Some have speculated that Apple could bring iMessage to Android as a subscription service. It’s not going to happen either, and if you’re wondering why, scroll back and read the part about how Apple execs view iMessage as a tool to get customers back to the iPhone.

So where does that leave us? Well, people could use third-party messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc. The only real problem with this is that people tend to go with the default option, and in my experience it can be incredibly difficult to get people to use a messaging platform when they need to install an app (especially people who aren’t tech savvy ).

Perhaps we could take RCS to a point where it’s a ubiquitous standard like SMS, and then carriers would phase out SMS in favor of RCS. At that point, Apple needs to either add RCS or break the ability for iPhone users to message Android users entirely. But that could take years, if it ever happens at all. Also, there’s no guarantee that carriers will delete text messages or that Apple won’t disrupt messaging with Android users out of spite.

You could, as Cook so eloquently said, just buy an iPhone. Surrender to the monopolistic machinery and join the Blue Bubble crew. Or turn it upside down — the next time an iPhone user is upset and received a blurry photo of you, remind them that the photo you sent was high-resolution, but their iPhone couldn’t receive it because it uses an old message standard.

Source: The Edge