Google is making yet another attempt to persuade Apple to support the RCS phone-messaging standard in its own iMessage service, but this time it’s aiming the sales pitch at iPhone users.
At a “Get the Message” site posted Tuesday, Google calls out the least-common-denominator aspect of texts between iPhone and Android users: Everybody loses such features as encryption, typing indicators, and read receipts supported separately by Apple’s iMessage and the Google -backed Rich Communications Services (RCS), also called “chat features” in Android.
“Apple creates these problems when we text each other from iPhones and Android phones, but does nothing to fix it,” the page declares. “Apple turns texts between iPhone and Android into SMS and MMS, out-of-date technologies from the 90s and 00s.”
Subsequent paragraphs emphasize how iPhone users don’t only suffer the indignity of seeing Android-using friends’ messages in green bubbles but also miss features they enjoy in conversations with other iPhone users. For example: “Without read receipts and typing indicators, you can’t know if your Android friends got your text and are responding.”
Privacy also loses out in cross-platform conversations, the page notes: “SMS and MMS don’t support end-to-end encryption, which means those messages are not secure.”
(But while RCS supports end-to-end encryption in one-to-one Android chats, group Android chats today only get encryption in transit, with “e2e” security advertised as coming later this year. Bringing this same security to chats between different apps and different platforms would be much harder.)
Apple has never shipped an iMessage client for Android, and court documents unearthed during Fortnite’s lawsuit against Apple revealed that the Cupertino, Calif., company rejected an iMessage port because it might weaken iMessage’s customer lock-in effect.
Google has instead tried in vain to get Apple to add RCS support to iMessage–most recently, at its I/O developer conference in May. But while this latest sales pitch may win over some iPhone users, Apple has a history of ignoring requests from users that don’t square with its own product vision.
Google, meanwhile, has struggled to get RCS going in Android. It didn’t get all three major carriers lined up to ship its own Messages app until 2021, leaving an enormous installed base of Android phones running carrier- or manufacturer-specific messaging apps that don’t speak RCS. And Google still hasn’t persuaded Google to add RCS support to its own Google Voice calling and messaging service.
Finally, Google has yet to provide third-party developers with the coding framework they’d need to add RCS support to such SMS-capable apps as Signal and WhatsApp–the two services Google’s new page endorses as alternatives for iPhone users anxious to avoid today’s “broken experience” of cross-platform communication.
Developer posts in a thread on Signal’s site blame that on Google not providing the right API, and Google has yet to say when it might ship that framework.
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