Apple has unveiled a brand new technology of iPhones with higher cameras, longer battery life, and a “Dynamic Island” as a substitute of a notch. One factor the brand new telephones will not have is RCS messaging assist. Apple CEO Tim Cook dinner was requested at Vox Media’s Code 2022 occasion whether or not the corporate would heed Google’s calls to undertake the common messaging commonplace. His reply was fairly snarky: “purchase your mother an iPhone.”
The difficulty lies in how Apple connects iPhones by the default messaging app. When an iPhone consumer sends a message to a different iPhone consumer, Apple intercepts it and routes it by a proprietary system you’ve got in all probability heard of known as iMessage. These messages can do greater than your common SMS with larger high quality media, learn receipts, enhanced group chat, and a lot extra. When chatting with an Android consumer, messages revert again to the previous SMS format with inexperienced textual content bubbles as a substitute of blue.
Google has been operating an consciousness marketing campaign in hopes of pressuring Apple to assist the RCS commonplace that Android telephones use for enhanced messaging. To this point, no cube, and it sounds prefer it’s not even on Apple’s radar. On the Code convention, Vox Media’s LiQuan Hunt informed Tim Cook dinner that the shortage of RCS is an actual drawback for him, explaining that he is unable to ship high-quality video to his mom. That is when Cook dinner spouted his “purchase your mother an iPhone” line.
It is no shock that is the occasion line. Apple has no incentive to assist RCS, and it might by no means permit Android units to hook up with iMessage. This helps reenforce the concept that Android telephones take dangerous pictures as a result of they find yourself blurry when despatched to iPhones as textual content messages. The way in which messaging works on iPhones is a serious lock-in issue, too. Individuals do not wish to lose their iMessage group chats they get when speaking to their iPhone-using buddies. Though RCS has lots of the identical options, that solely helps for those who’re speaking to different Android of us.
With Apple stonewalling, the one viable resolution for these annoyed by the inexperienced bubble scenario is to make use of a special messaging system. WhatsApp, Telegram, Fb Messenger, and all the remainder are merely connecting over the web. They will implement no matter options they need, and so they’ll work on all units equally.
