Google Exec Urges Apple to Adopt a Universal Messaging Standard

Once once more, persons are speaking about how Apple received’t play good with Android gadgets. This time Google Senior Vice President Hiroshi Lockheimer, who oversees Android, is taking Apple to job over the inexperienced bubble battle and urging the corporate to embrace a brand new textual content messaging customary that can make cross-platform communication simpler.

On Saturday, Lockheimer tweeted that Apple’s walled backyard round iMessage is a “documented strategy,” including that the corporate makes use of peer stress and bullying to promote its merchandise regardless of its advertising centered round “humanity and equity.”

Lockheimer particularly referred to as out how Apple might help Rich Communication Services, or RCS, however select to not. The messaging customary has successfully united all Android gadgets on one texting platform after a years-long campaign. The three main U.S. carriers all help RCS. It’s out there by default by way of the Google Messages app, which comes customary on all Android gadgets—identical to Apple Messages is customary is on all Apple gadgets. In truth, the final holdout to getting RCS standardized throughout cellular platforms is Apple.

Today Lockheimer denied that his tweets had been a critique of Apple’s refusal to deliver iMessage to Android. Instead, he desires Apple to help RCS in iMessage, simply as the corporate helps older SMS/MMS requirements. He even provided to assist Apple implement RCS, doubling down on a plea made late final yr.

Lockheimer insists that Apple adopting RCS would additionally assist extra people join.

“Phone number-based messaging is the fallback,” Lockheimer tweeted. “If you want to reach someone and you don’t know whether they use app x y or z, you have high confidence that sending them a text (SMS) will work.” It’s a regular that has lengthy been supported by cellular gadgets, which Lockheimer suggests is “probably why Apple supported SMS to begin with.”

Lockheimer is true. Supporting RCS would enhance the expertise for each iOS and Android customers. Speaking as a longtime Android person, it means I might have encrypted conversations with my family members who use iPhones with out having to make use of a third-party app, and I might lastly obtain video clips as supposed from my Apple-using pals.

But Google can be in charge for its disorganized messaging technique through the years, which it nonetheless hasn’t found out and whittled down. Google presently runs a handful of messaging providers, together with Google Messages, Google Chat/Hangouts (relying on should you flipped the change or not), and Google Voice. There’s additionally messaging and chat performance baked into different Google apps, together with Google Photos and Google Maps Business Messages, letting you chat with restaurant and store homeowners.

Lockheimer was on the cash about one factor: Phone numbers are a common solution to uncover if somebody’s on a messaging platform. Apps like Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp function second- and third-tier messaging platforms for a similar individuals I talk with by way of textual content messaging. And when Google Messages can’t carry out a job—like a big video file or end-to-end encryption—due to platform variations, my family members and I default to one of many backups talked about above.

I’m not holding out hope that Apple will undertake RCS, as a result of the corporate is little incentive to—its prospects don’t thoughts being locked in, as annoying because it may be for his or her Android pals.

Google could be higher off making a common messaging answer that unites all of them—third-party and first-party—making it simpler for its customers to flip backwards and forwards between conversations. We already heard of a few of this common utilization coming to Chrome OS’s cellphone app later this yr. Google might make Android higher by simplifying its personal messaging apps and enabling one-click entry to each possibility so Apple’s selections don’t matter.