Google says Apple ‘should not benefit from bullying’ created by iMessage lock-in

Google has accused Apple of benefiting from bullying as a part of a deliberate technique to make Android customers into second-class residents on the iPhone-maker’s iMessage service.

Apple’s messaging service contains a variety of iOS-exclusive options, like Memoji, and famously turns texts from Android customers inexperienced as a substitute of the iOS-native blue. This has turned iMessage into a standing image amongst US teenagers, creating peer strain for younger folks to purchase iPhones and generally resulting in the ostracization of Android customers. Showing up in a bunch chat as a inexperienced bubble has change into, for some, a social fake pas.

A current report in The Wall Street Journal highlighted this dynamic and prompted a response from each the Android group and Google’s head of Android, Hiroshi Lockheimer.

“iMessage should not benefit from bullying. Texting should bring us together, and the solution exists. Let’s fix this as one industry,” tweeted the official Android account.

Lockheimer was more strident: “Apple’s iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy. Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this.”

Although Apple’s iMessage technique has lengthy been obvious, inner emails despatched by firm executives that had been surfaced in the course of the current Epic Games trial confirmed the aware significance of this technique. Apple did contemplate making iMessage accessible on Android to draw extra customers, however concluded that doing so would “hurt us more than help us” (within the phrases of Apple exec Phil Schiller). As one other government, Craig Federighi, put it: “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.”

Google’s intervention right here shouldn’t be purely altruistic, after all: the corporate would profit massively from Apple making iMessage accessible on Android. Google has additionally lately been pushing for the iPhone-maker to assist next-generation texting customary RCS, which is meant to interchange SMS and has already gathered assist from main US carriers.

Google can also be not well-placed to criticize different firms messaging methods. As Ars Technica editor Ron Amadeo noted on Twitter, the search large is notoriously dysfunctional in relation to messaging, and has launched 13 separate messaging apps since iMessage got here out in 2011 (most of which have failed).