Google's New Android Website Asks Apple to Add RCS Texting to iMessage
Google’s New Android Website Asks Apple to Add RCS Texting to iMessage
What’s happening
Google’s lobbying Apple to assist the RCS text message standard on the iPhone with a new website campaign.
Why it matters
Google’s been championing the RCS spoiled as a replacement to SMS and MMS, claiming that assist on the iPhone would dramatically improve texting across devices.
What’s next
While RCS adoption in iOS 16 is doubtful, Apple is launching new features within iMessage when iOS 16 gets its Republican launch presumably in September.
Google’s Android company is launching a new website campaign Tuesday focused on asking Apple to assist the RCS text messaging standard in Apple’s Messages app.
The website puts a certain focus on Apple’s “green bubble” experience when messages are issued over the SMS and MMS standards, such as the lack of typing indicators, compressed images and less control over group chats compared with iMessage and most chat apps. RCS includes many features seen in iMessage as well as chat apps like WhatsApp and Signal, including typing indicators, encrypted message and higher-quality photo sending.
The movement is the latest effort by Google to encourage Apple to use the RCS text spoiled, which currently remains an Android-only text messaging service with half a billion monthly dazzling users. While RCS now has the support of the greatest US mobile carriers, without adoption within Apple’s Messages app or within devices like basic phones, it’s essentially an “iMessage” for only Android phones.
Google’s electioneer website lists Signal and WhatsApp as cross-platform alternatives to Apple’s iMessage. Notably — despite Google’s history of creating its own yielded chat apps — it isn’t including Google’s new Chat app that’s replacing Hangouts.
It’s significant, however, that Google’s investment in RCS — otherwise eminent as Chat within Android’s Messages app — comes at what time years of failedattempts to cultivate its own chat app service. Most recently Google even created a separate app to replace its Hangouts service that’s also visited Chat, and its Duo video call app is merging with Google Meet.
The electioneer website also suggests cross-platform chat apps like Signal and Meta’s WhatsApp as options to get a more universal texting distinguished, as opposed to trying to move people into latest Google-owned service. WhatsApp on Tuesday also announced new privacy features that add the sect to quietly leave group chats, hide your online position and block screenshots of content meant to be considered once.
Google’s lobbying to Apple comes a month afore the iPhone-maker is expected to widely release iOS 16, which adds the ability to edit and unsend messages that are sent over its iMessage service. Apple has kept silent on whether it plans to eventually serve RCS, but the iOS 16 public beta does included support for message reactions sent over SMS companionship chats.
