Google’s new site demands mercy from Apple in the message war

Google hasn’t been able to create a stable and competitive messaging platform for years and has completely lost the messaging war to products with a long-term strategy. At least some divisions within the company are waking up to the extent of the damage it’s doing to Google as a company, and now Google’s latest strategy is…begging its rivalry for mercy? Google — which has launched 13 different messaging apps since iMessage launched in 2011 — now says, “It’s time for Apple to fix texting.”

Google launched a new website called “received the message—Public lobbying campaign with a call to “Tweet Apple #GetTheMessage and fix text messages.” Google hopes public pressure will push Apple to adopt RCS, a minor upgrade to the SMS standard Apple uses for non-iMessage users. Google has paid This strategy since the beginning of the year but coming from the company with The most dysfunctional in the world Messaging strategy, you appear as a company that is tired of reaping what you sow.

All over the world iMessage is not popular (people tend to like Whatsapp), but in the US iMessage is enough of a cultural phenomenon Billboard Top 100 Songs It says how much it sucks to have a green iMessage bubble (SMS). Google is one of Apple’s biggest competitors – especially for online services – and Google’s inability to compete with iMessage has contributed significantly to the current situation. Google seems to feel that iMessage’s dominance is hurting its brand, so it’s now asking Apple, well, to stop beating it so hard.

Google says, “It’s not about the color of the bubbles. It’s the blurry videos, broken group chats, missing read receipts and typing indicators, not sending text messages over Wi-Fi, and more. These issues exist because Apple refuses to support modern text messages.” Standards for when people using iPhone and Android phones send text messages to each other.”

The standard 14-year-old is “modern,” right?

Some of Google’s claims on this website are meaningless. Google says, “Apple converts texts between iPhone and Android phones to SMS and MMS, legacy technologies from the 1990s and early 2000s. But Apple could adopt RCS – the modern industry standard – for these leads instead.” RCS isn’t a modern standard either – it’s from 2008—And despite some moderate updates since then, it hasn’t kept up with the times.

Remote Control System (RCS) has been hanging around for a long time and is still very poorly implemented because it was created by carriers (through GSMA) as a carrier-focused messaging standard. Carriers did this at the height of pay-per-message SMS, when mobile carrier messaging was a real source of revenue. Now carrier messages are a commodity though, carriers control RCS You have no incentive Interested in RCS. RCS is a zombie specification.

In Google’s defense, SMS dates back to 1986, so RCS is more recent than that. This is probably a sign that you should never work with the GSMA if you don’t have to. If Google and Apple ever collaborate to create a double monopoly on messaging, they won’t need their carriers or their old messaging standards.

Google’s fork of RCS

Being from 2008 means RCS lacks a lot of what you would want from the modern messaging standard. First of all, as a file Basic, RCS is carrier messaging, so messages are delivered to a single carrier’s phone number, rather than multiple devices across the Internet, like the way you’d expect a modern service to work. As a standard, there is no encryption. Google tried to add features to the old RCS specification, but if you think about that part of the RCS sales offering, which Google does, you’re now more like selling your “fork of Google’s ownership of RCS.” Google would really love it if Apple built its own RCS fork in iMessage.

By the way, Google’s version of RCS – the one promoted on the website with exclusive Google features like optional encryption – is definitely proprietary. If this is meant to be a standard, there is no way for a third party to use Google’s RCS APIs at this time. Some messaging apps, such as PepperThey asked Google to integrate RCS and it was said There is no public API for RCS and there are no plans to build one. Google already has RCS API, but only Samsung It is allowed to be used because Samsung has signed some kind of partnership deal.

If you want to implement RCS, you will need to run messages through some kind of service, and who provides that server? It might be Google. The Google Jibe . boughtthe leading provider of RCS servers, in 2015. Today Full sales promotion About how Google Jibe can “help carriers quickly scale up RCS services, iterate in short cycles, and take advantage of improvements right away.” So Apple’s offer to adopt RCS isn’t just public-good bullshit about making texts with Android users better; It’s also about running Apple Messages through Google’s servers. Google profits in both server and data acquisition fees.