Google accuses Apple of bullying: iMessage Platform

Google took the opportunity to hit the headlines to shoot Apple’s iMessage platform. The competitor is accused of deliberately profiting from bullying and calls for support for industry-wide solutions. “iMessage shouldn’t benefit from bullying. Texting should bring us together, and the solution exists. Let’s fix that as an industry,” said a statement posted on Android’s official Twitter feed.

We are referring to a report in the Wall Street Journal after there was a certain social pressure among young people to show up in the friends’ messaging apps with iMessage messages with a blue background – and not with the green SMS, the iPhones of Android users receive. Google’s request sounds honorable, but has little substance. The main thing here is that the Android provider would like to see Apple finally supporting the RCS standard in its iMessage app, as Arc Technica reports. RCS (Rich Communication Services) was developed by the mobile communications industry as the successor to SMS and should offer similar possibilities as the various messenger platforms.

The problem here, however, is that the standard was already adopted in 2008 and that further development is taking place extremely slowly – after all, an agreement must be found here among numerous companies from all over the world. Although it is now possible to distribute images, videos and similar content via RCS and to transmit status IDs, there are no various features of modern messengers such as end-to-end encryption of the content.

Google empty hands

Apple therefore has few ambitions to bring RCS into its iOS platform and prefers to rely fully on the further development of its own messenger platform. Google, on the other hand, supports the industry standard and advocates its integration with network operators. To a large extent, however, this is also due to the fact that the group has so far failed with all attempts to set up its own messaging platform.

There have been several attempts at this. In fact, Google Hangouts once had a really competitive product. Since there has been no uniform strategy for this area at Google for many years, the platform failed miserably after a short time and communication tools from other providers dominate on Android – above all WhatsApp, of course.