Customers have complained about how the two leading messaging platforms — Google’s Messages app, which makes use of Rich Communications Services (RCS) and Apple’s exclusive iMessage — handle text messages on smartphones for years.

Both platforms enhance standard text messages by adding features like better graphics, read receipts, text effects, enhanced security, replies, and other advantages. However, text conversations between iPhones and Androids revert to standard, antiquated text messages because the systems are incompatible.

“It’s not about the colour of the bubbles. It’s the blurry videos, broken group chats, missing read receipts and typing indicators, no texting over Wi-Fi, and more,” Google’s site argued. “These problems exist because Apple refuses to adopt modern texting standards when people with iPhones and Android phones text each other.”

When Google’s “Apple should fix what’s broken” website went live recently, the tech news site Business Insider discussed how “Some users have long lamented the green message bubbles that come with cross-device messaging, as well as poor-quality compressed videos, the lack of read receipts, and other headaches.”

According to Google, messages between Android and Apple handsets would appear nicer and be encrypted if Apple switched to RCS.

In response to US TODAY’s request for comment regarding Google’s campaign, Apple did not respond. However, the business has in the past criticised RCS, claiming that it does not provide complete end-to-end encryption.

Google has run this advertisement before. At the tech giant’s I/O conference in May, Sameer Samat, vice president of Android product management, touted how 500 million or more people used RCS on Android and made snide remarks to the competition saying, “We hope every mobile operating system gets the message and upgrades to RCS.”

Apple, though, made no move. At its own WWDC conference the following month, Apple introduced new features for its messaging platform, including the ability to remember or amend recently-sent messages, without mentioning RCS.

According to a post by CNET Senior Editor Mike Sorrentino, Apple could improve compatibility between Android and iOS devices, but it might not be in the company’s best interests. Moving away from iMessage might endanger Apple’s ability to maintain control over iOS, which the company frequently emphasises as a selling feature for customers.

Image Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Source: TechExplore News.