Sorry, Google, but Apple Isn’t Listening (Premium)

Google’s “Get the Message” ad campaign is aimed at convincing Apple to adopt RCS. But it’s Google that needs to get the message. Apple ain’t listening. And it never will.

“It’s not about the color of the bubbles,” a new subsite on Android.com notes, referring to Apple’s use of color in its messaging app to denote who’s in the Apple ecosystem. “It’s the blurry videos, broken group chats, missing read receipts and typing indicators, no texting over Wi-Fi, and more. These problems exist because Apple refuses to adopt modern texting standards when people with iPhones and Android phones text each other.”

Google is right: Apple’s continued use of proprietary technologies, and it’s continued ignoring of industry standards and outside technologies, has created a world in which there are two incompatible ecosystems, Apple’s and everything else. Apple fans point to this strategy either explicitly or implicitly as some kind of advantage, because when you give up choice—and, in a way, your soul—and just buy Apple products and services, everything just works.

Sure. But what this audience is forgetting or ignoring is even more important: Not everyone has decided to limit their choices like they have—indeed, there are far more people who haven’t—and they’ve created a bifurcated world in which many things that could work well between platforms don’t. In other words, they’re making the world worse and promoting Apple’s competitive needs over doing the right thing.

I can’t help those people, and, look, I kind of get it: anyone who has struggled with technology, which is everyone, understandably wants to move into a warm, comfortable world where everything works. That’s the dream.

No, it’s Apple I take exception with here. Not just because they’re doing what they’re doing, but because they are likewise ceaselessly promoting themselves as some kind of bastion of all that’s good and right with the world. They’re not.

And Google, I mean … what can one say here? They’re as problematic as is Apple, if for completely different reasons related mostly to privacy. But that’s not what we’re talking about today. What we’re talking about is Apple, its proprietary messaging system that alienates people from those they know and love who don’t use Apple products and services. And how they could very easily solve this problem without sacrificing their own users’ experiences. And they never will.

Google must know this. Must realize that there is no way to goad Apple, the “can’t innovate my ass” company that shoveled butterfly keyboards on their own customers for years, is basically immune to feedback. When they do respond, as they have recently with thicker MacBooks with more reasonable port selections and actually usable keyboards, they do so belatedly and mostly without apology. Witness the ongoing situation with Apple and USB-C on iPhones and AirPods. They’ll get there. Someday. But they don’t care what you think about it, let alone about those users trying to transfer massive recorded videos off their iPhones at Lightning’s USB 2.0 speeds.

In fact, calling out Apple publicly is probably going to have the unintended consequence of causing Apple to never support industry standard messaging technologies like RCS, or at the very least push back any plans they might have had to do so. Apple doesn’t respond well to criticism, and the company certainly isn’t interested in being the target of a public campaign. That’s what they do to other companies, like they did to Adobe with Flash, not vice versa. They’re always in the right.

Google has been trying for years to get Apple to be better in this one area. Back in January, it went public with its RCS concerns and it’s clear they didn’t get the response from Apple that they were hoping for. (I would be surprised if they got any response.) And a month later, it started publicly testing changes to its own Messaging app on Android to better handle Apple’s non-standard messaging features. It was a step in the right direction, but a true fix can only come from Apple. And that will never happen.

These kinds of things depress me. Look at Sonos and Google, fighting over the latter’s theft of the former’s whole-house audio solutions and then having Google, incredibly, complain in a lawsuit that it is Sonos that is harming their mutual customers. That’s nuts. But that’s what Apple is doing here with messaging and its lack of support for RCS: its own customers would benefit from this technology. And Apple just can’t bring itself to back down from its unilateral ways despite reality and common sense.

Maybe I’m just naïve. But I really do believe that all of these companies would be better off if they worked together, at least in most cases. I think that when I think about Google not bringing the Play Store to Windows 11’s Android subsystem and instead going its own way on Windows and explicitly without asking for Microsoft’s help. I think that every time Microsoft forces Windows 11 users to use Chrome, Bing, and MSN despite whatever choices their own customers made with regard to default browsers and search engines.

This is the problem with Big Tech. This is what happens when companies get so big that all they can see is protecting their own platforms, even when it’s clear that doing so will harm their own users and the customer experience. And even when there are no downsides to doing the right thing, as is the case here.

If you disagree with that for whatever reason, or are simply unclear about the issues here, please do check out the Google site and see how Apple’s own customers are impacted by this. I don’t agree with everything Google does, but in this case, they are in the right, and are on the right side of history.

And it doesn’t matter. Because Apple.