Tim Cook was recently queried by an Android user as to whether iMessage might ever gain support for RCS, but the Apple CEO doesn’t seem very interested in the idea.
- “Buy your mom an iPhone,” Cook told Vox Media’s LiQuan Hunt during an event last night after he complained to the executive about how his mother couldn’t see the videos that he was sending her through his Android device.
- Cook suggested that there is little interest in the feature, stating “I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point.”
- Google has set up an entire website calling on Apple to “fix texting,” explaining how texts between iPhones and Android phones are turned into SMS and MMS, “out-of-date technologies from the 90s and 00s.”
- This results in “blurry videos, broken group chats, missing read receipts,” and other issues when messages are sent between Android and iPhone devices, according to the search company.
- Android users are easily distinguished in iMessage, as those messages come in a green rather than blue bubbles.
From The Verge:
If you’ve tried to send a video from Android to iOS (or vice versa) using your regular text messaging app, then you know that your videos come out completely fuzzy on the other end. Cook’s suggestion to fix this annoying issue? “Buy your mom an iPhone.”
While it may seem silly, the bubble color in iMessage that distinguishes Android (green) users from fellow iPhone users (blue) has become a point of contention. Google’s campaign to publicly shame Apple into adopting the standard has clearly had no effect on Cook, who is publicly focusing on opinions from people who have iPhones. Of course, there are other reasons to avoid adding RCS. Emails unearthed in the Epic trial showed Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi saying, “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.”