New Google site begs Apple for mercy in messaging war - Ars Technica

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 "Get the Message"—a public pressure campaign with a call to "tweet at @Apple to #GetTheMessage and fix texting." Google hopes public pressure will get Apple to adopt RCS, a minor upgrade to the SMS standard that Apple uses for non-iMessage users.

Google says, "Apple turns texts between iPhones and Android phones into SMS and MMS, out-of-date technologies from the 90s and 00s.

But Apple can adopt RCS—the modern industry standard—for these threads instead." RCS isn't a modern standard either—it's from 2008—and, despite a few middling updates since then, hasn't kept up with the times.

If Google and Apple ever teamed up to make a messaging duopoly, they would not need the carriers or their ancient messaging standard.

First of all, as a standard, RCS is carrier messaging, so messages are delivered to a single carrier phone number, rather than multiple devices via the Internet, like how you would expect a modern service to operate.

Google tried to glom features onto the aging RCS spec, but if you consider those part of the RCS sales pitch, which Google does, now it's more like you selling "Google's proprietary fork of RCS." Google would really like it if Apple built its proprietary RCS fork into iMessage?

Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API and no plans to build one.

Today it has a whole sales pitch about how Google Jibe can "help carriers quickly scale RCS services, iterate in short cycles, and benefit from improvements immediately." So the pitch for Apple to adopt RCS isn't just this public-good nonsense about making texts with Android users better; it's also about running Apple's messages through Google servers.