Apple’s iMessage system is a dozen years old, but it still only provides a feature-rich messaging experience between iMessage users. That makes sense for Apple—it’s a big selling point for i-devices—but change may be coming.
One reason for that is industry pressure. Google has for around a year now been trying to publicly shame Apple into adopting the Rich Communication Services standard, which is the communication industry’s successor to old-school SMS (text) and MMS (multimedia) messaging, with added features such as read receipts and the ability to send media in high quality.
Google baked RCS support into Android back in 2019, so there’s clear self-interest involved here, but now Samsung—whose Android phones have made it the global smartphone market leader—is also piling into the fight.
“Green bubbles and blue bubbles want to be together. Help Apple #GetTheMessage,” Samsung declared in a video posted to YouTube yesterday, using Google’s preferred hashtag for the campaign. (In iMessage, blue bubbles are used for messages sent between iMessage users, while green bubbles are for messages sent to or from users outside the system, which denotes a fallback to those more archaic, less secure messaging protocols.)
This campaign on its own is likely to have no effect whatsoever on Apple, a company that famously ignores industry standards in favor of locking customers into its own ecosystem. But Google and Samsung’s combined assault is only part of the picture.
Also yesterday, Reuters reported that the European Commission has begun trying to establish whether iMessage should be brought under the remit of the EU’s new antitrust law, the Digital Markets Act, which imposes interoperability requirements (among other things) on so-called gatekeeper services that are part of many people’s daily lives.