Hiroshi Lockheimer, vice president of Google for Android, stated in twitter at that Apple is deliberately sowing “peer pressure and harassment” with its Messages app.
The purpose of this pressure is apparently to Android users to switch to iPhone (or not to switch from iPhone to Android) not being able to communicate with your friends and family using the Messaging app features, or being discriminated against with a different bubble color.
In fact, if you send or receive a message from an iPhone to an Android user, the chat bubbles will appear green instead of blue.
Lockheimer argues that Apple refuses to accept the RCS (Rich Communication Services) standard, which provides Android users with many of the functions that iMessage offers. Lockheimer has already offered to help Apple implement it.
The Messages app is very popular with teenagers in the United States, so it’s a good way to connect users to the Apple ecosystem from an early age.
Last year, during Apple’s legal dispute against the maker of “Fortnite”, thousands of pages of internal documents were released. Some revealed a long internal debate at Apple about offering iMessage on Android phones. Apple made a critical decision: Keep iMessage for Apple users only.
“In the absence of a strategy to become the primary messaging service for most cell phone users, I am concerned that iMessage on Android will simply remove an obstacle for iPhone families to provide Android phones to their children.“Said Craig Federighi, Apple’s director of software, in a 2013 email.
Three years later, then chief marketing officer Phil Schiller made a similar point to CEO Tim Cook in another email: “Moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than it will help us”, He said.
From the start, Apple didn’t ban traditional text messaging with Android users, but instead marked those messages with a different color. When an Android user is part of a group chat, iPhone users see green bubbles instead of blue ones.
Some functions are also missing. For example, there is no dotted icon to prove that a non-iPhone user is typing, and a heart or thumbs-up annotation in iMessage is transmitted to Android users as text instead of images.
Later, Apple took other steps that increased the popularity of its messaging service among teenagers with popular features like memoji, to compete with the messaging services of social media companies.
Now, while Apple has managed to hook teenagers in the United States, in the rest of the world, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app.
