Google blames Apple for texting being broken

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Apple has broken texting, Google has said.

The Android maker has proposed a number of changes that need to come to the iPhone, to allow devices on different operating systems text each other more seamlessly.

Google has been accusing Apple of having ruined texting for some time. When their two devices text each other, the messages lack a number of rich features, such as typing indicators or read receipts, and functioning group chats.

It has argued that a fix would be for Apple to integrate the new RCS standard into its Messages app. That is a successor to SMS that delivers texts in much the same way but adds the kind of newer technology that is associated with newer platforms such as Apple’s iMessages.

Apple has so far refused, however. As it is, that means that “Apple turns texts between iPhones and Android phones into SMS and MMS, out-of-date technologies from the 90s and 00s”, Google has said.

That is one of the many criticisms featured on a new Google webpage, titled ‘Get The Message’. The page attempts to encourage customers to join in the campaign, by getting them to a tweet a message at the official Apple account telling the company to “stop breaking my texting experience”.

The page highlights a number of criticisms of the current texting system: it shrinks down images so they can be sent over MMS, group chats do not work properly, they cannot be sent over WiFi, are not encrypted as they are sent, and there is no way to know if a friend is replying or has read a message.

Google also notes a more superficial criticism: that SMS messages on the iPhone are green, in comparison with iMessages’s blue. The website criticises the green colour for being hard to read – but among some communities, a particular kind of snobbery has said to have developed against those who do not send blue texts.

The website even suggests that people use other messaging apps that do not have a “broken experience”, pointing people to WhatsApp and Signal.