The last few weeks have been filled with headlines around whether or not Apple should adopt the RCS messaging protocol on iPhones, which would substantially improve the texting experience between iPhone and Android users. Google is running ads left and right on YouTube roasting Apple for refusing to adopt this standard. Tim Cook told one iPhone owner who has trouble sending videos to his Android-owning mother to "buy your mom an iPhone." A small but passionate number of folks are sharing examples of how atrocious the iPhone's current SMS solution is with the tag #GetTheMessage.
I normally defend Apple when people complain about its devices not playing well with other companies' products. Apple's biggest innovation from a business strategy perspective is its walled garden ecosystem, and they have a right to defend the walls of that garden. But they're getting this one wrong.
Sometimes a technology becomes so ubiquitous that we need to start treating it like a utility rather than one company's innovation. Texting has reached that point. It's absolutely unfathomable that we can be testing self-driving cars on the streets of San Francisco yet I still can't send a photo to my one friend with an Android without it looking like an abstract painting at The Met when he receives it.
All standard forms of communication and the baseline functionality associated with them should fall into this "utility" category. If you had Verizon as your phone carrier and your audio cut out every five seconds whenever you called someone with AT&T, you wouldn't tolerate it. If you used Gmail and could never send PDFs to people with Yahoo addresses without the documents getting blurry, you wouldn't tolerate it. We shouldn't tolerate it with texting, which at this point is probably a more critical communication method than either of those two.
All of the basic features of RCS — end-to-end encryption, the ability to send high-res photos and video, emoji reactions, and read receipts, for example — should not be Apple's innovation to own regardless of whether they pioneered the idea or not. These factors should all be accepted as table stakes for a sound texting service and should be interoperable between devices and operating systems. Apple still has plenty of ways to innovate for iPhone users within iMessage, whether that's with Group FaceTime or Memoji or iMessage apps. Adopting RCS doesn't infringe upon Apple's ability to differentiate iMessage; it just prevents Apple from gatekeeping basic functionality from Android users under the guise of protecting its innovation and ecosystem when Apple is really just protecting its market share.
I don't expect Apple to ever voluntarily adopt RCS. Subjugating Android users to green text bubbles, awkward third-person responses when an iPhone user accidentally "reacts" to a message, and photos that contain approximately eight pixels when delivered is possibly the greatest mechanism any company has ever devised for keeping customers from defecting. iPhone revenue is still the lifeblood of Apple. Adopting RCS would mean it's easier for iPhone users to switch to Android, and that one black-sheep Android user in your friend group will no longer get bullied into becoming an iPhone user by their obnoxiously blue-text friends. Both of these things would directly jeopardize that iPhone revenue, and Apple will not be willing to do that.
But if Apple will not voluntarily adopt RCS, then it's time for the federal government to step in and mandate that Apple adopts it. We can't keep treating something as fundamental to everyday life as texting like a Big Tech battlefield. It's time to wave the white flag and waive the green text.
Comments