Google has been unable to build a stable, competitive messaging platform for years and completely lost the messaging war to products with a long-term strategy. At least some divisions within the company are aware of how bad this is for Google as a company, and now Google’s latest strategy is to…beg for mercy from competitors? Google, which has launched 13 different messaging apps since iMessage launched in 2011, is now saying, “It’s time for Apple to fix text messaging.”
Google has launched a new website called “Get the Message “, a public pressure campaign to “tweet @Apple to #GetTheMessage and fix text messages.”Google is hoping public pressure will force Apple to adopt RCS, a minor update to the SMS standard that Apple uses for non-iMessage users. Google has been pushing this strategy since the beginning of the year, but coming from the company with the world’s most underperforming messaging strategy, it gives the impression of a company that is tired of reaping what it has sown.
Google’s website says, “It’s not about the color of the bubbles. It’s all about blurry videos, broken group chats, missing read receipts and input indicators, no text messages over Wi-Fi, and more. These problems exist because Apple refuses to accept modern text messages. standards when people with iPhones and Android phones text each other.”
A 14-year-old standard is “modern,” right?
Some of the Google statements on this website do not make much sense. Google says, “Apple is turning text messages between iPhones and Android phones into SMS and MMS, legacy technology from the 90s and 00s. But Apple could instead adopt RCS – the current industry standard – for these streams.”RCS is also not a modern standard – it appeared in 2008 – and, despite a few mediocre updates since then, has not kept up with the times.
RCS has been around for so long and is still so poorly implemented because it was created by carriers (via the GSMA) as a carrier-centric messaging standard. Operators did this during the heyday of pay-per-message SMS, when messaging was a real source of income. However, now that messaging with operators has become a commodity, the operators that control RCS have no incentive to care about RCS. RCS is the zombie specification.
In Google’s defense: SMS from 1986, so RCS is more modern. This is probably more of a sign that you should never work with the GSMA if you don’t have to. If Google and Apple ever teamed up to create a messaging duopoly, they wouldn’t need carriers or their ancient messaging standard.
Google’s own RCS fork
Being from 2008, RCS lacks a lot of what you would want from a modern messaging standard. First, RCS is carrier messaging in the standard, so messages are delivered to a single carrier phone number rather than multiple devices over the Internet as you would expect from a modern service. Typically, there is no encryption. Google tried to build features into the outdated RCS specification, but if you take into account the part of the RCS advertising campaign that Google is doing, now it’s more like selling “Google’s proprietary fork of RCS”. Google would love it if Apple built their own fork of RCS into iMessage.
Incidentally, the Google version of RCS advertised on the website with Google-exclusive features such as optional encryption is clearly proprietary. If this should be the standard, there is no way for a third party to use Google’s RCS API right now. Some messaging apps such as Beeper have asked Google about RCS integration and have been told that there is no public RCS API and no plans to create one. Google already has an RCS API, but only Samsung is allowed to use it because Samsung signed some kind of partnership agreement.
If you want to implement RCS you will need to run messages through some service, and who provides that server? It will probably be Google. Google bought Jibe, a leading provider of RCS servers, in 2015. Today, the company has an entire promotional presentation on how Google Jibe can “help carriers quickly scale RCS services, iterate in short cycles, and benefit from improvements immediately.”So Apple’s proposal to implement RCS isn’t just public benefit bullshit about making texting with Android users better; this also applies to the transmission of Apple messages via Google servers. Google profits from both server fees and data collection.