Google has accused Apple of benefiting from bullying as a part of a deliberate technique to make Android customers into second-class residents on the iPhone-maker’s iMessage service.
Apple’s messaging service contains quite a few iOS-exclusive options, like Memoji, and famously turns texts from Android customers inexperienced as a substitute of the iOS-native blue. This has turned iMessage into a standing image amongst US teenagers, creating peer strain for younger folks to purchase iPhones and typically resulting in the ostracization of Android customers. Displaying up in a gaggle chat as a inexperienced bubble has turn out to be, for some, a social fake pas.
A current report in The Wall Road Journal highlighted this dynamic and prompted a response from each the Android staff and Google’s head of Android, Hiroshi Lockheimer.
“iMessage shouldn’t profit from bullying. Texting ought to convey us collectively, and the answer exists. Let’s repair this as one trade,” tweeted the official Android account.
Lockheimer was extra strident: “Apple’s iMessage lock-in is a documented technique. Utilizing peer strain and bullying as a option to promote merchandise is disingenuous for an organization that has humanity and fairness as a core a part of its advertising and marketing. The requirements exist right this moment to repair this.”
Apple says making iMessage accessible on Android would “harm us greater than assist us”
Though Apple’s iMessage technique has lengthy been obvious, inner emails despatched by firm executives that had been surfaced throughout the current Epic Video games trial confirmed the acutely aware significance of this technique. Apple did take into account making iMessage accessible on Android to draw extra customers, however concluded that doing so would “harm us greater than assist us” (within the phrases of Apple exec Phil Schiller). As one other govt, Craig Federighi, put it: “iMessage on Android would merely serve to take away [an] impediment to iPhone households giving their children Android telephones.”
Google’s intervention right here will not be purely altruistic, after all: the corporate would profit vastly from Apple making iMessage accessible on Android. Google has additionally lately been pushing for the iPhone-maker to assist next-generation texting customary RCS, which is meant to exchange SMS and has already gathered assist from main US carriers.
Google can be not well-placed to criticize different corporations messaging methods. As Ars Technica editor Ron Amadeo famous on Twitter, the search large is notoriously dysfunctional in relation to messaging, and has launched 13 separate messaging apps since iMessage got here out in 2011 (most of which have failed).
