Nobody wants to be the guy with the green bubble—not even Hiroshi Lockheimer, the head of Android platform development at Google.
On iPhones, texts sent to iMessage-capable devices are blue, while texts to Android phones are green. Only the blue texts properly support groups, reactions, and read receipts, and iPhone users get pretty miffed when a single Android user breaks the group chat.
Over the past week, Lockheimer unleashed a highly discussed Twitter thread where he criticized Apple for "iMessage lock-in," the practice of making iMessage threads into a hot mess when Android users get involved. His solution: Demand that Apple support RCS, an industry standard for iMessage-like texting with better group chat and support for read receipts.
But Lockheimer needs to clean his own house first. Here in the US, the market where iMessage is most dominant, RCS isn't available by default on most Android phones. It's time for Google to step up and demand this.
Now, this debate is largely limited to the US. In other countries, people use WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, or Viber. But I write for the US market, and the US market is huge—Verizon's subscriber base alone is about double the entire population of France. And the US market is dominated by default texting apps.
Why? Unlimited texting buckets came to most US plans early, so there wasn't a drive to install WhatsApp so people could save money. US customers make far fewer international calls and send far fewer international texts than people in many other countries, which was another big WhatsApp driver. Finally, we have more iPhone users than in some other countries in part because our system of monthly phone financing smooths out the price differences between iPhones and less-expensive devices.
Google was long happy to pass the buck over to phone makers and carriers for RCS, but in the US, OEMs and carriers haven't delivered. Samsung, by far the dominant Android firm in the US, doesn't enable RCS by default in its Samsung Messages app. (While Samsung ships phones with Google Messages as the default app in other countries, it still uses Samsung Messages in the US—I just checked on a fancy Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra and on a low-cost Samsung A12.)
Verizon, our largest carrier, ships many non-Samsung Android phones with a "Message+" default app that doesn't support RCS. On both a Verizon Kyocera phone and a Verizon OnePlus phone, I had to separately download Google's Messages app and fiddle with the settings to get RCS. And time has proven that relatively few people in the US will download a third-party texting app.
Carriers used to have the power to refuse Google. In the US, that's a legacy of an earlier world when there were other OS options and stores for carriers to choose, such as Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS, and even briefly an Amazon-ified Android. But GMS has stamped out all of the competition here. Unless carriers want to become all-Apple (and they most certainly do not), Google has them over a barrel—and it should use its power.
Google has some bright lines. All Android phones in the US ship with the Google Play Store. All ship with Gmail. All default to Google Maps for navigation. (This didn't used to be the case; the carriers had some truly awful GPS software back in the day.) If Google says "Google Messages with RCS is now part of Google Mobile Services," the carriers aren't about to call its bluff; they have literally no other non-Apple OS provider to turn to.
Lockheimer is right: It's a lousy experience when Android users foul an iMessage thread with SMS, and industry-wide RCS support is the answer. But before he pressures Apple, he needs to show a better example for Android users in the US.
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What Else Happened This Week?
- OnePlus launched the OnePlus 10 Pro in China. I'm really concerned that the company is dialing back to become a China-first organization, especially after its merger with Oppo. OnePlus' success in the US has come in part from its clean, "burdenless" software, and that is not generally the experience on China-market phones.
- The 15th anniversary of the iPhone launch was last weekend, and I published my original notes from my meeting with AT&T on that day. My favorite bit has got to be "this is an addition to our portfolio—Yahoo—Napster—we have the most robust music offering in the biz." Yahoo?! Napster?!
- OnwardMobility, the company that claims to be making new BlackBerry-branded phones, declared that it is not dead and "will provide more regular updates starting this month." I extremely do not trust that right now—the company was radio silent for a year. I know a lot of you really want a good keyboarded 5G phone in the BlackBerry tradition, but this is definitely a situation where we need to see a device, not a blog post.
- Signals Research Group did its first tests of T-Mobile's 5G NR carrier aggregation and found that yes, it does increase range. I'm super curious to see if I find it's turned on when I test C-band next week. T-Mobile would also like to remind everyone it isn't using C-band and doesn't have to bother with all the FAA nonsense.