Google's new site asks for mercy from Apple in message war

Expand / A few of the many Google mail logos. Can you name them all? Ron Amadeo

Google hasn't been able to offer a stable and competitive email platform for years and has completely lost the email war to products with a long-term strategy. At least some divisions within the company realize how damaging this is to Google as a company, and now Google's latest strategy is to... beg mercy on its competitors? Google, which has launched 13 different messaging apps since launching iMessage in 2011, now says, "It's time for Apple to fix texting."

Google has launched a new website called "Get the Message": a public pressure campaign with a call to "tweet @Apple to #GetTheMessage and fix text messages". Google is hoping that public pressure will spur Apple to adopt RCS, a minor upgrade to the SMS standard that Apple uses for non-iMessage users. Google has been pushing this strategy since the start of the year, but coming from the company with the most dysfunctional email strategy in the world, it just seems like a company tired of reaping what it has sown.

Worldwide, iMessage isn't that popular (people tend to like Whatsapp), but in the US, iMessage is enough of a cultural phenomenon that Billboard Top 100 Songs wrote how bad it sucks to have a green iMessage bubble (SMS). One of Apple's biggest competitors, especially for online services, is Google, and Google's inability to compete with iMessage has contributed a lot to the current situation. Google apparently feels iMessage's dominance is detrimental to its brand, so now it's kindly asking Apple to stop beating it so hard.

The Google site says: "It's not about the color of the bubbles. It's blurry videos, interrupted group chats, missing read receipts and typing indicators, no texting over Wi-Fi, etc. These issues exist because Apple refuses to adopt modern texting standards when iPhone and Android phone users text each other."

A standard of 14 is "modern", right?

Some of Google's claims on this website don't make much sense. Google says: "Apple is turning texting between iPhones and Android phones into SMS and MMS, outdated technologies from the 90s and 2000s. But Apple may adopt RCS, the modern industry standard, for these threads instead. ." RCS isn't a modern standard either - it dates back to 2008 - and, despite some lackluster updates since then, hasn't kept pace.

RCS has been around for so long and is still so poorly implemented because it was created by carriers (through the GSMA) as a carrier-centric messaging standard. Carriers did this in the heyday of paid SMS, when carrier messaging was a real source of revenue. Now that operator messaging is commoditized, operators controlling the RCS no longer need to worry about the RCS. RCS is a zombie spec.

In Google's defense, SMS is from 1986, so RCS is more modern than that. It's probably more of a sign that you should never work with the GSMA if you don't have to. If Google and Apple teamed up to create an email duopoly, they wouldn't need carriers or their old email standard.

Google's proprietary fork of RCS

Being 2008 means RCS lacks a lot of what you would expect from a modern messaging standard. First, as a standard, RCS is carrier messaging, so messages go to a single carrier phone number, rather than multiple devices via the Internet, as one would expect a modern service to work. As standard, there is no encryption. Google has tried to glorify features on the aging RCS spec, but if you consider these as part of the RCS sales pitch, which Google does, it's more like you selling "Google's proprietary RCS fork" . Google would really like Apple to integrate its proprietary RCS fork into iMessage.

Google's version of RCS, the one promoted on the website with...