Apple has no incentive to make iMessage work better with Android

Last week, Google launched a new campaign calling on Apple to “fix texting” by adopting RCS messaging on iPhones, highlighting the various ways Apple’s insistence on keeping SMS as a fallback for iMessage hurts the texting experience for everyone, including iPhone users. It’s the latest development in the yearslong green bubble controversy, and Google is (still) making some good points. But it will take more than some sponsored public shaming by Vanessa Hudgens to change Apple’s mind about this.

When an iPhone texts another iPhone, messages are delivered through Apple’s iMessage platform, which includes all the modern messaging conveniences we’re familiar with, like typing indicators, read receipts, message reactions, and high-quality photos and videos. But if the person on the other end of that text isn’t using an iPhone (or has iMessage switched off), messages are instead sent by SMS or MMS.

If you haven’t experienced it yourself, you’ve probably at least heard of the green-bubble drama surrounding iPhone-to-Android texting. One-on-one conversations between Android phones and iPhones are old-fashioned SMS exchanges without any of the newer conveniences mentioned above. Google’s made it so its Messages app can interpret the Tapback spam texts generated when iPhone users “react” to SMS messages as proper inline reactions. Still, there’s no way to graft most modern messaging features onto the existing SMS framework.

The situation in group texts is even more dire. If just one person not on iMessage joins an iMessage chat with multiple participants, the entire chat is downgraded to MMS, making the experience worse for everyone involved. What’s more, participants that aren’t using iPhones have no way of leaving the conversation. In countries like the US that still overwhelmingly rely on preinstalled texting apps for communication, it’s easy to see how the added hassle of texting an Android user might gently dissuade some iPhone users from talking to people who don’t also own iPhones—especially when it comes to inviting them into more extensive chats.

Google is also calling attention to the fact that SMS and MMS are older and less secure than the RCS standard that’s now common on Android phones: While one-on-one RCS conversations are encrypted, SMS and MMS conversations aren’t.

A new Get the Message page on Android.com spells all this out in simple terms, highlighting where Apple’s reliance on SMS for iMessage’s fallback is terrible not only for Android users but for Apple’s customers, too. It’s hard to find fault with any of Google’s arguments here, but they all seem to ignore a key fact: All of this is good for Apple.

Falling back to RCS rather than SMS would indeed make for a better texting experience for iPhone and Android users alike—with support for features like large media files and read receipts, RCS offers a lot of what makes iMessage desirable and could alleviate most of the friction involved in including Android users in iPhone group chats. But that friction is also part of what keeps iPhone users returning upgrade after upgrade. If buying a Pixel 7 means everybody you want to talk to will become harder to communicate with overnight, you’ll probably buy whatever the newest iPhone is.

While plenty of big tech companies offer entire ecosystems of products (as I write this, I’m using a Samsung phone connected to both a Samsung watch and Samsung earbuds), Apple is singularly infamous for its ecosystem lock-in. Its hardware business is largely predicated on making sure its customers want to buy more Apple products—not necessarily because they love the ones they already have, but because buying anything else would be a hassle.

RCS in iMessage would be a crack in Apple’s garden wall big enough for some customers to slip out through. No amount of blame from Google, however rightly placed, is going to make that an attractive proposition for the sixth-largest company on the planet.