That sounds silly, but it's important enough that Apple executives were talking about it ten years ago. See the link from the article at https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609
> In the absence of a strategy to become the primary messaging service...iMessage on Android would serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones
That's from Craig Federighi, who is now the SVP at Apple in charge of all operating systems. If it were a minor silly thing, you probably wouldn't expect it to be talked about at the highest levels at Apple, would you?
Why not? I’ve been in C-level discussions where dark purple versus a slightly darker shade of purple turned into a weeklong shit show.
If so, it may have been important!
Yes, this is a framing that works for every strategic decision in business.
The C-level of a random software company talking about US-wide market lock-in is unlikely to make it work in practice. Apple has a very real chance of doing it.
No, they are nowhere close to locking down messaging.
Honestly, I missed that and my comment came out sounding like a gotcha when it should have just emphasized what you were saying. Sorry!
SMS doesn't support the concept of naming a group. That's not an OS limitation.
There's broadcast SMS (where the phone sends the same SMS to multiple people) and MMS groups.
I'll believe it when I see it. Judging from Apple's past behaviour, I wouldn't be surprised if RCS messages will be shown in Comic Sans or something.
Other issues are limitations by the OS, like Apple doesn’t let you change the group name for non-iMessage groups. Or Apple doesn’t let you replace the entire messaging app, so you’d need multiple apps to cover multiple channels.
The issues and OS limitations leads to things like kids bullying green bubbles (as silly as that sounds).
I don’t think Android users have a right to iMessage but I can understand the need to properly interpolate with each other here and it sounds like RCS will be just that when Apple adopts it.
I think that both Google took too long playing with new messaging apps and Apple took too long to actually want to make this experience better for Android-iPhone communication (which they’ve been pretty clear they’d only do due to pressure, since it helps them sell phones).
The pressure is great. Maybe we’ll actually have a good experience with RCS, but we will see…