What you need to know
- Google, alongside several other EU companies, has written a letter to the European Commission in hopes of forcing Apple to adopt the RCS messaging standard.
- Apple has remained adamant against adopting the standard, suggesting that users utilize more than one messaging app and such a move isn't required.
- In September, the EU stated it would launch an investigation into whether or not Apple will need to adopt RCS messaging into iMessage.
It looks like Google is ramping up its efforts to get Apple to adopt the RCS messaging standard into iMessage.
According to The Financial Times, a senior vice president from Google, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, and Orange have signed a letter penned to the European Commission (via The Verge). The letter's purpose is to argue that Apple's iMessage should qualify as a "core platform service" within the EU's Digital Markets Act.
"It is paramount that businesses can reach all their customers taking advantage of modern communications services with enriched messaging features," the letter reads. "Through iMessage, business users are only able to send enriched messages to iOS users and must rely on traditional SMS for all the other end users."
Additional data to back this up explains that there are nearly 10,000 monthly active business users. Google and others are using this estimation of users in business-related fields as a catalyst for the Commission to reevaluate iMessage's status within its latest DMA ruling.
As a rebuttal, Apple tells The Financial Times that consumers "have access to a wide variety of messaging apps, and often use many at once, which reflects how easy it is to switch between them."
The iPhone maker's statement to the Financial Times is also nothing new as it was a counterargument the company put forth during the EU's ruling back in September. It's worth noting that any such high-quality features that Apple provides through iMessage are only present for iPhone-to-iPhone messaging.
When an Android user is involved, as mentioned in the letter's statement, that goes away with photo and video quality dipping and group chats breaking completely. Not to mention the green and blue bubble fiasco.
To clarify, a company labeled as a "gatekeeper," with apps gaining core platform service status, is meant to encourage more healthy forms of competition among some large names in big tech such as Google, Apple, Amazon, and several more. The EU branded 22 services provided by these gatekeepers as a core platform service, but Apple's iMessage was not among them.
However, it's not like the EU has simply left things as they are. The European Commission stated in September that it is launching an investigation into whether or not Apple's iMessage falls into core platform service status, and if so, it will need to adopt the new RCS messaging standard, bringing with it more security for the user and more.
This is only the latest attempt at breaking down the harsh barrier between Apple's iPhone messenger and Android. Google recently made another push through its #GetTheMessage campaign, creating the "iPager" device while Samsung even started getting in on it, too.
