There was a time, between the mid-1990s and the end of the first decade of this century, when SMS messages have become one of the most used systems for communication in the world. They were brief, instant, and while not exactly a cheap option in their early days, over the years they became cheaper to use, to the point where carriers started offering unlimited sending on their various plans, even the cheapest ones. .

A little later, MMS messages arrived, but their high price contributed to the fact that receiving them could cause additional expenses, since it was necessary to connect to the Internet in order to download them, caused its success rate to be much lower than that of SMS. In fact, you can say that they didn’t really succeed at all, but rather it was a pretty major failure. They only achieved “reasonable” usage fees because some polytone, background, game and other stores used them to send users what they just bought.

With the rise of smartphones and even more instant messaging for them, SMS has started to fall into oblivion to the extent that today, except in certain areas, its use is purely testimonial. However, both Android and iOS maintain more than necessary compatibility with them, offering a combination of SMS/MMS with its own messaging system in the same application.

The problem is that each platform uses a different system. While Android bets on RCS (Rich Communication Services, Enriched Communication Services), which is a format born from the GSMA initiative, Apple bets on its own format, the one used in Messages, incompatible with RCS. Thus, users of both platforms cannot communicate with each other through their devices’ native messaging apps without resorting to SMS.

Google has been pushing Apple to end this situation and adopt RCS for some time, and the latest step in this direction was campaign launch It’s time for Apple to fix text messaging, translated, It’s time for Apple to fix text messaging. A campaign that is summarized in the introductory text of your website:

«It’s not about the color of the bubbles [en referencia a que, en Mensajes, los SMS/MMS se muestran en burbujas verdes, mientras que los de iMessage lo hacen en azul]. This includes blurry videos, broken group chats, missing read and write receipts, the inability to send text messages over Wi-Fi, and much more. These problems exist because Apple refuses to adopt modern text messaging standards when people with iPhones and Android phones send text messages to each other.»

Google claims, not without reason, that “Apple is converting text messages between iPhones and Android phones to SMS and MMS, outdated technologies from the 1990s and 2000s.« to emphasize that those from Cupertino could adopt RCS and in this way allow users to communicate with each other, regardless of the platform they use, cCounting everything RCS offers over SMSa system made operational when connected to the Internet on phones was still an aspiration for the future.

The campaign mentions several important aspects for which this change would be more than desirable, from RCS operation over WiFi to, and I personally find this point key, end-to-end encryption. So Google is recommending alternative services, namely WhatsApp and Signal, as an alternative until Apple decides to make that leap, if it does. Now the big question is whether Apple will respond to this demand not only from Google, but also a large part of users by definitively adopting RCS, or whether, on the contrary, they prefer to leave iMessage as an exclusive communication platform between iPhones, forcing those who want to use Messages to communicate with Android users to they did so via SMS/MMS.