This time, in a Las Vegas ad with a New Year’s theme, Google is officially urging Apple to embrace the RCS communications standard.
The advertisement starts with the phrase “the ball may have dropped on 2022, but you don’t have to drop the ball on correcting your pixelated photographs and movies,” and then provides lines of RCS code “to get the ball rolling.”
An advertisement that appeared on a digital billboard near Harmon Corner in Las Vegas was captured on film by TikTok user Uptin and uploaded. According to a TikTok post by Uptin, over 56% of Americans use iOS, with Android coming in second with approximately 44% of the market.
A Google spokeswoman told Insider that the LED display “demonstrates Android’s aim to deliver more interoperability between devices, and providing a fantastic messaging experience across platforms,” and that Google would be present at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas.
The most recent pressure tactic used by Google to exert pressure on Apple
In August, Google started its #GetTheMessage campaign pleading with Apple to accept the RCS messaging standard.
In contrast to SMS and MMS, which it has referred to as “out-of-date” technology from the 1990s and 2000s, RCS, which stands for Rich Communication Services, is promoted by Google as “the new industry standard.”
Short Message Service, or SMS, was chosen to be replaced by RCS in 2008 because it runs over the internet rather than using a carrier’s bandwidth. RCS is therefore superior for sending GIFs, high-resolution images, and videos, as well as for group messaging.
Google’s campaign against Apple resumed in December with a “happy birthday” message for SMS, which will be 30 in 2022.
While I’m all for nostalgia, Neena Budhiraja, group product manager for Messages by Google, stated in the article that she also wanted to “look in the opposite direction.” “Today’s smartphones are so much more advanced; my first phone was nothing like my present one at all,” the author said.
Before the article was published, Insider immediately contacted Apple for comment.
According to Sanaz Ahari, who oversees Android and corporate communications at Google, “from a Google standpoint, we think every Android user should just have messaging over Wi-Fi,” noting that Android and Apple have “a lot of talks.”
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, claimed that he doesn’t frequently receive requests from Apple consumers asking for the messaging between iPhones and Android phones to be fixed. Buy your mom an iPhone, Cook advised a member of the audience with an iPhone when he was asked about problems with videos transmitted between him and his Android-owning mother.
