“Riverdale” star Madelaine Petsch recently posted a tearful video to Instagram, apologizing for blaming Android users for their subpar texts.
“None of this was your fault,” she says. “It was Apple’s.”
Turns out, Petsch’s video is part of Android’s #GetTheMessage campaign to get Apple to make cross-platform texting more equitable.
What’s the deal?
Though people often joke about iPhone blue vs. Android green bubbles, it goes deeper.
Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) are two types of texting tech, dating back to 1992 and 2002, respectively.
- The former allows for short text messages; the latter incorporates media like pics and emoji.
In 2007, Rich Communication Services (RCS) came along, adding read receipts, support for video calls and sending documents, and more.
Android considers RCS the modern standard.
But Apple…
… built iMessage instead, which has a lot of the same bells and whistles.
Users can send large files, share location info, and it offers end-to-end encryption. It works over the internet and syncs to all your devices — if they’re Apple products.
But iMessage doesn’t work on anything that isn’t Apple. When Android users text iOS users, Apple converts their message to SMS/MMS.
This leads to:
- Unsent texts, as SMS and MMS don’t always support texting over WiFi
- Pixelated photos and video
- No end-to-end encryption
- No read receipts or typing indicators
If Apple switched to RCS, Android would consider the problem solved. Until it does, the campaign marches on.
And now, here’s Android using a Drake song to be passive-aggressive.
