Tim Cook on RCS for iMessage: "Buy an iPhone for your mother"

For years, Google has been trying to persuade Apple to support RCS for texting so that advanced chat features like sending stickers and GIFs back and forth work. Apple is not cooperating with this and Google has launched an ‘rcs offensive’ on social media. Tim Cook has now commented on the problem between the green and blue message bubbles.

What is RCS?

RCS is the successor to SMS and Google has made this communication protocol available worldwide for all Android users – also in the Netherlands. It is a form of enriched text messages that can be sent with Google’s Messages app. With an ‘old’ SMS you can send text or an image (MMS). Text messages sent with RCS are much more similar to messages sent with apps like WhatsApp. For example, you can send more photos at the same time, have group conversations and see when someone is typing. That is why you can see RCS as the successor of the classic SMS.

Enable RCS Features

The new chat features in the Messages app appear to be enabled for everyone remotely. To check this, follow these steps:

1. Open the Messages app
2. Tap the three dots at the top right
3. Tap ‘Settings’ and then ‘Chat Features’
4. Activate ‘Enable chat features’

Apple does not participate in RCS

Google has worked with carriers and other parties for years to roll out RCS to everyone, including iPhone users. Apple isn’t that interested in that, also because those advanced chat functions are already in Apple’s own iMessage to sit. So both Google’s Messages app and Apple’s iMessage app support smart chat features, but they don’t work cross platform. Messages from Android users thus arrive as a simple text message in iMessage and can be recognized by the green message bubble instead of the blue one. That color in iMessage represents regular text messages, and that means there’s no support for advanced chat features like sending stickers and GIFs.

At the end of last year, Google’s vice president called on Apple to roll out RCS messages for its iPhones, but Apple kept its foot down. iMessage was supposed to keep iPhone users in the Apple ecosystem, leaked conversations revealed. Google decided to take action itself and started hiding text and converting it to an emoji. At the beginning of this year, Google’s call to make RCS available for iPhones grew stronger. In America, children with an Android are bullied because they can only send simple text messages to iPhones.

Since then, you will regularly see the RCS call addressed to Apple on Android’s Twitter account and Instagram account. Repetition is the advice, the social media people at Google must have thought, because it starts on a real RCS campaign to seem.

Response Tim Cook

A response from Apple was of course inevitable, although we had to wait a long time for it. Yesterday was the day, Apple CEO, Tim Cook commented in an interview. That reports The Verge. Cook pointed out that iPhone users don’t miss RCS support, at least they don’t ask for it. Subsequently, the interviewer noticed that his mother cannot see the videos he sends her. If both messaging systems that have higher quality images and videos worked together, then that problem wouldn’t be there. Also, sending a video from Android to iOS (or vice versa) causes poor resolution on the receiver’s side. Cook’s suggestion for solving this annoying problem is below.

Buy your mom an iPhone.

What do you think? Should Apple finally work on RCS for iMessage, or have you been satisfied with messaging apps like WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram for a long time? Let us know in the comments at the bottom of this article.