Rapper Drake's new album includes a song that mentions Android and the infamous green text bubble on iMessage.
Google, which is in the middle of a campaign to get Apple to support the RCS platform, used the song to help its cause.
In the tweet, Google wrote, "The Android team thinks Drake's new song "Texts Go Green" is a real banger. It refers to the phenomenon when an iPhone user gets blocked. Or tries to text someone who doesn't have an iPhone. Either way, it's pretty rough. If only some super-talented engineering team at Apple would fix this. Because this is a problem only Apple can fix. They just have to adopt RCS, actually. It would make texting more secure too. Just sayin'. Great track tho."
Years ago that may have been true, but Messages combined with RCS support (and other carriers with their own apps supporting that should you not buy a Pixel) has been pretty uniform. If Apple would get on board then it would be a non issue by now.
I mirror what Pxtl says, Messages frequently breaks where I can be messaging someone and maybe an hour or so later it tells me the recipient is "offline" and the message wasn't delivered! No fail over, just fails to send and only notifies me a random amount of time later.
Messages doesn't even consistently fail-over to SMS if the client is unreachable through the internet. The feature exists, but it rarely works.
Messages is bad software, and has been for quite some time. Google pointing to that embarrassing trash as their heroic standard for messaging is ridiculous.
They have nobody to blame but themselves for green bubbles. I'm a die-hard Android user but their reputation on this front is well-earned.
And yet Google had not yet added RCS support to Google Fi "messages for web" (the service to access voice and sms without connecting to a phone) after several years.
It is that site, but for Google Fi users, it has an option to switch from being an interface to your phone (which includes RCS features) to an independent online service (much like Google Hangouts used to be). But selecting that option is only supported for Fi and it will not support RCS on either the website OR the phone.
Yeah, they should just adopt so called "standard" protocol implemented in 1 app available from 1 app repository for 1 operating system, with no open server implementation available, that even being internet based is totally tied to phone carrier and supports just bare minimum of features expected in modern chat app.
Jabber has been an available standard for over 20 years. Google jumped onto it and then jumped off in their infamous cycle of ADHD on the subject of instant messaging. They have nobody to blame but themselves for the "green speech bubbles" problem -- they could have a lot more credibility here.
For the technically skilled, there is BlueBubbles to get iMessage on Android. I set this up recently and it works quite well. I'm running a MacOS Ventura virtual machine using docker-osx on one of my personal servers and pretty much all iMessage functionality is available. I modified the Android (flutter) project locally to get my own push notifications working using my self-hosted ntfy instance as a UnifiedPush provider instead of needing to use Firebase.
There is also Beeper which bridges iMessage and many other chat services in one app, but I wanted something fully open source that I can manage myself, plus I think there's still a wait-list and I didn't want to hand over my Apple ID to a third party.
It's hard trying to convince people (esp. iPhone users) to use a cross platform solution because they perceive us Android users as the problem and they know iMesssge just works. And for the non- technical, that's understandable even if frustrating. So as a software engineer, I am the one making accomodations so they can still use iMessage. But it also made for a fun project for me to learn about.
Yup. I just got the pixel 8 today from a 13 pro. Set up blue bubbles. Just gotta have people put in my email address in my contact and it works just fine
Google's phone service Fi had an option to handle messages and calls on a web site without needing to connect to your phone (useful if your phone is bricked or lost).
But it can't support RCS, because apparently it would be "too hard".
_Discussion of RCS vis-à-vis Msg4Fi:
Many posts lament that RCS is not supported when using Msg4Fi. Implementing RCS is a massive undertaking as evidenced by the years it took the industry, carriers and device manufacturers to implement the many protocols and services. There are dozens of specification docs, many 100's of pages long. To get RCS working on the web will require duplicating the development that went into Messages - to have the web client be a full fledged RCS client without the phone on._
Telegram has a lot of advantages over text and RCS, but I'd rather not be tied down to a profile like that rather then a phone number. A phone number can be brought to various services at least.
In the song, Drake raps about not answering someone's phone call and says, "She call my number, leave her hangin', she got dry cleaned. She got an Android, her messages is lime green."