Archiv für den Monat Januar 2022

After ruining Android messaging, Google says iMessage is too powerful

Google failed to compete with iMessage for years. Now it wants Apple to play nice.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/after-ruining-android-messaging-google-says-imessage-is-too-powerful/

Google took to Twitter this weekend to complain that iMessage is just too darn influential with today’s kids. The company was responding to a Wall Street Journal report detailing the lock-in and social pressure Apple’s walled garden is creating among US teens. iMessage brands texts from iPhone users with a blue background and gives them additional features, while texts from Android phones are shown in green and only have the base SMS feature set. According to the article, „Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones.“ Google feels this is a problem.

„iMessage should not benefit from bullying,“ the official Android Twitter account wrote. „Texting should bring us together, and the solution exists. Let’s fix this as one industry.“ Google SVP Hiroshi Lockheimer chimed in, too, saying, „Apple’s iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy. Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this.“

The „solution“ Google is pushing here is RCS, or Rich Communication Services, a GSMA standard from 2008 that has slowly gained traction as an upgrade to SMS. RCS adds typing indicators, user presence, and better image sharing to carrier messaging. It is a 14-year-old carrier standard, though, so it lacks many of the features you would want from a modern messaging service, like end-to-end encryption and support for non-phone devices. Google tries to band-aid over the aging standard with its „Google Messaging“ client, but the result is a lot of clunky solutions that don’t add up to a good modern messaging service.

Since RCS replaces SMS, Google has been on a campaign to get the industry to make the upgrade. After years of protesting, the US carriers are all onboard, and there is some uptake among the international carriers, too. The biggest holdout is Apple, which only supports SMS through iMessage.

Apple's green-versus-blue bubble explainer from its website.
Enlarge / Apple’s green-versus-blue bubble explainer from its website.
Apple

Apple hasn’t ever publicly shot down the idea of adding RCS to iMessage, but thanks to documents revealed in the Epic v. Apple case, we know the company views iMessage lock-in as a valuable weapon. Bringing RCS to iMessage and making communication easier with Android users would only help to weaken Apple’s walled garden, and the company has said it doesn’t want that.

In the US, iPhones are more popular with young adults than ever. As The Wall Street Journal notes, „Among US consumers, 40% use iPhones, but among those aged 18 to 24, more than 70% are iPhone users.“ It credits Apple’s lock-in with apps like iMessage for this success.

Reaping what you sow

Google clearly views iMessage’s popularity as a problem, and the company is hoping this public-shaming campaign will get Apple to change its mind on RCS. But Google giving other companies advice on a messaging strategy is a laughable idea since Google probably has the least credibility of any tech company when it comes to messaging services. If the company really wants to do something about iMessage, it should try competing with it.

As we recently detailed in a 25,000-word article, Google’s messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google’s CEO, no division is really „in charge“ of messaging. As a consequence, the company has released 13 half-hearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011. If Google wants to look to someone to blame for iMessage’s dominance, it should start with itself, since it has continually sabotaged and abandoned its own plans to make an iMessage competitor.

 

Messaging is important, and even if it isn’t directly monetizable, a dominant messaging app has real, tangible benefits for an ecosystem. The rest of the industry understood this years ago. Facebook paid $22 billion to buy WhatsApp in 2014 and took the app from 450 million users to 2 billion users. Along with Facebook Messenger, Facebook has two dominant messaging platforms today, especially internationally. Salesforce paid $27 billion for Slack in 2020, and Tencent’s WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, is pulling in 1.2 billion users and yearly revenues of $5.5 billion. Snapchat is up to a $67 billion market cap, and Telegram is getting $40 billion valuations from investors. Google keeps trying ideas in this market, but it never makes an investment that is anywhere close to the competition.
 
 

Google once had a functional competitor to iMessage called Google Hangouts. Circa 2015, Hangouts was a messaging powerhouse; in addition to the native Hangouts messaging, it also supported SMS and Google Voice messages. Hangouts did group video calls five years before Zoom blew up, and it had clients on Android, iOS, the web, Gmail, and every desktop OS via a Chrome extension.

As usual, though, Google lacked any kind of long-term plan or ability to commit to a single messaging strategy, and Hangouts only survived as the „everything“ messenger for a single year. By 2016, Google moved on to the next shiny messaging app and left Hangouts to rot.

Even if Google could magically roll out RCS everywhere, it’s a poor standard to build a messaging platform on because it is dependent on a carrier phone bill. It’s anti-Internet and can’t natively work on webpages, PCs, smartwatches, and tablets, because those things don’t have SIM cards. The carriers designed RCS, so RCS puts your carrier bill at the center of your online identity, even when free identification methods like email exist and work on more devices. Google is just promoting carrier lock-in as a solution to Apple lock-in.

Despite Google’s complaining about iMessage, the company seems to have learned nothing from its years of messaging failure. Today, Google messaging is the worst and most fragmented it has ever been. As of press time, the company runs eight separate messaging platforms, none of which talk to each other: there is Google Messages/RCS, which is being promoted today, but there’s also Google Chat/Hangouts, Google Voice, Google Photos Messages, Google Pay Messages, Google Maps Business Messages, Google Stadia Messages, and Google Assistant Messaging. Those last couple of apps aren’t primarily messaging apps but have all ended up rolling their own siloed messaging platform because no dominant Google system exists for them to plug into.

The situation is an incredible mess, and no single Google product is as good as Hangouts was in 2015. So while Google goes backward, it has resorted to asking other tech companies to please play nice with it while it continues to fumble through an incoherent messaging strategy.

Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble

The iPhone maker cultivated iMessage as a must-have texting tool for teens. Android users trigger a just-a-little-less-cool green bubble: ‘Ew, that’s gross.’

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-teens-dread-the-green-text-bubble-11641618009

https://images.wsj.net/im-464252/square

Soon after 19-year-old Adele Lowitz gave up her Apple AAPL 0.51% iPhone 11 for an experimental go with an Android smartphone, a friend in her long-running texting group chimed in: “Who’s green?”

The reference to the color of group text messages—Android users turn Apple Inc.’s iMessage into green bubbles instead of blue—highlighted one of the challenges of her experiment. No longer did her group chats work seamlessly with other peers, almost all of whom used iPhones. FaceTime calls became more complicated and the University of Michigan sophomore’s phone didn’t show up in an app she used to find friends.

That pressure to be a part of the blue text group is the product of decisions by Apple executives starting years ago that have, with little fanfare, built iMessage into one of the world’s most widely used social networks and helped to cement the iPhone’s dominance among young smartphone users in the U.S. 

How that happened came to light last year during Apple’s courtroom fight against “Fortnite” maker Epic Games Inc., which claimed the tech giant held an improper monopoly over distribution of apps onto the iPhone. As part of the battle, thousands of pages of internal records were made public. Some revealed a long-running debate about whether to offer iMessage on phones that run with Google’s Android operating system. Apple made a critical decision: Keep iMessage for Apple users only. 

“In the absence of a strategy to become the primary messaging service for [the] bulk of cell phone users, I am concerned the iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s chief software executive, said in a 2013 email. Three years later, then-marketing chief Phil Schiller made a similar case to Chief Executive Tim Cook in another email: “Moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us,” he said. Another warning that year came from a former Apple executive who told his old colleagues in an email that “iMessage amounts to serious lock-in.” 

When Adele Lowitz, left, experimented with using an Android smartphone instead of an iPhone, one friend asked: ‘Who’s green?’ PHOTO: STEVE KOSS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

When Adele Lowitz, left, experimented with using an Android smartphone instead of an iPhone, one friend asked: ‘Who’s green?’ PHOTO: STEVE KOSS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

From the beginning, Apple got creative in its protection of iMessage’s exclusivity. It didn’t ban the exchange of traditional text messages with Android users but instead branded those messages with a different color; when an Android user is part of a group chat, the iPhone users see green bubbles rather than blue. It also withheld certain features. There is no dot-dot-dot icon to demonstrate that a non-iPhone user is typing, for example, and an iMessage heart or thumbs-up annotation has long conveyed to Android users as text instead of images. 

Apple later took other steps that enhanced the popularity of its messaging service with teens. It added popular features such as animated cartoon-like faces that create mirrors of a user’s face, to compete with messaging services from social media companies. Apple’s own survey of iPhone holders made public during the Epic Games litigation found that customers were particularly fond of replacing words with emojis and screen effects such as animated balloons and confetti. Avid teen users said in interviews with The Wall Street Journal that they also liked how they could create group chats with other Apple users that add and subtract participants without having to start a new chain. 

How Apple’s iPhone and Apps Trap You in a Walled GardenYOU MAY ALSO LIKEUP NEXT 0:00 / 6:21How Apple’s iPhone and Apps Trap You in a Walled Garden How Apple’s iPhone and Apps Trap You in a Walled GardenApple’s hardware, software and services work so harmoniously that it is often called a “walled garden.” The idea is central to recent antitrust scrutiny and the Epic vs. Apple case. WSJ’s Joanna Stern went to a real walled garden to explain it all. Photo illustration: Adele Morgan/The Wall Street Journal

The cultivation of iMessage is consistent with Apple’s broader strategy to tie its hardware, software and services together in a self-reinforcing world—dubbed the walled garden—that encourages people to pay the premium for its relatively expensive gadgets and remain loyal to its brand. That strategy has drawn scrutiny from critics and lawmakers as part of a larger examination of how all tech giants operate. Their core question: Do Apple and other tech companies create products that consumers simply find indispensable, or are they building near-monopolies that unfairly stifle competition?

Apple in its fight against Epic Games denied it held improper monopoly power in the smartphone market, pointing to intense competition globally with other phone makers and Android’s operating system. “With iMessage we built a great service that our users love and that is different from those offered by other platforms,” the company said in a statement.

Apple and other tech giants have long worked hard to get traction with young users, hoping to build brand habits that will extend into adulthood as they battle each other for control of everything from videogames to extended reality glasses to the metaverse. Globally, Alphabet Inc.’s Android operating system is the dominant player among smartphone users, with a loyal following of people who are vocal about their support. Among U.S. consumers, 40% use iPhones, but among those aged 18 to 24, more than 70% are iPhone users, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners’s most recent survey of consumers.

Shoppers at an Apple store in November.

PHOTO: NIYI FOTE/ZUMA PRESS

Apple is not the first tech company to come up with a must-have chat tool among young people, and such services sometimes struggle to stay relevant. BlackBerry and America Online were among the popular online communication forums of past decades that eventually lost ground to newer entrants. 

Yet grabbing users so early in life could pay dividends for generations for Apple, already the world’s most valuable publicly traded company. It briefly crossed $3 trillion in market value for the first time on Jan. 3. 

“These teenagers will continue to become consumers in the future and hopefully continue to buy phones into their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s,” said Harsh Kumar, an analyst for Piper Sandler. The firm recently found that 87% of teens surveyed last year own iPhones. 

Never date a green texter

Apple’s iMessage plays a significant role in the lives of young smartphone users and their parents, according to data and interviews with a dozen of these people. Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones. 

“In my circle at college, and in high school rolling over into college, most people have iPhones and utilize a lot of those kinds of iPhone specific features” together, said Ms. Lowitz, the Michigan student. 

She said she came to realize that Apple had effectively created a social network of features that keeps users, such as her and others, locked in. “There was definitely some kind of pressure to get back to that,” she said. 

Many of the new iMessage features—such as the 3D-like digital avatars known as memojis—exist fundamentally as a reason to own an iPhone and don’t make money for Apple directly. Last year Apple also made it possible to share FaceTime connections with Android users—a slight crack in Apple’s self-reinforcing ecosystem as video calling became more prevalent during the pandemic. In recent years, however, it has incorporated some moneymaking elements including Apple Pay and e-commerce links to other businesses such as Starbucks.

“We know that Apple users appreciate having access to innovative features like iCloud synching across all their Apple devices, Tapback and Memoji, as well as industry-leading privacy and security with end-to-end encryption—all of which make iMessage unique,” Apple said in a statement.Youthful ExuberanceThe share of Apple iPhones in the U.S. has swelled​dramatically among young smartphone owners. Source: Consumer Intelligence Research PartnersNote: Annual survey conducted each September of 2,000 U.S. people​who purchased a smartphone in the previous 12 months. Age 18-24Older than 242014’15’16’17’18’19’20’2120304050607080%

Apple’s iMessage uses the internet to send text, video and photo messages, while iPhone users communicating with non-Apple users use old-school cellular channels such as SMS and MMS. Apple said its closed, encrypted system ensures messages are protected from hackers. Apple also disputes the idea that users are locked in to iMessage, saying users can easily switch to other smartphones.

A Google executive said Apple could make it easier for iMessage and Android users to communicate. “There are no real technical or product reasons for this issue,” Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google senior vice president of platforms and ecosystems, said. “The solutions already exist and we encourage Apple to join with the rest of the mobile industry in implementing them. We believe people should have the ability to connect with each other without artificial limits. It simply doesn’t have to be like this.” TECH NEWS BRIEFINGWhat Apple’s Texting App Tells Us About Its Strategy to Attract Users 00:00

IPhone users switch among a variety of apps to communicate. But if you use an iPhone, it is likely you’re also using iMessage. Apple’s internal research made public during the Epic Games litigation found that a survey of U.S. iPhone users, some as young as 14, overwhelmingly use iMessage. Among those who used an instant messaging app at least once a month, 85% of those surveyed said they used iMessage compared with 57% and 16% using Meta’s Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, respectively, the Apple research showed. Meta’s messaging apps are widely used globally. WhatsApp, for example, topped 2 billion users in 2020.

In the pitched battle for messaging, Facebook executives in recent years became interested in capturing users at a younger age, according to documents reviewed by the Journal that formed the basis of a series of articles, called the Facebook Files, published in recent months. 

One Facebook study, shared internally in 2019, aimed to understand why iMessage and SnapInc.’s Snapchat were the primary messaging apps for 10- to 13-year-olds. The research focused attention on a popular game played through iMessage called “Game Pigeon.” 

The third-party game, acquired through Apple’s App Store and designed to operate in the messaging app, illustrates just one of the ways iMessages connects with young people. The game consists of users taking turns playing activities, such as checkers or word games, and allows for texting back-and-forth among players. “Game Pigeon” can’t be played between iPhone and Android users.

PHOTO: MILES FRANKLIN

Facebook researchers concluded the appeal revolved around the social aspect of the games, helping younger people initiate conversations. “Game Pigeon generates amusement through digital interaction without the pressures of finding topics of conversation by enabling tweens to send games as content interactions and to use shared activities as a way to connect when they feel there is nothing to talk about,” according to the study.

Rounds of “Game Pigeon” in high school among friends were the first time Miles Franklin said he realized he was left out with his Android phone. “That’s my first taste of it,” said Mr. Franklin, now a 22-year-old senior at the University of Florida in Gainesville. 

He said he long considered himself an Android loyalist going back to when he got his first phone at age 13 for his birthday. That changed, however, two years ago when he switched to an iPhone because he preferred it for making TikTok videos. 

While it seems simple enough to shift to another messaging service, it isn’t in real life, according to Mr. Franklin. “I personally would do that,” he said. “But I’m not everyone else. I can’t convince other people to switch over to another app because they’re not gonna want to do that unless you’re really close to them.” 

Grace Fang, 20-years-old, said she too saw such social dynamics among her peers at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. “I’ve had people with Androids apologize that they have Androids and don’t have iMessage,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s Apple propaganda or just like a tribal in-group versus out-group thing going on, but people don’t seem to like green text bubbles that much and seem to have this visceral negative reaction to it.” Ms. Fang added that she finds the hubbub silly and that she prefers to avoid texting all together. 

‘I’ve had people with Androids apologize that they have Androids and don’t have iMessage,” said Grace Fang.

PHOTO: ASHLEY PANDYA

Jocelyn Maher, a 24-year-old master’s student in upstate New York, said her friends and younger sister have mocked her for exchanging texts with potential paramours using Android phones. “I was like, `Oh my gosh, his texts are green,’ and my sister literally went, `Ew that’s gross,’” Ms. Maher said. 

She noted that she once successfully persuaded a boyfriend to switch to an iPhone after some gentle badgering. Their relationship didn’t last. 

Such interactions have made fertile ground for memes on social media. During the pandemic, Jeremy Cangiano, who just finished up his MBA at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, dealt with his boredom on TikTok, quickly noticing that blue-bubble-green-bubble memes were popular among young people. He tried to cash in on it last year by selling his own merchandise that touted, “Never Date a Green Texter.” 

‘Serious lock-in’

The blue iMessage bubble was born out of a simple engineering need, according to Justin Santamaria, a former Apple engineer who worked on the original feature. At first, Apple engineers just wanted to be able to easily identify iMessages when working with other texting formats as they developed their system, he said. The effect just stuck as it moved forward for consumer rollout. 

“I had no idea that there would be a cachet or like, `Ugh green bubble conversations,’” he said. The idea that it would keep users locked in to using Apple devices wasn’t even part of the conversation at the time, he said. 

The idea of opening iMessage to Android users arose in 2013, according to some of the internal records made public during the courtroom fight with Epic Games. As a market rumor circulated that Google was considering the acquisition of the popular messaging app WhatsApp, senior Apple executives discussed how such an acquisition might roil competition and how they might better compete. 

Eddy Cue, who oversees Apple’s services business, told his colleagues he had some of his team investigating how to make iMessage available on Android phones, according to an email that surfaced as part of the Epic Games litigation. “We should go full speed and make this an official project,” he advised. “Google will instantly own messaging with this acquisition.” 

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Mr. Schiller, the executive who at the time oversaw marketing, wrote: “And since we make no money on iMessage what will be the point?” Mr. Cue responded: “Do we want to lose one of the most important apps in a mobile environment to Google? They have search, mail, free video and growing quickly in browsers. We have the best messaging app and we should make it the industry standard. I don’t know what ways we can monetize it but it doesn’t cost us a lot to run.” 

Others weighed in. Mr. Federighi, Apple’s chief software executive, said in an email that he worried that making iMessage an option on Android could have a serious downside by removing an obstacle for iPhone families to get their children Android phones. 

In the end, Google didn’t buy WhatsApp and Apple didn’t make its iMessage available to Android users. Facebook ultimately acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for $22 billion, ratcheting up competition with Apple. 

In just a few years, the value of iMessage’s blue texts had become more clear to Apple execs. After an executive left the company and began using an Android, he wrote former colleagues in 2016 and said he had switched back to iPhones after just a few months.

His family resorted to using Facebook products to message him, former Apple Music executive Ian Rogers said in the email. “I missed a ton of messages from friends and family who all use iMessage and kept messaging me at my old address,” he wrote, adding that “iMessage amounts to serious lock-in.” 

The note, which became public during Apple’s litigation with Epic Games, eventually made its way to Mr. Cook through then-marketing chief Mr. Schiller, who added his own two cents: “Moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, this email illustrates why.” 

As for Ms. Lowitz, the Michigan college student, she was glad when her switch to Android—brought about by her participation in a paid research study—came to an end. She was ready to get back to her iPhone. “There’s too much within the Apple network for me to switch,” she said. 

Anna Fuder, 19, a friend at Michigan who had declined to participate in the study for fear of giving up her iPhone, was overjoyed. “As soon as she switched back to her iPhone, it was like hallelujah,” Ms. Fuder said. “Blue again.