Well, here’s something you don’t see on many “normal” news days, let alone a Sunday. Google’s official Android Twitter account, which is typically used, well, to advertise special Android features and key “selling points” in a fairly straightforward and uncontroversial manner, is making serious waves with a rare Apple jab disguised as an “unofficial lyric explainer video” of one of Drake’s latest songs.
Impressively, this comes just 48 hours or so after the surprise release of the “Texts Go Green”-including “Honestly, Nevermind” album. Of course, said track’s title made Big G’s mission to call out its arch-rival for resisting adoption of the RCS protocol pretty easy, especially after doing the same (minus the timely pop culture reference) a number of times in the recent past.
While extremely simple in its execution (some might even say rudimentary), the 38-second video featuring the catchy “Texts Go Green” audio intro and a short PSA narrated by the robotic Google text-to-speech voice manages to be both highly informative (just ask none other than Ryan Reynolds) and decidedly effective in bringing negative attention to Apple.
Technically, Google doesn’t mock or openly criticize its competition here, even resorting to (sarcastic) flattery to plead for “some super talented engineering team” at Apple to do the right thing in the complicated matter of messaging service fragmentation.
For those of you who’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, the search giant behind the world’s most popular mobile operating system has championed the widespread adoption of Rich Communication Services (RCS), working hard towards the technology’s goal of enriching everyone’s basic texting experience together with all the three major US carriers.
Unsurprisingly, Apple has yet to join the initiative, making life unnecessarily difficult for both Android and iPhone users. For instance, end-to-end encryption can’t be used between the two platforms, and the same goes for many other useful features that are separately supported by Apple’s iMessage app and all the various RCS implementations on the market today.
On top of everything, we’re obviously dealing with a chromatic issue here as well, which Apple could also easily fix by integrating RCS into its iMessage service and stopping texts from going “green.” Of course, green and blue bubbles may very well still be a thing even if the Cupertino-based tech giant cracks under all this public pressure and decides to extend Google an olive branch… at some point in the future. Until then, we can probably all agree on one thing: that Drake song is an absolute banger.
