New Google site begs Apple for mercy in messaging war

Google is tired of losing so badly to iMessage, so it wants Apple to adopt RCS.

Read the whole story

 

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Google begging for mercy has echoes of Microsoft begging for mercy with a native YouTube app for Windows Phone circa 2012. Google even made sure to deprecate Microsoft's homemade app for YouTube when the former wouldn't bother with it.

Suck it, Google. What goes around comes around.

They did the same with the iOS YouTube app. Apples homebrew app was for a long time the only version because Google couldn’t be bothered and then when they finally did make their own App the Apple version was the much better version.

Then Google said „no you have to use our app“ and deprecated a lot of APIs that were used by third parties. I‘d argue that the last version of Apple‘s YouTube app was still better than even the current 2022 version from Google.

Google only cares about interoperability when they haven’t „won“ yet.

 

[Numfuddle]

Google begging for mercy has echoes of Microsoft begging for mercy with a native YouTube app for Windows Phone circa 2012. Google even made sure to deprecate Microsoft's homemade app for YouTube when the former wouldn't bother with it.

Suck it, Google. What goes around comes around.

They did the same with the iOS YouTube app. Apples homebrew app was for a long time the only version because Google couldn’t be bothered and then when they finally did make their own App the Apple version was the much better version.

Then Google said „no you have to use our app“ and deprecated a lot of APIs that were used by third parties. I‘d argue that the last version of Apple‘s YouTube app was still better than even the current 2022 version from Google.

Google only cares about interoperability when they haven’t „won“ yet.

Err...the iOS Youtube app was always provided by Google. The early versions of YouTube and Google Maps that were bundled were part of a partnership with Google, and Google actually copied/converted all the backend videos to a format the iPhone could decode in hardware to do it.

When the big falling out happened over maps and the deal expired, Apple did their own maps, and Youtube was just dropped as a bundled app, you were expected to use Safari. Google then submitted their Youtube app to the store as anyone else would.

No, the old (cathode ray TV icon) YouTube app provided with iOS 1 through 5 was internally developed by Apple after they got an API license from YouTube. YouTube had been a Google subsidiary for about three months when the original iPhone was first unveiled in January of 2007.

Which means that negotiations to use YouTube‘s APIs started before they were acquired by Google.

It was removed in iOS 6 after the original license agreement expired because Google had no interest to renew it in 2012 mostly because of „disagreements“ between Google and Apple over a variety of things among them Apple encroaching on Google‘s turf with the imminent release of Maps, Apple‘s stance on privacy and data protection and the fact that the Apple built App didn’t show Ads.

The Hunter Walk blog post goes into some of it

https://hunterwalk.com/2017/06/30/how-y ... hread/amp/

 

[Numfuddle]

This article reads more like an advertorial for Apple, than a serious analysis of the issue. Sure Google may be dreaming that Apple would ever do this, but there is a value to having a universal standards. People, around the world, still often have to fall back on SMS. Not everyone is on the same third party messaging platforms. It would be good if that standard could be updated.

And one of the big reasons, amongst several, that the universal standard is still SMS, from 1986, is because of Apple. If Apple embraced some form of RCS and came to the table with Google and the GSMA, maybe that fall back could be something a lot better than SMS, even if not up to the standards of Signal and other messaging apps.

Instead, Apple would rather use iMessage as a way to confuse their own users into thinking that iMessage "just works" and there something wrong with Android, because they really don't understand that what iMessage does is an entirely proprietary, backend Apple service, and has nothing to do with SMS. Honestly, almost no iPhone user I know understands this, they think the reason texts from Android phones look crappy on iMessage, is because something is wrong with Android phones, not because iMessage is mainly a closed system for iPhone users and purposely refuses to use RCS. At least with Signal and Whatsapp, etc., people understand that those are just separate messaging platforms.

I think a better startegy for Google would be to treat Apple to a dose of their own medicine. Make Google searches and Gmail and Google Maps worse on iPhones and Macs and have them appear is some odd color to denote that you're having a degraded experience because Apple products are not compatible with Google. Or show more and more obnoxious ads on iPhones and Macs, when using Google, Gmail, GMaps. Apple is essentially leveraging their closed ecosystem to make Android look bad, Google can play the same game.

How about returning to the Google of 2010 or so when they gave a shit about their products.

Google still does care about their products. You just do not understand that their primary product is, which is ads. All other things they do are a means to data mine and feed the ad business beast.

Going by just how bad their search has gotten over the last few years, how unusable and infested with junk it is and how bad and predatory the Adsense and paid search results have gotten I wouldn’t necessarily agree.

Google doesn’t even seem to give a fuck about ads anymore