The green bubble problem
RCS was meant to solve Android to iPhone messaging, but all it did was add complexity.
I wrote a bunch about texting standards yesterday, and it turned into a full AppleInsider article. It isn't a piece seeking to blame anyone for the situation, but just lamenting the annoyances and hoping for a better solution.
Apple would sure love it if everyone just had an iPhone. But that isn't reality, no matter how cheap an iPhone it releases.
Green bubbles started as a way to ensure users knew if they were chatting for free or not. Yes, a blue bubble also meant end-to-end encryption, but that was less discussed at the start.
That green bubble still means you're chatting through a cellular service, which is handy to know, but beyond that, it has become a social stigma. I'm not happy about it, but that doesn't mean I don't also feel the friction every time I text someone with an Android phone.
Messages don't send or appear in a way that I expected. Sometimes they even send out of order. At times, I can't even get a message to go through, likely because of a carrier issue.
I think Apple needs to move past the bubbles. Label the chats, sure, but get rid of this artificial divide. No one should ever spend any time thinking about what chat they are in.
Even better, let users customize the bubbles. Let users choose the color for iMessage and encrypted RCS or basic SMS. We don't need the bubbles anymore.
Apple already has a solution in place, two in fact. The text field shows what protocol you're using in a chat. If it's not iMessage, it shows among the texts that something is SMS, RCS, or encrypted RCS when reviewing previous messages.
We don't need green versus blue.
Apple already introduced chat backgrounds in Messages – something I never thought would happen. Custom bubble colors are the next most obvious thing.
And that leans into my main story's request. I want Apple to make it so RCS and iMessage are nearly indistinguishable through some background magic. Never show the "person liked this" or other junk. Just intercept it and render it natively in the chat.
I already own an iPhone, so there's no reason to make chatting with Android users worse.