‘Buy Your Mom An Iphone,’ Apple’s Tim Cook Tells Man Complaining About Android Green Text Bubbles

Apple CEO Tim Cook Tells Man Complaining About Android Green Text Bubbles & Video Sending To Buy His Mom An Iphone

Apple CEO Tim Cook said Wednesday night that he doesn’t hear from many users that the company needs to fix Android-to-iPhone messaging.

At the annual Code Conference Wednesday night, Cook was answering audience questions when one man asked about improving cross-device messaging.

Cook replied, “I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy on that at this point. I would love to convert you to iPhone.” But the audience member held up an iPhone and then said he and his mom can’t send videos because she doesn’t have one. “Buy your mom an iPhone,” Cook said, prompting laughs from the crowd.

 

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Apple has long fielded criticism for not adopting what is called Rich Communications Services, or RSC, which is a modern industry standard to improve the image, video, and text quality of messages between devices. Apple currently uses SMS and MMS, decades-old methods of sending text-only messages.

This is why some users complain about poorly converted videos and other media when sending them between Android and iPhones. It’s also why Android texts appear green on iPhones — not blue like iMessages. The move has kept users locked into the Apple ecosystem for years, a fact that leadership acknowledged in legal documents revealed in 2021.

“Moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us,” Apple executive Phil Schiller said in one of the documents.

Google specifically has worked the issue into its marketing and has been publicly vocal about urging Apple to adopt RCS. In early August, Google took a blatant jab at Apple via a campaign on its website over what it says was the company’s failure to improve the user experience.