Google’s making RCS messaging with iPhone out to be win for Android users, which is surely true from their perspective. They’re marketing RCS on iOS as a feature for Android. Their marketing campaign centers around how Apple is supposedly, finally, starting to “get the message.”
Making fun of competition for being late to the game is this industry’s hallmark feature, but I’m not so sure Google has a stellar messaging record to be boasting about it. Especially when compared with Apple.

Instant messaging has a longer history than smartphones, and I don’t want to get into that. Instead, I’ll start with MMS (multimedia messaging service), which was in Android 1.0 in 2008 and iPhoneOS 3.0 in 2009.
In 2011, Apple introduced iMessage on iPhone. It was cleverly integrated into the existing SMS/MMS app. Without having to download a new app or change any settings, new and existing chats between iPhone users simply became iMessage chats, giving them almost all the functionality RCS has today.
I’m sure there was noise about how iMessage was only for iOS users at the time, but BlackBerry had a similar thing going with BBM since 2005 that only worked among their customers as well. It wasn’t unheard of.
It’s hard to describe Google’s history of messaging because it’s so complicated. Google Talk started in 2005 inside Gmail, later getting its own Android app. While Apple was shipping iMessage, Google launched a social network called Google+ with a few messaging solutions: Messenger (a.k.a. Huddle) and Hangouts. Hangouts later broke out of Google+ and replaced their earlier Talk product in 2013.
But wait, there’s more. Google Messages (a.k.a. Messenger, Android Messages, and Messages by Google) was built to be an all-encompassing solution for messaging. They launched this product on Android in 2014. They also developed Google Chat (along with Google Meet) in 2017 with the intention to replace Hangouts in 2021.
That means there were overlapping messaging products from Google. Several of them were renamed, phased out, or merged into other apps. Google never had a cohesive vision for messaging, perhaps because different internal teams compete with each other about it.

Just to be clear, Google adopted RCS inside Google Messages in 2019. But perhaps more importantly, it was only made on-by-default in 2023. That’s right, just last year.
When Apple introduced iMessage back in 2011, it was part of a cohesive vision around messaging and communication that evolved from iChat. iChat on Mac OS X supported AIM and ICQ since 2002, Google Talk and Jabber since 2004. They folded in iMessage support in 2012, the year after iMessage support started on iOS. iChat dropped support for other protocols a few years later as the AIM protocol was shut down.
For 20 years, Apple’s messaging app on iOS and macOS has been a multi-protocol app, supporting different services simultaneously, from AIM and ICQ, to Jabber and Google Talk, to iMessage and SMS. And now RCS.
Over the years, while Apple maintained a single messaging application on each platform, Google launched and shut down several messaging apps. Google fumbled messaging for their own users, and let companies like Facebook own messaging on Android, with Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
And that’s what kinda blows my mind. Android users clearly benefit more than iOS users with interoperability, so why didn’t Google build a cross-platform messaging app so compelling that even iOS users would want to use it? Apple didn’t need to build iMessage for Android, but Google at any time could have built a great app on iOS.

Obviously, RCS is good for interoperability and I’m glad it’s here for everyone. But personally, I didn’t need RCS. While Google takes a victory lap for being just one-year earlier than Apple with RCS-by-default functionality, I’ve been using basically the same app since 2005, evolving along the way, without bumping around multiple separate solutions from a company that can’t make up its mind or resorting to third-party apps for messaging.
While I wouldn’t describe the experience of Apple’s evolution for messaging as seamless, it has always been presented to customers as a single app, with overlapping functionality. I think that approach instilled a sense of trust. In contrast, Google has always appeared to be flailing. So for them to be a little arrogant about this now is a bit …rich.

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