iPager: Google’s Latest Poke At Apple’s Use of SMS

Google continues to make fun of Apple’s use of SMS for messaging Android users, running an Apple-like reveal of the “iPager” in its latest video.

While Apple’s iMessage is wildly popular among iPhone users, iOS falls back to old-fashioned SMS text messages when texting with an Android device. Apple does this despite the advent of RCS, which is the iMessage-like successor to SMS.

Google has long maintained that Apple should keep iMessage for iPhone-to-iPhone communication but fall back to RCS for iPhone-to-Android texts. Doing so would give users on both ends of the conversation a superior experience and keep conversations protected with end-to-end encryption, something woefully lacking in SMS.

Apple has resisted all such calls to adopt RCS, seeing iMessage as a way to keep users locked into the company’s ecosystem, prompting Google to release a humorous video highlighting how un-Apple-like such a stance really is.