iPhone users’ blue text bubbles under threat in EU
Christopher Hutton
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Google and major European mobile carriers are attempting to use new European Union digital laws to force Apple to share its iMessage blue bubbles with Android devices.
The search engine has long pressured Apple to abandon the unique encryption behind iMessage and embrace RCS, Google’s preferred DM encoding. The difference in encryption limits functionality between iPhones and Androids as well as colors texts green and blue, a distinction that has held social notoriety for years.
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Google is now stepping up the effort by urging the EU to crack down on the practice through the Digital Markets Act. The act sets regulations for tech companies it designates as “gatekeepers” and will go into effect in 2024.
“Consumers today have access to a wide variety of messaging apps, and often use many at once, which reflects how easy it is to switch between them,” Google and the European phone providers Vodafone and Orange argued, according to a letter sent to the European Commission and viewed by the Financial Times. “iMessage is designed and marketed for personal consumer communications, and we look forward to explaining to the commission why iMessage is outside the scope of the DMA.”
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The EU is currently investigating whether Apple’s iMessage encryption can be regulated under the new law. Apple argued that the law does not apply to iMessage due to it not being popular enough.
Google has spent years lobbying against iMessage’s encryption, arguing that RCS was the replacement for SMS, the previous texting standard used by most mobile phones. The search engine argues that iMessage limits what users can send over text messages and break most text messaging features.