Serious allegations against Apple: Bullying as a sales strategy?

Apples like to pat themselves on the back for their social conscience. An allegation now causes scratches on the image. It’s about iMessage – and how a small feature can lead to bullying among students.

WhatsApp is the measure of all things for messengers – at least in Germany. In the USA, however, the situation is different. Many teenagers use iMessage as a messaging service to communicate with family and friends. The problem: iMessage only works with Apple devices such as iPhone or Mac. If you write to a friend with an iPhone as an Android user, their message will be sent as an SMS and will appear in iMessage as a green bubble instead of a blue one. According to the Wall Street Journal, this small difference in treatment has led to a bullying problem among students.

Google accuses Apple: iMessage is said to promote bullying

Google manager Hiroshi Lockheimer took the WSJ report as an opportunity to publicly shoot at Apple. “Using peer pressure and bullying to sell products is disingenuous for a company that talks about humanity and equality in its advertising”, so the 47-year-old on Twitter, who oversees Android, Chrome OS and the Google Play Store at Google. “The standards already exist today to change that.”

What Lockheimer means: RCS. This is an open communication standard that makes it possible for a wide variety of messengers to be compatible with one another. RCS has also been touted in the past as “the reinvention of SMS”. If iMessage supported RCS, the Google manager apparently thought, the messages from Android users would no longer have to be displayed as a green bubble in iMessage – and the bullying would disappear.

iMessage is one of many alternatives for WhatsApp:

Apples is unlikely to give in to the demands

However, it is unlikely that Apple will open iMessage for RCS. Insinuating that the US company wants to sell products with peer pressure and bullying is a strong piece and a gross exaggeration on the part of Lockheimer. But one thing is also clear: Apple’s much-cited ecosystem, in which everything works as if by magic, is a strong selling point. However, this only works because Cupertino controls everything from head to toe. Any opening, no matter how small, would be a potential disruptive factor here. Apple would therefore be a fool to give in to the demands.