Technology - Google News

After ruining Android messaging, Google says iMessage is too powerful - Ars Technica
Apple says App Store developers have earned more than $260 billion - The Verge
YouTuber leaves his Switch OLED running for 75 days for burn-in test - TechRadar

After ruining Android messaging, Google says iMessage is too powerful - Ars Technica

Posted: 10 Jan 2022 04:12 PM PST

Google took to Twitter this weekend to complain that iMessage is just too darn influential with today's kids. The company was responding to a Wall Street Journal report detailing the lock-in and social pressure Apple's walled garden is creating among US teens. iMessage brands texts from iPhone users with a blue background and gives them additional features, while texts from Android phones are branded green and only have the base SMS feature set. According to the article, "Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones." Google apparently feels this is a problem.

"iMessage should not benefit from bullying," the official Android Twitter account wrote. "Texting should bring us together, and the solution exists. Let's fix this as one industry." Google SVP Hiroshi Lockheimer chimed in too, saying "Apple's iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy. Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this."

The "solution" Google is pushing here is RCS, or Rich Communication Services, a GSMA standard from 2008 that has slowly gained traction as an upgrade to SMS. RCS adds typing indicators, user presence, and better image sharing to carrier messaging. It is a 14-year-old carrier standard though, so it lacks many things you would want from a modern messaging service, like end-to-end encryption and support for nonphone devices. Google tries to band-aid over the aging standard with its "Google Messaging" client, but the result is a lot of clunky solutions which aren't as good as a modern messaging service.

Since RCS replaces SMS, Google has been on a campaign to get the industry to make the upgrade. After years of protesting, the US carriers are all onboard, and there is some uptake among the international carriers, too. The biggest holdout is Apple, which only supports SMS though iMessage.

Enlarge / Apple's green-versus-blue bubble explainer from its website.
Apple

Apple hasn't ever publicly shot down the idea of adding RCS to iMessage, but thanks to documents revealed in the Epic v. Apple case, we know the company views iMessage lock-in as a valuable weapon. Bringing RCS to iMessage and making communication easier with Android users would only help to weaken Apple's walled garden, and the company has said it doesn't want that.

In the US, iPhones are more popular with young adults than ever. As the Wall Street Journal notes, "Among U.S. consumers, 40% use iPhones, but among those aged 18 to 24, more than 70% are iPhone users." It credits Apple's lock-in with apps like iMessage for this success.

Reaping what you sow

Google clearly views iMessage's popularity as a problem, and the company is hoping this public-shaming campaign will get Apple to change its mind on RCS. Having Google give other companies advice on a messaging strategy is a laughable idea though, since Google probably has the least credibility of any tech company when it comes to messaging services. If the company really wants to do something about iMessage, it should try competing with it.

As we recently detailed in a 25,000-word article, Google's messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google's CEO, no division is really "in charge" of messaging. As a consequence, the company has released 13 halfhearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011. If Google has anyone to blame for the iMessage's dominance, it should start with itself, since it has continually sabotaged and abandoned its own plans to make an iMessage competitor.

Messaging is important, and even if it isn't directly monetizable, a dominant messaging app has real, tangible benefits for an ecosystem. The rest of the industry understood this years ago. Facebook paid $22 billion to buy WhatsApp in 2014 and took the app from 450 million users to 2 billion users. Along with Facebook Messenger, Facebook has two dominant messaging platforms today, especially internationally. Salesforce paid $27 billion for Slack in 2020, and Tencent's WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, is pulling in 1.2 billion users and yearly revenues of $5.5 billion. Snapchat is up to a $67 billion market cap, and Telegram is getting $40 billion valuations from investors. Google keeps trying ideas in this market, but it never makes an investment that is anywhere close to the competition.

Google once had a functional competitor to iMessage in the past, called Google Hangouts. Circa 2015, Hangouts was a messaging powerhouse, which in addition to the native Hangouts messaging, also received SMS and Google Voice messages. Hangouts did group video calls five years before Zoom blew up, and it had clients on Android, iOS, the web, Gmail, and every desktop OS via a Chrome extension.

As usual though, Google lacked any kind of long-term plan or ability to commit to a single messaging strategy, and Hangouts only survived as the "everything" messenger for a single year. By 2016, Google moved on to the next shiny messaging app and left Hangouts to rot.

Even if Google could magically roll out RCS everywhere, RCS is a poor standard to build a messaging platform on because it is dependent on a carrier phone bill. It's anti-internet and can't natively work on webpages, PCs, smartwatches, and tablets, because those things don't have SIM cards. The carriers designed RCS, so RCS puts your carrier bill at the center of your online identity, even when free identification methods like e-mail exist and work on more devices. Google is just promoting carrier lock-in as a solution to Apple lock-in.

Despite Google's whining about iMessage, it seems to have learned nothing from its years of messaging failure. Today, Google messaging is the worst and most fragmented it has ever been. As of press time, the company runs eight separate messaging platforms, none of which talk to each other: there is Google Messages/RCS, which is being promoted today, but there's also Google Chat/Hangouts, Google Voice, Google Photos Messages, Google Pay Messages, Google Maps Business Messages, Google Stadia Messages, and Google Assistant Messaging. Those last couple apps aren't primarily messaging apps but have all ended up rolling their own siloed messaging platform because no dominant Google system exists for them to plug into.

It is an incredible mess, and no single Google product is as good as Hangouts was in 2015. So while Google goes backwards, it has resorted to asking other tech companies to please play nice with it while it continues to fumble though an incoherent, fragmented messaging strategy.

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Apple says App Store developers have earned more than $260 billion - The Verge

Posted: 10 Jan 2022 11:51 AM PST

App Store developers have earned more than $260 billion since the store launched in 2008, according to a Monday press release from Apple. Apple said last January that developers had earned more than $200 billion since the launch of the App Store, so the new figure shared Monday indicates developers earned $60 billion in 2021. The iPhone maker also said that spending on the App Store between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve in 2021 grew by a double-digit amount, though it didn't specify exactly what that number might be.

While the new numbers suggest that the App Store continues to be a big moneymaker, developer unhappiness with the store is high at the current moment. Many developers have taken issue with what they see as restrictive store policies, particularly the 30 percent cut Apple takes from many transactions. Apple is still embroiled in a legal dispute with Fortnite-maker Epic Games over the App Store, and although Apple arguably got off well from the Epic Games v. Apple ruling, that ruling has been put on hold, meaning Apple won't have to let developers point customers to alternative payment systems outside the App Store for the moment.

Monday's press release also included a stat first shared during its October earnings: there are more than 745 million paid subscriptions to services from developers and Apple. In recent years, Apple has added new premium services like News Plus, Fitness Plus, and Apple TV Plus to its roster of services offerings. The strategy seems to be paying off, given the new all-time high for services revenue reported during the October earnings, but it's unclear how many subscriptions to Apple's own services are counted in that 745 million.

Correction, January 10th, 6:19PM ET: The 745 million paid subscriptions to services includes subscriptions to both developers and Apple, not just Apple, as we originally reported. That number was also shared in its October earnings, not first on Monday as we said. We regret the errors.

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YouTuber leaves his Switch OLED running for 75 days for burn-in test - TechRadar

Posted: 10 Jan 2022 09:18 AM PST

A YouTuber has deliberately left his Switch OLED running for over 1800 hours in an experiment to determine how far the console's screen can be pushed before suffering from burn-in.

The stress test, conducted by YouTuber Wulff Den, involved leaving a static in-game screenshot of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on screen, at full brightness, at all hours of the day. While Wulff Den had originally planned to leave the image up for seven days, he continued running the experiment and released a video cataloging the results 11 weeks after the test began.

Those results are remarkably positive. "OLED burn-in should not be a concern to you, at all," the YouTuber summarises, finding there were no "noticeable burn-in marks" nearly 2000 hours after leaving the console running, and no difference in the color tests he ran comparing the initial and final screens.

"If you're worried about OLED burn-in on your Switch because you have like 2000 hours in a game, I think you can relax a little bit," he says. "I don't think it's a practical concern for anybody."

He does, however, point out that the whites of the image became slightly dimmed after the test, while some other hues took on a greenish tint. Regardless, that doesn't constitute the type of image retention that some fans were worried about.

Analysis: to burn or not to burn

Switch fans have been concerned over the possibility of burn-in ever since the console's OLED model was announced last year. Image retention has historically been a drawback of OLED screens, particularly TVs, and was reasonably expected to become a common occurrence here. Games often feature static images that appear on screen for long stretches of time - such as HUDs, logos, or main menus - worrying some that their lovely handhelds would quickly be ruined by permanent marks.

Wulff Den's video demonstrates that's unlikely to happen, however. Even if you rarely let your Switch leave your hands, 1800 hours will take you a long way into the lifespan of the console. The fact that no ghosting or marks of any kind appeared during Wulff Den's acid test suggests the boffins at Nintendo made great strides in reducing the chance of burn-in for the console.

We reckon you can rest fairly safe and sound in the knowledge that image retention won't be a major concern. You're probably better off making sure you don't drop the thing.

If you're still on the fence over whether the console is right for you, read our Nintendo Switch OLED review to make up your mind.

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