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Hello! I hope you had a cool week. As in the temperature. Here in the New York/New Jersey area, you just can’t put on enough deodorant. Enough weather small talk—on to why Google wants to make texting easier between iPhone and Android friends. Plus, Apple brings the battery percentage reading back to iPhone lockscreens, Disney crushes it in the streaming world, and cord organizing gets serious because you, dear readers of this newsletter, are awesome nerds.
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CREDIT: CHAYA HOWELL/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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Back in June, when filming this documentary about the 15th anniversary of the iPhone, I interviewed Justin Santamaria, a former Apple engineering manager who led the development of iMessage:
Joanna: What problem were you trying to solve with iMessage?
Justin: We wanted to make messaging more reliable, more fun to use and give a better overall experience to a way of communication that people were using more and more.
Joanna: So, basically, text messaging sucked…
Justin: When text messaging worked it was great, but text messaging kind of sucked…
So in 2011, we got iMessage, and it became a lot smoother to message with others who had iPhones—and eventually those with iPads and Macs. Everyone is a blue bubble, and you get typing indicators, read receipts, high resolution video and photos and more.
But when messaging with the user of an Android smartphone or flip phone, it’s back to old, crappy texting—aka SMS or MMS messaging. And dun, dun, dun…green bubbles.
Now, Google has had it. This week the company launched a marketing campaign accusing Apple of breaking messaging. The search giant attempted to shame the iPhone maker into adopting the next-gen texting standard, Rich Communication Services or RCS. This new website boldly instructs people to tell Apple to “fix texting.” (Ironic, given what Mr. Santamaria said.) Apple hasn’t publicly responded, and an Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.
Here’s my take on it all:
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What does Google want?
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If Apple implements RCS, green-bubble messaging wouldn’t go away, but it would become more like blue-bubble messaging. Everyone would see helpful things like read receipts and typing indicators, and pictures and videos would come through at higher resolution.
And while the RCS standard isn’t end-to-end encrypted like iMessage, Google has added encryption to one-on-one chats, and is working on doing that for group chats. (More on encryption in messaging from my colleague Dalvin Brown here.)
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Will this public pressure work?
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I don’t think so—even if I do wish it would. Apple doesn’t have any business reason to adopt RCS. Sure, it would make it a better experience for both iPhone and Android users, but so would creating an iMessage app for Android, which the company has resisted for years. Either move could reduce the peer pressure to buy iPhones.
“iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” Craig Federighi, Apple senior vice president of software, wrote in a 2016 email to colleagues that was unearthed in the Epic lawsuit.
Plus, there may be additional security and privacy reasons why Apple isn’t embracing RCS right now.
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With WhatsApp and other messaging services, does this even matter?
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It depends on where you live. The iPhone is king in the U.S., but overseas, Android tends to reign supreme. Because of that, people choose cross-platform messaging apps such as WeChat and Meta’s WhatsApp, and the blue/green bubble debate doesn’t come up as much. So yeah, I’m not optimistic that RCS is coming to iPhones anytime soon.
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iPhone 🔋 Percentage Returns!!
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In November 2017 when the iPhone X was released, I wrote that Apple’s removal of the battery percentage from the iPhone’s upper right corner was harder on me than the “time my mom turned my childhood bedroom into a guest room.”
FIVE years later, Apple finally hears me. In iOS 16, expected next month, the company is bringing the percentage indicator back to its rightful home. You’ll no longer need to swipe down from the top right to see how much charge you’ve got left. It’s just there inside the battery icon, even when your iPhone is locked. The setting was spotted in a beta version of the operating system this week.
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CREDIT: JOANNA STERN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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New Samsung Foldable, Not Rollable 🧻
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Is this the year you buy a foldable phone? Probably not but, hey, Samsung’s got new ones! Like last year’s models, the $1,800 Galaxy Z Fold 4 still folds and the $1,000 Galaxy Z Flip 4 still flips, but they’re more durable, with slimmer hinges, stronger glass around the crease and stickier adhesives to keep the protective screens from peeling. Still, the prices are pretty steep for phones that are not as rugged as your average Android or iPhone and don’t really do a ton more. But you know what could be more useful than a folding phone? A rolling phone. Dalvin explores
that here.
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Disney: The New Stream Queen 👑
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Disney just dethroned Netflix as the streaming service with the most customers, but it’s a tight race. Across all of its streaming offerings, which includes Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu, its total subscriber base stands at 221.1 million, disclosed in its most recent earnings call. Meanwhile, Netflix reported 220.67 million subscribers. And what better way to celebrate than with…ads! Disney’s $7.99 ad-supported tier will launch on the platform on Dec. 8, just in time for those holiday specials. If you want to stay ad-free, your cost will go up to $10.99 a month.
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📰 Catch up on the headlines, understand the news and make better decisions. Sign up for What’s News, free in your inbox on weekday evenings and Sunday afternoons.
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A Thing to Try: Measure App
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You know the drill. You buy storage baskets for your new bookshelf. They arrive! You’re so excited! They don’t fit in the bookshelf. You’re sad.
OK, maybe that’s a too-specific example from my recent move. But, man, was the Measure app on iOS a lifesaver over the last few weeks.
The app, which is included on most iPhones and iPads running iOS 12 and later (see here for supported devices), uses the camera and augmented-reality software to measure the size of objects or spaces, essentially working as a digital tape measure.
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CREDIT: JOANNA STERN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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Open the app, and you will see a view of your rear camera along with a circle and a dot in the middle. Move your device around a bit so your camera has a frame of reference, then align the center dot with the starting point of whatever you’re measuring (in my case one of the bookshelves) and tap the + button.
Slowly move your device until you reach the end point of what you’re measuring and tap + again. The app will display the length between those two points, and from there, you can choose to adjust the measurement, copy and paste it, take a photo or clear it.
Also, the app has a level so you can hold your phone on a mirror or painting you’ve just hung to make sure it’s not crooked!
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CREDIT: JOANNA STERN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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For those who missed last week’s newsletter, you can catch up here on my tales of cord hoarding and organizing. But wow, did I underestimate the level of obsession of you lovely people. I received some amazing submissions that prove I’m not alone! Here were some of my favorites:
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PHOTO: ZACH HICKS
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“I have a love for keeping things neat and organized, especially when it comes to my tech and office space. This is basically just an IKEA bookshelf with a bunch of little plastic drawer organizers you can get on Amazon and some larger ones for the larger cables like HDMI. Simply involve a label maker, and you round out this nerdy monument of organization. My wife usually just rolls her eyes and calls me Monica Geller. A worthy comparison, I grant you.”—Zach Hicks in Vacaville, Calif.
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PHOTO: KENNETH GUDZ
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“The cables are stored in a finished closet in my office. It was a work in progress. Things started out in banker’s boxes, which did not satisfy my OCD. I then graduated to small plastic boxes and needed something to keep them in place. Enter: Really Useful Boxes. To get the excess clutter out of the house, older cables such as 30-pin connectors, FireWire and the like get recycled at Staples/Best Buy.”—Kenneth Gudz in Hilton Head, S.C.
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PHOTO: LAUREN HOLMES
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“OK, here’s my solution to the cords-as-giant-hairball problem: I wrap them with those Velcro thingies, and then I drop them into colored mesh bags. The colors are supposed to mean something (yellow for my MacBook, for example, and purple for travel), but I admit I haven’t been as systematic about that as I’d hoped. Then I slot them into cubby holes in our drop-front desk and close it. Voila.”—Lauren Holmes in the Detroit area
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PHOTO: EDMUND LESLIE
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“I had a box of wires and stuff and every time I looked for something in the box, I wound up with a huge mess all over the floor. So, I set the criteria that I should be able to see everything and grab the items I want without disturbing everything else. The coat rack in my home-office closet was empty, so I got a hanger and hung a few things on it. Then, I added a few more and expanded the hanger by attaching a bar to it at the bottom. It keeps growing.”—Edmund Leslie in Omaha, Neb.
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Next week we will return with a Throwback Thing—our weekly look at old tech that made us who we are today. Got an idea for it? Reply to this email with a photo of old tech and tell us why you loved—or hated—it.
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Reply to this email and share your feedback and suggestions.
User-submitted content has been edited for clarity and length. This week’s newsletter was curated and written by Joanna Stern and Cordilia James.
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