Google, which is in the middle of a campaign to get Apple to support the RCS platform, used the song to help its cause.
In the tweet, Google wrote, “The Android team thinks Drake’s new song “Texts Go Green” is a real banger. It refers to the phenomenon when an iPhone user gets blocked. Or tries to text someone who doesn’t have an iPhone. Either way, it’s pretty rough. If only some super-talented engineering team at Apple would fix this. Because this is a problem only Apple can fix. They just have to adopt RCS, actually. It would make texting more secure too. Just sayin’. Great track tho.”
For the technically skilled, there is BlueBubbles to get iMessage on Android. I set this up recently and it works quite well. I’m running a MacOS Ventura virtual machine using docker-osx on one of my personal servers and pretty much all iMessage functionality is available. I modified the Android (flutter) project locally to get my own push notifications working using my self-hosted ntfy instance as a UnifiedPush provider instead of needing to use Firebase.
There is also Beeper which bridges iMessage and many other chat services in one app, but I wanted something fully open source that I can manage myself, plus I think there’s still a wait-list and I didn’t want to hand over my Apple ID to a third party.
It’s hard trying to convince people (esp. iPhone users) to use a cross platform solution because they perceive us Android users as the problem and they know iMesssge just works. And for the non- technical, that’s understandable even if frustrating. So as a software engineer, I am the one making accomodations so they can still use iMessage. But it also made for a fun project for me to learn about.
Yup. I just got the pixel 8 today from a 13 pro. Set up blue bubbles. Just gotta have people put in my email address in my contact and it works just fine