From green texts to lightning cables to the App Store tax, there are a lot of problems. Nobody’s perfect, but Apple can fix these problems.
Apple makes sleek, fast, easy-to-use products. They’re cross compatible, which makes moving from your iPhone to your Macbook simple and easy, whether you’re copying text or going from podcasts on your phone to Youtube on your computer. Apple also makes your life more annoying, more expensive, and less secure in a number of ways that the company could easily fix if it wanted to.
Why won’t Apple adopt a texting protocol that encrypts messages between iPhones and Androids? Why is everything more expensive on the Apple App Store? Why do I have to carry around a different cable for my iPhone and my laptop? Is Apple lying about its privacy practices?
We asked Apple about these questions and more, but did not immediately receive a response. We’ll update this article if we hear back.
In the meantime, here’s a little roundup of all the ways Apple makes your life worse. Click through for the hall of shame.
iPhone users’ messages turn green when they’re texting Android phones. When both people are on iPhones, all the messages are blue. This isn’t just about aesthetics.
When two iPhone users communicate, the texts are end-to-end encrypted, which means they’re more private and far more secure. When iPhones text with Androids, the messages are sent over SMS, an ancient protocol that dates back to 1992. There are other drawbacks too, for years the little heart reactions you can add to a message weren’t compatible across platforms, and videos sent between iPhone and Android would get compressed and sent in pitifully low quality.
Basically, it seems like this is Apple’s fault. Google, the maker of Android, wants to fix the problem. Google adopted a new texting protocol that would solve all of these problems called RCS. Google wants to fix the green text problem by collaborating with Apple, but Apple apparently refuses. Apple could also just make an iMessage app for Android, but they probably won’t do that either.
In an email uncovered in a lawsuit, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, said, “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.” Another Apple employee said elsewhere that “the #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage… iMessage amounts to serious lock-in.” In other words, this is about crushing their competition.
When a reporter asked Tim Cook when Apple would adopt RCS, he quipped, “buy your mom an iPhone.” Cute, but you paid for your iPhone, and it’s your messages turning green, not your Android mom’s. Apple is making life worse for you, the loyal Apple customer, to control your choices about your next purchase. It doesn’t hurt that it creates a stigma for people who don’t want to spend $1,000 on a new iPhone, either.
It’s hard to believe, but there is no calculator app on iPads. Check for yourself. iPads have been around for 13 years. You can download one in the app store, but Apple has never shipped an iPad with a calculator built-in like it does for iPhones.
