‘Buy your mom an iPhone’: Tim Cook on user’s complaint about iOS-Android texting

Apple CEO Tim Cook.

At a recent conference, Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook was given a personal account of difficulties an iPhone owner faced while texting his mother, an Android user.

He told Tim Cook he could not send his mother videos because of the restrictions posed by SMS messaging, CNBC reported.

In response, the Apple boss suggested that the audience member buy his mother an iPhone, adding that it wasn't a top priority for the company to improve the communication experience between iPhone and Android devices.

“I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy on that, on this point,” he was quoted as saying by CNBC at the Vox Media’s Code Conference in California on Wednesday. “I would love to convert you to iPhone.”

Texting between two iPhones, done using iMessage, is much more hassle-free as compared on an Android user texting an iPhone.

Google has been urging Apple to make cross-messaging easier by adopting Rich Communication Services or RCS --  a protocol that is supposed to replace SMS and MMS standards.

To this end, Google had unveiled a website last month.

"It’s not about the color of the bubbles," Google said on the website, referring to the blue bubble-green bubble difference between iPhone and Android texters. "It’s the blurry videos, broken group chats, missing read receipts and typing indicators, no texting over Wi-Fi, and more."

"These problems exist because Apple refuses to adopt modern texting standards when people with iPhones and Android phones text each other," it continued.

Google said messaging could be made better for everyone if Apple adopted RCS. "Apple turns texts between iPhones and Android phones into SMS and MMS, out-of-date technologies from the 90s and 00s," it said.

Apple has just come out with its latest iPhone 14 series and Watch Series 8.