The text messaging app is fun and efficient, and it’s often a quicker way to get a response than sending an email or making a phone call. Apple’s latest software system, iOS 16, includes enhancements to its iMessage app. Texts can now be edited after they are sent to scrub out embarrassing typos; a message can also be retracted. Google’s Messages app for Android has tools that automatically generate responses to texts.
These changes help us sidestep awkward situations and save time, but they don’t address a larger societal problem: texting is distracting, demanding and, at least at times, stressful.
“Where does your work end and personal life begin?” said Justin Santamaria, one of the iPhone engineers who developed the iMessage app. “That’s something over the past three years everybody has struggled with.”
Texting is also not the most secure form of communication, especially in a post-Roe era when privacy is more important than ever, said Caitlin George, a managing director at Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. “It should be something that everybody should have and not have to worry about,” she said.
The new messaging features are simple to use. On iPhones running iOS 16, holding down on a sent message opens options to edit or retract it. Android users can open Google’s Messages app, enter the settings and toggle on “Enable chat features” to use the new texting technology, called Rich Communication Services.
Apple’s iOS includes Focus, which manages how notifications appear when at work, at home, while driving or heading to bed. In a work profile, Focus can be set up to let text and phone notifications arrive only from colleagues. But setting up each Focus profile is time-consuming, and it requires effort to remember to toggle the feature on or off. Google’s messaging app has a Smart Reply tool, which generates possible responses to a text message. But you still have to manually select a response.
Apple’s and Google’s messaging apps would benefit from a simpler tool: the away message.
One of the beauties of text messaging is the ability to share something — like an idea or a photo — immediately. But the iPhone messaging app still lacks an easy way to avoid pestering people at unreasonable hours: the ability to schedule a message to send later.
Here is where Android’s messaging app has a clear advantage. Last year, Google added a scheduling tool. After composing a message, hold down the send button. A “Schedule send” button appears, letting you set a time and date for the text to be sent.
Also, the lack of interoperability between the iPhone and Android messaging services makes photos and videos look pixelated when sending them between Androids and iPhones, a digital phenomenon known as the “green bubble” effect.
At a tech conference, an audience member raised this issue with Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. Cook was asked whether Apple would consider making the iPhone’s messaging service work with Google’s Rich Communication Services so that the questioner could send clearer videos to his mother, who had an Android phone.
“I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point,” Cook said. “Buy your mom an iPhone.”
George of Fight for the Future said Cook’s comment was elitist, adding that the incompatibility between Apple’s and Google’s apps posed a problem to digital privacy.
Apple and Google encrypt their messaging apps to make messages indecipherable to anyone but the sender and the recipient. But encryption doesn’t work when users of different operating systems text one another, making the content readable to other parties like phone carriers.
While third-party texting apps like Signal offer encrypted messaging between Apple and Android, those tools are not as widely used.
“At a time when half the country needs to be concerned about how they’re communicating about their bodily autonomy, there’s a moral obligation to see your marketing through if you’re telling people they can trust you,” George said of Cook, who has staked his reputation on digital privacy.
NYTNS
