Featured Image Credit: uptin/TikTok/Iain Masterton / Alamy Stock Photo
Topics: Technology, Google, iPhone, Apple, Phones
Joe Harker
Topics: Technology, Google, iPhone, Apple, Phones
Google has been trolling Apple with their ad campaign and even stuck their message calling out the iPhone maker on a massive billboard for everyone to see.
While people who use Android or iPhone might have endless arguments over which phone is better (pretty much always whichever one they've got) it's rare for a company to so blatantly call out their competition in an ad.
However, Google last year launched their 'Get the Message' campaign targeted at Apple and complaining that they've broken texting between the different devices.
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Their adverts in the campaign make jabs at Apple with claims that the tech giant 'don't have to drop the ball on fixing your pixelated photos and videos' and that Google could 'help fix your pixelated texting problem'.
The ad then shows a whole load of code which Google says will 'help get the ball rolling' on Apple upgrading their messaging services before finally finishing with a call for Apple to #GetTheMessage.
The trolling has become so strong from Google that they've even stuck the ad up on a big billboard so everyone can get a look at them claiming they want to help their supposedly stricken rival by sending over a load of code.
Plenty thought Google's adverts trolling Apple were hilarious, calling it a 'baller move' and loving 'the way they included the code'.
Another joked that 'someone should write an Apple x Android enemies to lovers fanfic', which sounds like the worst thing I'd definitely read.
Others wondered why bother trying to sort this out when other messaging platforms like WhatsApp seemed to work alright as an alternative.
Some thought the ad campaign didn't really work, saying 'the desperation is real'.
To really dig down into why Google is trolling Apple over this, here's some tech-y stuff, messages sent from iPhones prefer to use iMessage, which you can tell you're using because the bubbles your texts are sent in are blue.
They're sent over the internet and it only works between different Apple devices, which is why if you text someone who doesn't have an iPhone the text bubbles come up as green.
An iPhone's backup messaging system when it can't use iMessage is SMS (short messaging service), but this bumps into a problem because the messages and media you can send via SMS aren't as high quality as Google's backup.
SMS is pretty old technology by now and doesn't have a lot of the features today's texters are used to.
While iPhones use SMS as their backup for messaging, Android phones use something called RCS (rich communication services) and Google really wants Apple to shift over to this, framing it as a helpful move to send messages and media without them getting pixelated and reduced in quality.
However, RCS comes with its own list of problems and Google's figures point towards a majority of their phone users not having access to RCS.
Apple's stance on the matter appears to be that they don't need to shift over if more people switch to their phones instead.
CEO Tim Cook previously said anyone bothered about the difficulties involved with sending messages from iPhone to Android should just 'buy mum an iPhone'.
UNILAD have contacted Apple for comment.