Yesterday, Apple shocked the tech world by finally promising to adopt the Rich Communication Standards (RCS) messaging standard next year after a long and persistent campaign from Google CEO Tim Cook once told a journalist, "Buy your mother an iPhone" if cross-platform messaging is a problem

But while the (perhaps unwilling) adoption of RCS messaging will remove some of the practical problems of texting from Android to iOS and vice versa, the aesthetics will apparently remain the same

Apple told 9to5Google that while RCS brings iMessage-style features to texting between Android and iOS (such as read receipt, typing indicator, and high quality media), iPhone to iPhone messages will continue to appear in blue and and messages from Android devices will appear in green

This is apparently because Apple wants to clearly show what it believes is the safest and best way for people to communicate from iPhone to iPhone and via iMessages But there also seems to be a secondary factor

You might read this and shrug and say, "Who cares what color the message is?" That suggests that you are not a teen As the Wall Street Journal explained in an article last January, "Teens and college students fear the ostracism that accompanies green texting And there are memes that express such sentiments

One woman claims that when her sister and friends exchange texts with a potential partner, they mock her if the message arrives in the dreaded green color She recalls, "I was thinking, 'Oh my God, his text is green,' and my sister literally said, 'Wow, that's disgusting'"

Apple no doubt knows this and recognizes that the exclusivity of iMessage gives it a certain stickiness Indeed, the WSJ article quotes Craig Federighi as saying that bringing iMessage to Android would "remove [the obstacle] for families using iPhones to get their children Android phones" a decade ago

While this is no doubt very silly (and a bit incomprehensible to many outside the US, where WhatsApp is the dominant force in messaging), it is still Google and its plans for Android in the US, which lags far behind iOS compared to other countries This could be a sore point for Google and its plans for Android in the US, which lags far behind iOS compared to other countries

The adoption of RCS may make Android and iPhone messaging functionality equivalent (or close to it), but if having blue messages remains a status symbol, it will not help Android's penetration in the US However, if having blue messages remains a status symbol, it will not help Android's adoption in the US