If there's something that fills an iPhone user, especially a younger one, with out-and-out rage, is looking at a green bubble in a group chat. iMessage elitism is a real thing across schools and teenage social circles in the United States. While we at Android Police carry our green bubbles with pride, teenagers across the country can get excluded from their social circle if they dare switch to an Android phone. Google is now calling out Apple publicly on this in what seems to be an attempt to get it to add RCS support to iOS.

Google executive Hiroshi Lockheimer has posted a tweet aimed directly at Apple's throat, saying that the company is using "peer pressure and bullying" to sell its products and that "the standards exist today to fix this," referring to RCS. The message was further amplified by the Android Twitter account, saying that "iMessage should not benefit from bullying."

It should be noted that Apple is not actually promoting this green bubble stigma by itself, but it's definitely complacent about it. After all, the company knows that the iMessage pull is powerful enough to bring new iPhone users in and make existing ones stay — Apple decided against launching its messaging platform on Android for this very reason. Its software chief, Craig Federighi, famously said once that bringing iMessage to Android users would "remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones."

While we agree that RCS on iOS needs to happen for the good of every smartphone user, Google also holds some blame for the current state of affairs. It has failed to develop a good competitor for Android phones for years, only having multiple deteriorating messengers to show for itself, allowing iMessage to thrive, with its only real alternative being SMS (at least in the US). RCS addresses many of SMS's issues and adds a few landmark iMessage features, like typing indicators, so it would go a long way to ease green bubble shaming, all without making the feature-packed Apple service completely obsolete.

Then again, there's a reason why Apple doesn't feel in a particular hurry to add RCS to iPhones, and it's probably the same one that shot down the possibility to bring iMessage to Android — cold, hard cash.