Text your green bubble friends

Text your green bubble friends

Is the Apple vs. Android texting war finally over? It would seem, at the very least, that a peace offering has been accepted: Apple introduced RCS support as part of their latest iOS update.

It’s not all excellent news, though. First, this product change was… ahem… strongly suggested by EU regulators. Not exactly a fist pump from Apple. Second, it’s only RCS. Bubbles are still green. We may still need to buy our mum an iPhone.

It’s a step in the right direction nonetheless. Apple users who, for some reason, are friends with Android users (and vice versa) will now enjoy a more seamless experience. RCS is more modern, offering basic features like typing indicators, read receipts, and, of course, emoji reactions.

Read more about the new iOS features.

Microsoft take on Canva

What do you want to design?

Microsoft take on Canva, the ‘digital asset design made easy’ app, with Microsoft Designer. Start from templates, create from scratch, and even use AI to give you a head start; it’s all there. To be honest, they even look the same.

The obvious advantage Microsoft have over Canva is its reach. Microsoft Office boasts a cool 1.2 billion users worldwide and some 400 million paid seats. Not too shabby. Meanwhile, Canva reported reaching 170 million users according to their latest report.

What else is up?

• Google kill another product: The Google URL shortener is no more. This is the 7th product Google killed this year. This happens so often someone decided to make a website: Killed by Google. The conversation around how & why Google kill so many products took off on X this weekend. Here’s a highlight.

• Figma shed some light on the recent AI-generated Apple design drama (covered in a previous issue). Turns out they didn’t vet their training data enough. Oops.

• CrowdStrike, the cyber security giant, had a giant failure over the past week causing a global outage. Some 8.5 million Windows devices were affected by what some dubbed the largest IT failure in history. One company’s largest IT failure in history is another company’s opportunity: Wiz and Oligo Security came out of the woodwork promising greener pastures.

Get backlog’d

I feel hurt

Written by: Product nerds. What did you expect?

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