What you need to know
- Toronto rapper Drake just released his new album, “For All the Dogs,” on Friday.
- The album features a song called “First Person Shooter” that makes a comment about receiving a text from an Android phone.
- This isn’t Drake’s first time referencing green bubble texts, and Google has even tried to use a previous track to its advantage.
If you’re remotely a fan of the rapper Drake (for the record, I’m not), then you should be aware that he dropped a new studio album on Friday called “For All the Dogs.” Feel free to go stream on your favorite music streaming service if you haven’t heard it yet, but when you get to the song “First Person Shooter” featuring J. Cole, you may catch that Drake throws a mention at Android and green bubble texts.
The reference comes up just past the halfway point of the song after things switch up. He raps about not answering someone’s call before mentioning that “she got a Android, her messages is lime green.”
I have so many questions here. Why isn’t he answering her call? Is it because she uses Android? Does Drake have something against Android, or just the color lime green? Why does my editor-in-chief even listen to Drake? Is it because she’s based in Toronto, where he’s from? Is that why she practically begged me to write this article? So many questions… but I digress.
Anyway, this isn’t the first time Drake has brought up green bubbles. In last year’s “Honestly, Nevermind” album, he has a song literally called “Texts Go Green,” a title that references what happens when an iPhone user gets blocked on iMessage and their texts start appearing green instead of blue. Coincidentally, that’s the same color that appears when an iPhone user texts an Android user. Isn’t it interesting that those two circumstances are related that way? Not really, but I like the drama of it all.
Google apparently found that interesting because it used the moment to highlight the song and the fact that Apple has yet to adopt RCS, which it says can alleviate the many issues users have when texting Android phones, like low-quality media, the lack of security when sending texts via the aging SMS standard. It’s one of many times Google has tried to publicly berate Apple’s decision to keep iMessage to itself and not adopt RCS.
#TextsGoGreen hit us different, that’s why we had to drop this unofficial lyric explainer video #GetTheMessage 💚😏 pic.twitter.com/dPxt9yZjCGJune 18, 2022
Despite Google’s continued attempts, Apple won’t budge on the matter. And unless the EU steps in, we may have many more years of Apple ignoring Google’s pleas and Drake calling out people for texting him from Android phones.