No more individual notifications for all those ‘Xyz liked message’ texts
Google Messages received iMessage-like reactions for RCS chats in 2020, but the solution is unsatisfactory for anyone who regularly converses with iPhone-wielding friends and family. iMessage allows users to react to regular SMS messages with emoji and likes, but those will only be displayed correctly for recipients also using iMessage. The rest of us will get overly descriptive automated text messages like “[Xyz] liked [message]” and such, quickly polluting otherwise clean group chats and pestering you with individual notifications for each reaction. As spotted by 9to5Google, the Messages developers are looking for a proper solution.
An app teardown of the latest Messages beta (version 10.7) reveals that Google is working on an option to properly display iMessage reactions. While the preference is not yet live in the app, there are some strings that point to this functionality: “ios_reaction_classification: Show iPhone reactions as emoji.”
Since iMessage replies are, in essence, just SMS messages rendered differently by the iMessage client, Google is able to give Messages similar capabilities. That way, an SMS called “Liked [message]” can be displayed as a like on the respective text instead. Messages and iMessage use different sets of emoji for their implementations of reactions, which could lead to problems, but it looks like Google is accounting for that. There’s a string called “ios_reactions_mapping,” which is likely supposed to correctly transliterate messages. Presumably, this will also stop notifications from showing up for all of these pesky individual reactions.
While the implementation of iMessage reactions is more than welcome and helps cut back on the noise, it feels incredibly tacked on and a little hacky. I’d much more prefer Apple to just finally implement RCS on iPhones, which would give Android and iOS users a universal, internet-based standard to communicate over rather than relying on the ancient SMS protocol. But I guess Apple has its iMessage ecosystem lock-in to uphold, so we might not see that anytime soon.
Since these iMessage reactions have only been unearthed in a teardown and aren’t live yet, it will likely still take a while until it hits the stable release. If you want a chance to get the feature ahead of others, be sure to join the Messages beta program on the Play Store.
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