If you’ve ever texted with an Android user, you know who conversations can quickly get overrun with “Jason laughed at” this or “Roman liked” that messages. As soon as an Android user joins a group conversation, Apple’s iMessage reaction expressions turn to text prompts so no one misses out on what’s happening.
That might be changing in a future Google Messages update. According to 9to5Google, who has dug through the APK for a beta version (10.7) of the app’s APK, Google has changed expressions such as “Liked,” “Emphasized,” and “Laughed” to “ios_reaction_classification” and “Show iPhone reactions as emoji” as well as “ios_reactions_mapping.”
It’s not entirely clear how the new reactions would work, but it seems as though Google is working on changing the way reactions are transposed by Android phones using Google Messages. Based on 9to5Google’s understanding, Messages will be tagged with a heart emoji rather than “Liked” and won’t need to repeat the entire message. Rather, the appropriate emoji would appear under the original message similar to how it works with iPhone users.
Granted, there are a lot of unknowns here. For one, the feature may never be released. For another, we don’t know exactly what Google is doing here so we’ll need to see it in action. And it might strictly be an on-device Google Message feature that doesn’t change what iPhone users see on the other side.
But for the first time in years, it seems like Google is recognizing that Android users text a lot with iPhone users and the experience isn’t great. Since Apple isn’t about to change the way iMessages works to accommodate Android users, Google might finally be taking matters into its own hands.
Michael Simon has been covering Apple since the iPod was the iWalk. His obsession with technology goes back to his first PC—the IBM Thinkpad with the lift-up keyboard for swapping out the drive. He’s still waiting for that to come back in style tbh.
