For the foreseeable future, Android users will forever be the “green bubble people” for people with iPhones. A full iMessage port for Android remains a distant dream, but it is now possible to react to individual iMessage texts, as prophesized by an earlier report.
9to5Google has now confirmed that message reactions sent by an Android user to iMessage texts appear properly on both devices, but with a few hiccups. For starters, only a handful of emojis can be used as reactions (far fewer than what Telegram allows).
Secondly, not all the emojis seem to show up correctly. We can chalk that down to the feature being in the early stages of implementation. The feature is switched on in Google Messages by default. If you wish to disable it, head over to Settings> Advanced and toggle “show iPhone reaction as emoji” off.
The feature is still in beta and will likely make its way to a future version of Google Messages via an OTA update. There could be a lot of kinks to iron out, given that all iMessage texts are end-to-end encrypted.
Samsung Galaxy phone users on the stock messaging app may have to switch to Google Messages to keep up with their iPhone brethren or use a third-party app that offers message reactions.
Join SamMobile’s Telegram group and subscribe to our YouTube channel to get instant news updates and in-depth reviews of Samsung devices. You can also subscribe to get updates from us on Google News and follow us on Twitter.
