Android Messages Beta Starts Properly Displaying iOS Message Reactions (theverge.com) 91
Google is widely rolling out a new Google Messages feature to beta users that allows the Android messaging app to correctly interpret emoji reactions sent from the iOS Messages app, 9to5Google reports. From a report: The feature appears to be live in version 20220121_02_RC00 of the app, according to Droid-Life, but not for every user. Although it didn't work on every phone we tried, we were able to get it working on an Oppo Find X3 Pro, which is more than can be said for when the feature initially started appearing last November. The feature fixes a long-standing issue that can affect SMS chats between iPhone and Android users. When an iPhone user reacts to an Android message with emoji, the Android user typically sees this reaction sent as an entirely separate text message, resulting in confusion and lots of unnecessary clutter.
race to the bottom (Score:5, Interesting)
iOS should not be sending message reactions over SMS if it's not part of the SMS standard. At least, they should have partnered with Google to create a semi-standard before implementing this.
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This does not end well for you. [cnn.com]
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Seriously: Who still uses SMS?
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Anyone not on an iPhone, when talking to people with an iPhone. Or anyone on an iPhone, talking to people not on iPhone.
Or are we all supposed to use 5 different messaging platforms in order to talk to everyone we know? And copy / paste a whole lot if the people we need to talk to aren't all on one platform? Oh, Sam uses Whatsapp, but Sara uses Facebook Messenger, and Willy and Bert use Line, but Chris and Tim are on Signal, and Kathy is on Telegram. Guess I'm going to be doing a whole lot of app switch
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A couple of years ago we had a medical crisis in my family. My large extended family pulled together and SMS was a key tool for us to communicate. We couldn't switch to something like WhatsApp because some of the older members of the family still used flip phones.
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SMS isn't a lowest common denominator standard. It requires access to a cell network, and can only be implemented by cell providers.
Something like XMPP is, and yes, we should all be using it instead of the weird shitshow that gets a 4G+ network to pretend to be a ye olden cell network carrying messages wedged into a service channel.
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Almost everyone nowadays has a cellphone. Good luck explaining to someone who isn't computer savvy how to get started with XMPP. I don't care how ridiculously easy you find it to install and use the software, 10yrs having worked at a couple of different helpdesks is enough to tell me when someone is being forced to learn something they don't care about, it's like asking them to recite pie to the 1000th digit: seriously frustrating for all parties involved.
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Anyone not on an iPhone, when talking to people with an iPhone. Or anyone on an iPhone, talking to people not on iPhone.
Actually most people in the scenarios you describe use WhatsApp. There are two-billion users on WhatsApp. Its platform interoperability is one of the key reasons people use it.
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There are over 6 billion people with smart phones as of last month. Whatsapp only gets you 1 in 3, where SMS gets you 3 in 3.
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SMS only reaches mobile phone numbers. If you want to reach people, that's not a good way. Some people have more than one number. Some people share a number. Sometimes you can't know if the number is landline or mobile.
If you want to make sure not to reach me, send me an SMS to one of my phone number.
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and I am supposed to memorize every country's mobile phone prefix? Anyways as you just said many countries DON'T have a prefix for mobile phone. One major advantage is the portability between landline and mobile, and the fact that carriers can't charge you more to call a mobile.
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No, most people don't use whatsapp. It varies by region of course, but in the US WhatsApp is pretty much only used by dating site scammers. SMS is the common messaging protocol here.
As for 2 billion users- no. There may be 2 billion accounts. I have a half dozen of those, none of which I've used for years. There are areas of the world where its dominant (particularly in parts of Asia), but not in most of it.
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Which is exactly what I said in another post. Apple want this problem, and is in a position to create it and maintain it as a problem. Literally everyone else would like to have a common messaging baseline protocol to build on. Unfortunately, because Apple, that baseline is ass-old shitty SMS.
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Anyone not on an iPhone, when talking to people with an iPhone. Or anyone on an iPhone, talking to people not on iPhone.
Or are we all supposed to use 5 different messaging platforms in order to talk to everyone we know?
Nope, if you are on iPhone, you have to use 6, because in addition to all the other ones, you also need to use iMessage, isn't it?
And copy / paste a whole lot if the people we need to talk to aren't all on one platform? Oh, Sam uses Whatsapp, but Sara uses Facebook Messenger, and Willy and Bert use Line, but Chris and Tim are on Signal, and Kathy is on Telegram. Guess I'm going to be doing a whole lot of app switching to figure out where we're going for dinner!
Oh, I know - I should just force other people to use what I use, right? Lowest common denominator standards exist for a reason.
Except that SMS is not the lowest common denominator. I don't use it. It completely sucks. It rely on a phone number as an ID, it doesn't work on 99% of internet-connected devices which aren't connected to a mobile phone network. It requires your phone to be on, with signal.
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Lots of people with Android phones apparently. They're pretty passionate about it too.
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I don't know if you were being sarcastic but filenames can be made case-insensitive in ext4 and f2fs since kernel 5.2. The editors of lwn called it "a feature that has been on some people's wish lists for a decade or two" https://lwn.net/Articles/78404... [lwn.net] in particular for admins running NFS and samba on a linux server and letting windows users connect. The major point of disagreement was the prospect of including a complex unicode canonicalization algorithm into the kernel.
You can also read about it there:
Re:race to the bottom (Score:5, Funny)
drafalski liked "iOS should not be sending message reactions over SMS if it's not part of the SMS standard. At least, they should have partnered with Google to create a semi-standard before implementing this."
Re: race to the bottom (Score:1)
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I'm on Android. Google doesn't support dislikes anymore.
Re:race to the bottom (Score:5, Informative)
There is an open standard for doing this. It's called RCS. Apple refuses to implement it.
The hilarious thing is that, AFAIK, Apple doesn't even support their own reactions over SMS/MMS. That is, if for whatever reason someone uses a "special" iMessage feature to another iMessage user but it ends up getting sent over "legacy" SMS, it'll show up as just text. (This is easy to do with MMS, if there are Android recipients in a group text, none of the "special" iMessage features work in the group and instead show up as text for other iMessage users. Sending SMS when both users are on iMessage is somewhat harder since it involves a scenario where the phone has cellular access but not Internet access.)
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The hilarious thing is that, AFAIK, Apple doesn't even support their own reactions over SMS/MMS
Apple wants to support a narrative where this is too hard to implement or that Android users don't deserve to participate. Same reason they don't like RCS.
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It's time for SMS to die entirely. Problem is, there is no good alternative. RCS is okay, but relies on phone numbers as identifiers.
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There is email, xmpp. With some will, something else (better) could be developed pretty quickly.
The problem is that corporations like Apple prefer vendor lock-in.
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Well, the real problem isn't "corporations like Apple", it's just "Apple".
They won't let any other app handle SMS messaging on iOS, and they won't add RCS to iMessage. And then they won't make an iMessage app for Android, which they could do in about 10 days if they wanted to. Even if they charged for it, they would make money on it; and it would be the best SMS handler on Android overnight.
They are purposefully causing pain by being assholes.
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Wouldn't it be better if "message reactions" died entirely? There is literally no valid use case there. It's like people can't be bothered to remember they're not on Facebook.
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Either you have message reactions, or you hand comments like "me too". You can't stop people doing it.
At least with reactions they don't clutter up the conversation too much.
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At least with reactions they don't clutter up the conversation too much.
Well, now. They were nothing BUT clutter if there was an Android phone involved, especially in group messaging:
person1: blah blah blah very long message blah blah this and that blah blah blah
person2: person2 liked "blah blah blah very long message blah blah this and that blah blah blah"
person3: person3 liked "blah blah blah very long message blah blah this and that blah blah blah"
person4: person4 liked "blah blah blah very long message blah blah this and that blah blah blah"
person3: person3 liked "person4
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There is no other reasonable identifier if you want a universal standard. Phone numbers have two things going for them - they aren't tied to any one corporate entity and they have a somewhat artificial scarcity to reduce spam.
If all you want is chat, you can pick whatever vendor you want. You just have no way of getting everyone in the world (or even in the same country) to be in the same ecosystem. So then you have to deal with the avalanche of Teams, Slack, Google Chat, Whatsapp, Messenger, Telegram, S
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There is no other reasonable identifier if you want a universal standard. Phone numbers have two things going for them - they aren't tied to any one corporate entity
They are. They belong to a phone provider. Plus, you can't move them from one country to another. They are the worst ID I could think of, even an IP address would be better.
and they have a somewhat artificial scarcity to reduce spam.
Not really, plus I get tons of auto dealership spam robo calls. My email spam are handled much better.
RCS should have a way to use the phone number identifier off-network on a PC or tablet, though. The problem is that this would be implemented at the carrier level and so they would probably be the ones developing the app unless they were to extend RCS to hook/relay into a third party.
RCS is total crap because just like SMS, it depends on mobile phone carriers. It allows mobile phone carriers to easily see who you sent messages to, and bill you per message.
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I can move my phone number between providers. An IP address would be...fun? We're a long way from IPv6 being anywhere common. And multiple endpoint devices would all have their own address. Not even cell providers are dealing with IPv6 - they are jumping to Carrier-Grade NAT and just ignoring IPv6. IP+Port would be your cell phone's unique identifier and it would change over time.
The thing is, it's the difference between an open standard and a vendor-locked platform. Being semi-locked by country but s
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P.S. IP Addresses are handled by ARIN and are directly tied to your carrier or ISP. Unless you own your own delegated address space.
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SMS might not be single vendor but it's locked to the mobile phone operator cartel, or should I say mafia?
Whatsapp also suck because it rely on phone number as the ID.
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Like it or not, 99% of people change mobile phone number if they move to another country. Roaming forever is expensive, although there might be some regional exceptions (EU?)
And while you can use a VoIP phone number anywhere, again, regular people want a local number so that their friends can call them without having to pay exorbitant fees. An expat might keep his old number and get a new one in the new country.
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One other problem with phone numbers is that they are not linked to a person. Some have a couple different phone numbers, and others share a single number between many people.
for that reason alone, email is a much better ID.
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Some have a couple different email addresses, and others share a single email address between many people.
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Well unless you still live in 1990, families don't share a common email address anymore.
If you have a couple different email addresses, it's because they serve different purposes (such as personal/corporate). My different phone numbers are landline and mobile. Which one should you use to contact me? It depends.
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I literally still see people sharing a Facebook account. And yes, email too. Some of them millennials. I'm not saying I understand.
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Well it's their problem but there is no reason why they couldn't each have their own. Unlike a phone number, which you usually have to pay a significant amount of money each month for.
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I pay about $1/mo per DID. If those numbers were cell phones on a voice/text prepay account it would be a few dollars more - maybe $5-6 each?
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Well even for $1/month, I'm not getting a dedicated phone number for each member of my family. Anyways they would all ring the same phones.
I'm not getting my kids cell phone numbers either. Maybe when they are older...
And I don't even myself have an SMS plan. I have to pay per message. I'm not using it.
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Businesses generally don't get my cell number. For VoIP, I prefix the caller ID name with an initial and colon to show who the call is for. I guess my goal in life is to answer as few phone calls as possible.
Why not? (Score:2)
iOS should not be sending message reactions over SMS if it's not part of the SMS standard.
I really cannot comprehend this response, nor the statement in the story summary that people are getting "confused".
What is so hard to understand about a thumbs up sent as a separate message, vs being slightly raised and attached to message you are responding to?
Hell I do this most of the time anyway, someone sends a message saying they are going to do something and I just send a thumbs up emoji instead of a "reaction
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Because it doesn't just show up as an emoji on non-Apple devices. It quotes the whole fucking message and prepends $NAME liked "$MSG". And in groups, multiple "likes" means multiple copies of the same message. It's fucking shit.
Thanks (Score:1)
It quotes the whole fucking message and prepends $NAME liked "$MSG".
Thanks, didn't realize it was doing all that, would have been nice to see a bit more description around the problem in the summary.
Luckily for Android users I know, I pretty much only ever just send emojis instead of reactions...
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exactly, a separate message would be fine. But what Apple is sending is total crap. It is sending the same message again, along with the reaction such as "like". It's idiotic.
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iOS should not be sending message reactions over SMS if it's not part of the SMS standard. At least, they should have partnered with Google to create a semi-standard before implementing this.
The whole point of the SMS spam is to annoy Android users, and to make messaging on iPhones look better in comparison. There was never any incentive for them to partner with Google -- if anything, there's incentive now for Apple to change the format of those messages so that Android messaging apps won't be able to interpret them again.
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The users sending these spams, just like "sent from my iPhone" advertisements at the end of every email, should be ashamed. Not just Apple themselves.
The user has a responsibility not to spam. If your phone is configured to spam your recipients and you don't know how to turn it off, then you should change your phone.
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Yeah, because Apple is in the business of partnering on anything to do with iMessage or FaceTime.
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they don't have to. But then they should stop sending their crappy message reactions as text
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Sounds like an Asus problem, as my Pixel has none of those issues.
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If that isn't a hit show, I don't know what is.
The big hit show of 2023 will be celebrity circle jerk. I don't see the appeal, but folks love their celebrities.
I don't want that either (Score:3, Informative)
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No they aren't. iMessage reactions, when sent to an Android phone, show up in the form of "[user] [reaction] [entire text of message]" where [reaction] is one of the six available iMessage reactions. The only two I know are "loved" (which iOS displays as a heart) and "liked" (which is a thumbs up). There's also a "thumbs down" to pair with the "thumbs up," an exclamation point, a question mark, and a small "ha ha." (Literally the text "ha ha," not a laughing face or anything.) I don't know how those show up
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That's annoying but what's worse is when an iphone user likes a picture. If you sent multiple, you have no idea which one they are liking [user][reaction]"likes an image"
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No they aren't. iMessage reactions, when sent to an Android phone, show up in the form of "[user] [reaction] [entire text of message]" where [reaction] is one of the six available iMessage reactions. The only two I know are "loved" (which iOS displays as a heart) and "liked" (which is a thumbs up). There's also a "thumbs down" to pair with the "thumbs up," an exclamation point, a question mark, and a small "ha ha." (Literally the text "ha ha," not a laughing face or anything.) I don't know how those show up in Android.
Android just treats each of these as separate texts. Apple groups them.
In any case, they're not emojis. They end up being incredibly long messages because they quote the entire message being reacted to.
Please consult Unicode tables
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Notice how you didn't find a "ha ha" emoji? That's because they're not emojis. They're special iMessage things. You can map them to emojis (that's how Google handles this) but they're not emojis.
Android just treats each of these as separate texts. Apple groups them.
Wrong. When an iMessage user "reacts" to a message to another iMessage user, they send a "special" message that indicates which of the six reactions they're using and what message they're reacting to. If it gets sent over SMS, it instead gets converted to text.
So, for example, if an Android user sent "Reactions are
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Notice how you didn't find a "ha ha" emoji? That's because they're not emojis. They're special iMessage things. You can map them to emojis (that's how Google handles this) but they're not emojis.
Notice how you promptly ignored that I demonstrated 4 of the 5 icons that you said were "not emojis" were in fact emojis. It is like you are selectively choosing to ignore evidence. If I were to guess "HaHa" is a repurposed "Tears with Joy" emoji Unicode 0X00001F602
Wrong. When an iMessage user "reacts" to a message to another iMessage user, they send a "special" message that indicates which of the six reactions they're using and what message they're reacting to. If it gets sent over SMS, it instead gets converted to text.
Geez man. You stated exactly what I stated but labeled my statement as "wrong".
Worse, I'm fairly sure the text representations are locallized based on the sending iPhone.
What? You do know the purpose of Unicode was to support multiple localizations and languages simultaneously in one character set, right? If I send simplified Chinese o
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You're right that how they're represented on iPhone is Unicode emoji. But when they are sent out as fallback SMS, it is literally the words like "liked" and then a quote of the message. Android has to interpret the locale of the word "liked" in every supported language depending on the sender and then find the linked message by looking for a sent message with the same quoted words. SMS can't contain metadata with a message ID of where to attach that emoji which is why Apple sends the quoted text back fo
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You're right that how they're represented on iPhone is Unicode emoji.
No, he's not, unless his argument is literally every little picture is "an emoji" and even then he's not because "ha ha" literally is not a Unicode emoji. Apple actually calls these things "tapbacks" so you can see what they look like on the support article for tapbacks [apple.com]. They're special iMessage specific icons that are used in iMessage and iMessage alone. (Also shown in the generic support article for iMessage features [apple.com] if you want to see how they look on iOS. Note that the "tapback" is the thing above the e
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That's because they are sent as separate texts, which iMessage parses and hides in order to put the emoji badge over the thing that was reacted to.
Strangely, that's exactly what Google implemented in Messages.
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Thing is? Some "reactions" can be pretty handy. I particularly like the "thumbs up" emoji even in MS Teams corporate chats, because quite often, you just need to convey acknowledgement and approval of a comment. It saves typing, responding "Sounds good!" or "Confirmed!" or whatever else you might otherwise reply.
I like having options so sure, I wouldn't mind if phones let you toggle something to filter all of them out. But I'm just saying, they can be a valid form of communications and I'm not sure I'd wa
why should we care (Score:2)
what poor people experience on their PoorPhones
As a boring guy who doesn't like pointless shiny (Score:2)
I don't bother replying to SMSes that don't contain plain ASCII, because I know whoever sent it isn't someone I want to interact with.