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Google Messages update bridges one gap between blue and green bubble people

Google Messages update bridges one gap between blue and green bubble people

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Putting aside the lack of end-to-end encryption support, one of the most annoying things for Apple iPhone users about communicating with Android users via SMS are all the iOS features that get lost in translation. Having a visual effect translated to the deadpan “(sent with Balloons)” ruins whatever impact you intended the particular effect to have, and it clutters up your message history with extraneous text.

On that second front, Apple’s Tapback feature is especially annoying. When using iMessage, this short list of half a dozen reactions is a handy way to signal acknowledgement or enjoyment, or just to bump a message thread to the top of someone’s list. On Android phones, each individual Tapback generates an entirely new block of text with a text description of the reaction, and the entire original text. As a fallback option for non-smartphones or an accessibility feature, this isn’t necessarily a new bad thing. But it can quickly make SMS group textual content threads chaotic and unreadable for Android users.

A new update to the Google Messages app , which was spotted over the weekend by 9to5Google and appears to be rolling out in order to some Android users now, fixes that issue by translating Tapback responses into emoji responses. Google android devices using the Messages app have been able to send each other emoji responses with regard to over some sort of year now , but this is Google’s first attempt at mapping Apple’s response mechanism to be able to its own.

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