This is a fascinating update from Google, at least it is for me. I personally am involved in a lot of group messages and this can get quite annoying at times when half the individuals in these conversations are iOS users that love to use the reactions that come back to Android users as quoted text, repeating everything that was just said in the message they reacted to.
James liked “I personally am involved in a lot of group messages and this can get quite annoying at times when half the individuals in these conversations are iOS users that love to use the reactions that come back to Android users as quoted text, repeating everything that was just said in the message they reacted to.”
Sorry, I felt the pun was needed. Anyhow, Google seems to agree that this isn’t the right way of handling this data. So the wonder developers there have developed a means of converting these reactions in to emoji responses. Not in the sense that it will come in as a whole new message with nothing but an emoji in it, but properly displaying to the bottom-right of the message as it would in something like Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, or anything else that has reaction commands to a message.
This will make it a lot easier to scroll around and find information within the conversation without having to fish through a bunch of duplicate responses caused by multiple people “liking” something.
There is a catch though. This is something that is fixed within the apps individually and not within the general communication protocol. Which means that this is limited to Google Messages (and is currently limited to the beta version of Google Messages, which you can sign up for from the app’s page within the Play Store.
If you make use of an alternative app, such as Samsung Messages, you’ll have to wait for those developers to take action as well (assuming they ever do). Else, you will have to switch to Google Messages as your default messaging app (and sign up for the beta).
Regardless, this is a step in the right direction in cleaning up group conversations a bit. Making them a little less painful. As for those of you that are in my many group conversations, sorry, but it had to be said! You aren’t the annoyance. It’s just the feature and how it has translated all this time.
