iPhone emoji reactions will now be translated by Google Messages.
If you’re on Android and frequently text your people using iPhone, you may have noticed that they respond with strange descriptive texts. Consider phrases such as “loved an image,” “laughed at an image,” and “stressed [message text].”
These haven’t been typed by a person. What’s going on here is that Android is attempting to interpret iMessage’s’reactions,’ which allow iOS users to reply to messages with an emoji. It’s just not very good at what it’s doing.
However, Google is currently pushing out an upgrade to Google Messages that will improve the app’s ability to decode emoji and display reactions as intended rather than as descriptive sentences.
9to5Google first noticed the change after decompiling the current beta version (10.7) of Google Messages. The site discovered an option named “ios reaction classification” that said “display iPhone reactions as emoji.”
While RCS chats on iOS have a distinct set of reactions, Google appears to be taking this into consideration by “mapping” a reaction to the closest equivalent available on Android.
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After the feature was first published, a reader who had early access to it contacted the site to demonstrate how the mapping worked.
According to the site, Google’s translation of the iPhone’s ‘love’ reply is the heart eyes emoji answer to the sentence “that was lovely like,” which feels like a reasonable approximation. If you tap any reaction, Google Messages will display the text “Translated from iPhone” (as seen in the third screenshot) to stress that something might have been lost in translation.
Another thing to note from this demonstration is that if an iPhone user’s reaction changes after posting, it will be reflected in Google Messages as well. Between the second and third screenshots, notice how the heart eyes reaction changes to a ‘laughing with joy’ emoji.
Users who have moved their message habits will not be affected by this.
