This spring, Google updated its Messages app to support iMessage response processing. That is, instead of spamming a group chat with individual messages when someone responded to a text message with one of iMessage’s emoji responses, known as Tapbacks, the app would now display the emoji attached to the side of the message. , where it belongs. With the launch of iOS 16, Apple seems to be solving this long-standing annoyance on its part as well.
First spotted by 9to5Mac, the feature was too tweeted by an Apple employee on Monday as one of the many Messages updates arriving with iOS 16 and macOS Ventura. While the highlights — including editing messages, marking as unread, and retractions — were detailed during Apple’s WWDC keynote address on Monday, the new “SMS Tapback Inference” feature wasn’t there.
When iMessage users chat with Android users, the conversation automatically turns into a text chat. Even one Android user in a group chat will kill the blue bubbles — a design choice that has helped Apple lock iPhone users to its platform, especially American teens who find the green bubble “uncool”. But the reality is that all iPhone users end up in a chat with an Android user at some point, and in those cases, Tapback emoji responses are turned into spam texts.
Instead of displaying the emoji next to the message as intended, users are presented with separate (and very annoying!) extra texts that someone liked, liked, or otherwise responded to a particular message when the chat takes place on mobile platforms. This contaminates group chats, leads to excessive notifications and generally results in a poor user experience.
Fortunately, Apple is tackling this issue as it will now work better with Android on this emoji response feature. Instead of getting an additional text, the emoji response will appear next to the message the user is responding to, but in green to indicate the Android origin.
While the newer communication standard RCS natively supports emoji responses, Apple has yet to roll out RCS support — perhaps because RCS is too similar to iMessage with its features like type designations, read receipts, higher quality MMS messages, and more.
But with this feature, at least cross-platform messaging is less of a problem.
