Receiving a text from someone that uses an iPhone can be rather confusing if you are using Google Messages on your Android device. While the messages are going to look more or less the same, the advent of emoji reactions to these messages is what ended up making matters a lot more confusing than they actually needed to be. One reason for this is that you don’t really see the emoji reaction in Google messages at all, instead you would get a text translation of the emoji.
A thumbs up emoji will send you a text prompt that someone liked your message, and given the rather diverse meanings that such pictorial messages can have this had the potential to make cross platform SMS understandably difficult to parse. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Google is now changing things for the better by making it so that you won’t really have to worry about seeing such translations again.
Quite on the contrary, you will now be seeing emojis whenever someone or the other reacts to your text with an emoji on their iPhone. One thing to note about this change is that the emoji can seem rather different based on the phone that you are using. A Heart emoji could be translated to a Face With Heart Eyes emoji, so this is a rather imperfect translation system that could still cause a fair bit of confusion down the line although it’s definitely better than the text translation that came before it.
Tapping on the emoji will reveal that it was translated from iPhone, and if you don’t like this feature all that much you can quite easily change it by turning it off in your settings. Cross platform compatibility is something that both Apple and Google have been hesitant to facilitate since both of them want to end up creating distinct ecosystems that don’t have a lot to do with each other. However, both companies have recently been trying to improve the kind of compatibility that their devices and software can have likely because they have realized how beneficial this can be.
H/T: 9to5G.
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A thumbs up emoji will send you a text prompt that someone liked your message, and given the rather diverse meanings that such pictorial messages can have this had the potential to make cross platform SMS understandably difficult to parse. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Google is now changing things for the better by making it so that you won’t really have to worry about seeing such translations again.
Quite on the contrary, you will now be seeing emojis whenever someone or the other reacts to your text with an emoji on their iPhone. One thing to note about this change is that the emoji can seem rather different based on the phone that you are using. A Heart emoji could be translated to a Face With Heart Eyes emoji, so this is a rather imperfect translation system that could still cause a fair bit of confusion down the line although it’s definitely better than the text translation that came before it.
Tapping on the emoji will reveal that it was translated from iPhone, and if you don’t like this feature all that much you can quite easily change it by turning it off in your settings. Cross platform compatibility is something that both Apple and Google have been hesitant to facilitate since both of them want to end up creating distinct ecosystems that don’t have a lot to do with each other. However, both companies have recently been trying to improve the kind of compatibility that their devices and software can have likely because they have realized how beneficial this can be.
Read next: Google Is Adding In A Domestic Violence Hotline Number To Relevant Searches