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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

Apple added the same thing for iMessage/SMS. It worked as expected if the group message was all Apple users. But if you were the unfortunate person outside the ecosystem, you would get spammed with ‘{person} liked “{message}”’.

In some cases, people would react to the reaction leading to some ridiculous chains of text.

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This reminds of when Microsoft released a comic strip chat client for IRC. You would have these people popping into IRC channels with all kinds of metadata about their character. It was fine for them, but super annoying for everybody with a normal client.

I guess it was designed to be used with MSN servers, but people used them to connect to the "regular" ones as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

> Microsoft Comic Chat installed a custom font, Comic Sans MS, that users could use in other applications and documents.

We have finally found the root of all evil.

I like how you word this in the past tense, it still happens to this day. I live outside the states but keep a google voice number and in my family's group chat I still get these all the time. I've mostly (miraculously) moved them to Signal, but they revert to their SMS ways occasionally.

RCS is finally coming to iOS though, so soon this should be resolved.

Not to Google Voice though, because Google loves nothing more than orphaning communications products.

Which is a shame... I think when Hangouts had GV and SMS integration in a single app, that was probably the pinnacle of usage for power user messaging. It's all been down hill since then. Going back to the separate GV app has mostly sucked, and still stagnating.

Google should really give a bit of credit (bonus levels) for advancing and maintaining existing applications. Their motivation structure is backwards.

I no longer get those messages in the default SMS app on my Pixel 8. Either google or apple updated something, they now show as emojis on the original message as intended.

Google finally started parsing those in 2022[0].

[0] https://www.xda-developers.com/google-messages-imessage-reac...

As an Android user, I often wonder if Apple users realize how stupid their replies look to non-Apple users. I wonder if I should tell them or just move on.

Apple doesn't care what Android users think as long as the majority of Americans continue to think iPhone's are "premium" products, are willing to spend $1k to buy a new iPhone because they don't have a slot for an SD card so that's the only way to get more space, and genuinely believe YOU are the dumb one for buying an "inferior" Android phone.

I am more concerned about Apples users than what Apple thinks. If Apple makes their users look silly, their users might start caring.

Until (very) recently iOS users saw the same thing you did, e.g. the text describing the reaction instead of the reaction itself.

The person sending the reaction sees it on the message like an iMessage, but everything in a non-iMessage group text (iOS, android, or other) gets sent the same “liked your message” text. Nowadays both Android and iOS parse those texts and apply the reaction as if it was sent normally, but that’s a decent change

Doesn't matter to them. They just think we are either dumb or too poor to use an iPhone

On second thoughts (looks at Camelot), let's not go there. It's a silly place.

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