Android Might Soon Feature iMessage Design As Emoji

Recent analysis from 9to5google suggests Google’s text messaging app on Android devices is been expected to feature iMessage reactions as emoji characters instead of text.

Currently IMessage app on iOS and Mac devices, gives users the ability to add a reaction like a heart, thumbs up, thumbs down, a laughter, a question mark, or an exclamation, which in all only show as annotations to an iMessage. However, these emojis can also be used on “green bubble” messages from Android users, but in the Android case, it can barely transcribe the emoji reactions as it aught to be which can be really awkward.

For instance, if you issue a heart emoji within a message on an iPhone, another ‌iPhone‌ user who is on the other end of the conversation receiving the message will also see a little heart on the message. But on Android, the case isn’t always the same. When a user issues a heart on a message it transcribe it as text e.g. [Person] “Loved” and then the text of the message.

According to new beta update code studied by one of 9to5Google reporter, discovered within the Google Messages app code is a sign that Google is making a new change to the preview of the iMessage reactions from it’s current text mode into emoji, which would be a much better solution for Android users.

“Show ‌iPhone‌ reactions as emoji,” reads a line of the code, under the “ios_reaction_classification.”

For now, it’s not clear exactly how this “classification” would work, but one would imagine Google Messages would spot incoming messages that start with something like “Liked” and try to match it to a previous message. Once it’s figured out what message is being reacted to, perhaps Google Message will hide the incoming iMessage fallback and instead show an emoji under the original message.

That said, iMessage has a different set of reactions than currently offered by Google Messages in RCS chats. Google may be accounting for this, as there is mention in the code of “mapping” the iMessage reactions, possibly mapping to the set of reactions available in Google Messages today, or perhaps just mapping to various emoji.

If this feature should materialize, it could really solve the wieredness within a conversation and could also allow users to better understand the meaning of behind a sent message or conversation. Though wether Google will see this through or not is still not known but we hope they do.