Reports have been hitting the internet that emoji message reactions work on the Apple Messages app when texting with Android users, but in my experience, it’s still hit-and-miss.

My group chat with my two closest friends consists of two iPhone users and one Pixel 8 user, and while it works more or less without a hitch, message reactions only seem to work sometimes. The guy who owns the Pixel’s name is Dom, and he uses reactions a ton, but only about half the time does it work as expected, and the other half, I get a message like “Dom reacted to your message with [emoji].”

There is little consistency, too. At first, I thought that the reactions were only supported with certain emojis, like the thumbs-up, but after looking back in my chat for a few days, there are even instances where he has ‘thumbed up’ two messages back to back and only one works as intended; the other is the old written-out style.

Overall, it works a little more than half the time and in private chats, not group chats, it seems a little more stable, but it’s still not exactly perfect. On top of that, with Freedom, I’m having issues with RCS working consistently, which is also annoying, and the bouncing between RCS and SMS wreaks havoc on my group chats since it creates two separate conversations on my friend’s Pixel, one for SMS and one for RCS. This could maybe be the cause of the hit-and-miss reactions, but looking through the conversations, it seems to apply equally to SMS and RCS messages.

Via: The Verge