“Texting is how we now all communicate, which would be fine and pretty easy, except that the rules keep getting more complicated,” Shannon Palus writes for Slate. “A small, but terrible, complication was quietly introduced to texting in the fall of 2016, tucked into an update to iPhone operating systems: reactions.”
“Right now, if you’ve got a friend who employs reactions you’re thinking, Oh God, those stupid things,” Palus writes. “For the blissfully uninitiated, there are six text reactions: thumbs up, thumbs down, double exclamation point, question mark, a heart, and ‘HA HA.'”
“When you send someone a text on their iPhone, the recipient may choose to reply normally—you know, by texting back,” Palus writes. “Or the recipient may emit a reaction, a small blunt tool of confusion. Reactions are confusing and annoying. They’re quietly ruining group chats and therefore our society. Kill them!”
“The other thing—the biggest thing, really—is that reactions only work if you have an iPhone. If you do not, your friend’s reactions are delivered to you cumbersomely spelled out. If you are in a group text with even one Android user, everyone gets everything cumbersomely spelled out. Beware the story of the woman who was the lone iPhone user joining a group text full of Android-ees,” Palus writes. “When she reacted to a text, her new friends were getting not an ambiguous character in a thought bubble, but the words ‘laughed at’ followed by the entirety of the reacted-to text message.”
MacDailyNews Take: First of all, they’re called “expressions,” not “reactions.” Secondly, they’re not just for iPhone, but also for iPad, Apple Watch, iPod touch, and Mac!
Now, who cares if they irritate Android settlers. They’re the ones who settled for fake iPhones, not us. Irritating Android settlers via Messages is a feature; payback for those caveman SMS green bubbles and inability to do even simple things that we iPhone take for granted. That Messages expressions irritate non-Apple device users makes us want to use them all the time. Get a real iPhone!
(This is a joke. Note the “HA HA” expression attached. Black comedy. By “kill,” we mean “eliminate,” as in: Convert the poor bastages to real iPhones. Do not kill Android settlers. They have enough problems. Do not eat iPod shuffle.)
What we really need are more expressions, so we can quickly and effortlessly express ourselves even better to fellow iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and/or Mac users while irritating the pitiful Android settlers even more!
I absolutely HATE expressions in Messages!!! It’s the WORST thing Apple ever did. Why? Because in order to implement this “feature” (which I NEVER use and honestly could do without), they took away the ability to copy PART of a text message. How braindead is that??!! Utter idiocy!!! Now I can only copy and entire text message and not part of it. I could kill the person who came up with this “brilliant” idea. Really, death would be too good for them. I think I would force them to use a keyboard with only half the keys working for the rest of their life. Or maybe a mouse that moves left not the screen when s/he moves the mouse to the right. IT would serve them right!
Looks nice when it’s zoomed up like above. How does it look on smaller iPhones? Is it still readable by most users? If not you might need to add the smaller iPhone users to the group of ‘annoyed’.
I do expressions to my Android ‘friends’, screen
Shot and send them the pic so they can see how horrifying it is to text with them. Fucking bottom feeders.
This is yet another reason why we usually leave android users out of group texts
I absolutely HATE expressions in Messages!!! It’s the WORST thing Apple ever did. Why? Because in order to implement this “feature” (which I NEVER use and honestly could do without), they took away the ability to copy PART of a text message. How braindead is that??!! Utter idiocy!!! Now I can only copy and entire text message and not part of it. I could kill the person who came up with this “brilliant” idea. Really, death would be too good for them. I think I would force them to use a keyboard with only half the keys working for the rest of their life. Or maybe a mouse that moves left not the screen when s/he moves the mouse to the right. IT would serve them right!
Got how I hate messages now…
The worst thing they ever did, come on, the keyboard redesign took down their entire laptop lineup.
This is just.. copy the message and then delete the part you don’t want. Right? 😉
Or paste the copied message into Notes, change what you want and copy and paste back
Or just do as Mr. MR said and then do the modifications in the pasted message
No need to get your knickers in a knot or parties in a twist, macboy.
Looks nice when it’s zoomed up like above. How does it look on smaller iPhones? Is it still readable by most users? If not you might need to add the smaller iPhone users to the group of ‘annoyed’.
I do expressions to my Android ‘friends’, screen
Shot and send them the pic so they can see how horrifying it is to text with them. Fucking bottom feeders.
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