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Texting is one of the most effective and efficient ways to communicate in the world today. It’s used by over five billion people every year, which adds up to 65% of the world’s population. It’s a technology and form of communication that has been around for several decades, and as time goes on, it has become a dominant form of communication for most people in the world.
As smartphones have become one of the most popular and usable mobile devices in the modern world, texting has continued to develop more features and functionalities. Using the enhanced hardware and platforms that come along with smartphones, texting services and phone manufacturers have created more and more ways to express yourself over text.
While iPhones used to be the most popular kind of phone for expressing yourself better over text, technological and developmental advancements have made it so virtually anyone can access these incredible features. Here are a few features that can make your Android texting experience much more engaging, and bring a new level of excitement to every text message that you send.
How To Like a Message
It’s easy to make messages more meaningful while using Android phones. One of the most exciting and useful features to come out of the past few years is reacting to, or “liking” messages. With Android, you can add any emoji as a reaction to a text, which makes it much easier to express exactly what you are thinking.
Generally, most people who are using Android phones are using the stock Android app, Google Messages. This is an app that is found on almost all Android phones as the default app that you can use for texting. While anyone has the ability to use whatever apps they want for texting, the Messages app is the most common one by far, and makes it easier to communicate with other people who are using the same texting application.
Adding a reaction to a text message using the Messages app is very simple:
- Tap and hold on the message that you want to “like” or react to with an emoji.
- Choose which reaction emoji you would like to use. Generally, the best emoji for “liking a message is the thumbs up emoji. This is the typical standard for most phones, and the most commonly recognized for “liking” something.
Using this process, you can react to virtually any text to add a little bit more flavor and interest to the text message you send and receive.
There are also options to change the reaction, or even remove the reaction entirely. If you want to change the reaction, follow these steps.
- Long press on the message that already has a reaction:
- Select a different, new reaction.
This is important in case you accidentally use the wrong reaction, and need to switch it to the one that you want to use. Alternatively, it can happen when your feelings towards a message change over time, and you need to restate what you are thinking.
If you want to delete your reaction to a text, follow these two easy steps:
- Tap and hold on the message with the reaction you want to delete
- Tap the highlighted emoji, which will be the one that is already selected.
- This will deselect the emoji, and the reaction will disappear from the text.
These are very simple ways to make it so that you can have a much more engaging text experience. If you are in a group text and want to find out who reacted to a message that either you or someone else sent, tap and hold on that message and it will show you who reacted to the message.
How To Turn On RCS Messaging On Your Android Phone
In order to use text reactions as a tool for texting, it’s important to have RCS messaging enabled on your phone. While many people are familiar with SMS and MMS messaging, RCS messaging is a very powerful and exciting new way to communicate over text. It takes the flexibility of MMS messaging, and adds a lot of additional functionality and features, of which text reactions is one.
SMS and MMS messaging, although they are very popular and well used, don’t actually support text reactions or other modern features. If you want to make use of these features, make sure that you and everyone who you are texting have RCS messaging enabled. Here is how to do that:
- Open the Messages app
- Tap the three dots on the top-right of the screen, which will open up settings drop down window
- Tap Settings
- Tap Chat Features
- Toggle the “Enable Chat Features” to on. Some phones may come with this feature already enabled, so if it’s already toggled on, then just leave it as it is.
RCS messaging enables you to access a wide range of new features, and is generally the most updated and powerful messaging standard today. RCS is slowly becoming more and more dominant as a texting technology, while SMS and MMS messaging are still both very powerful and popular forms of texting.
How To See Typing Bubbles On Android Phones
Another new feature that has come to Android phones through RCS messaging is typing bubbles. These are very useful when texting with someone, because it will let you know when they are typing a message to you. It makes the whole experience of texting much more engaging and exciting, and makes it a lot easier to communicate effectively.
When you have chat features enabled on Google Messages, this will automatically be sent out from your phone. If you want to see the typing bubbles appear on other people’s phones, try to have them enable their chat features.
In general, many of these new features with Android phones depend on having both the sender and receiver of the text messages having their phones enabled for RCS messaging. It makes it a lot easier for good communication to happen, so encourage all of your friends to enable RCS messaging, as long as they are able to.
How To See Read Receipts
Another new feature that goes along with RCS messaging is the implementation of read receipts. These are small notifications in your messaging app that will allow you to know when someone has read your message, and allows people to know when you have read their messages. It’s a very helpful and useful tool to have, because it makes it a lot easier for people to know when messages have been both received and understood.
Enabling read receipts is as simple as enabling chat features using the previously discussed method. RCS messaging is the texting platform that enables people to send read receipts as well, so turning on chat features will automatically turn on those features as well.
Will Chat Features Work With iPhones?
All of these features are very powerful, and make communication between Android phones much more convenient and useful. iPhones also have a lot of similar features that enable them to use a lot of similar features, including reacting to messages, Typing Bubbles, and Read Receipts.
However, it is important to note that the iPhone messaging system, iMessage, is not compatible with RCS messaging. Even though these two systems offer very similar features, they can’t work across platforms. This means that new features like Message Reacting, Typing Bubbles, and Read Receipts will not work when an Android is texting an iPhone, or vice versa.
This does not mean that iPhones and Androids can’t text, however. If an iPhone is sending or receiving a text message from a non-Apple based product, it will send the message using SMS or MMS messages. When an iPhone sends or receives an SMS or MMS message, it will show the text as green bubbles instead of the blue bubbles that go along with iMessage messages. These do all the basic features of texting, including sending text messages, photos, videos, and other multimedia content.
While iMessage and RCS features are reserved for communication between devices of the same brand, communication is still possible, even if the same phone isn’t used by both parties.
Conclusion
These new features that have come to Android phones over the past several years have made texting on Android much more interesting. However, using SMS and MMS messaging is still a very powerful tool for many companies that need to send highly compatible and powerful messages to their communities. That’s why Community uses SMS and MMS messaging - to make sure that everyone can receive your messages, no matter what phone they use.
If you’re looking for a highly effective and powerful way to reach out to a large number of people at one time, Community is one of the best options in the world. Instead of just focusing on the quantity of messages sent, Community is intentional about creating high quality, engaging communication between you and your community. To learn more about how our service can cultivate a much more powerful relationship with you and the people who care the most about you, check out our website today!
Sources:
Cell phones and American adults | Pew Research
Turn on chat features in Messages - Messages Help | Google
Chat features by Google FAQ - Messages Help | Google
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