I was under the impression that just viewing a text would show a “Read” indicator if both users have an iPhone, or both users use the Google’s Android Messaging app.
Can you dumb it down for me? I’ve never experienced it and darn near everyone I know uses iPhones. If it’s a software problem, why doesn’t it have the same effect on everyone?
Nor mine. I have no idea what he’s talking about with blue or green bubbles. My texts show a really pale blue, texts from others are grey.
If this is the case it would mean people I text with that have iPhones have never used the quick response button because I have never seen what ThelmaLou describes. I’ve used the quick response on my Android and have never seen a text repeated back to the original sender.
I wonder if we are all talking about different things. This is what I’m talking about.
My text: Hey, want to go bar hopping and then have wild crazy sex tonite?
Her text back: :Hey, want to go bar hopping and then have wild crazy sex tonite? 
I want to know why some people get their whole text sent back to them, like ThelmaLou does, and why I don’t if it’s an iPhone/Android issue.
Note that I’ve only gotten the type of text reply that we’re talking about twice among the hundreds of replies I’ve received.
So maybe just an hiccup rather than an actual software problem? We need to do some testing. You should constantly text everyone you know with an iPhone, and tell them to use the quick response button until you get a double message back. Then do some sciencey stuff with the results.
Well, my bother and one friend of mine have an iPhone and I occasionally get exactly the response described in the OP. Liked or Loved followed by my previous text to them in quotes.
I also get “Laughed at” and then whatever I wrote in quotes.
Just call or text your friend and test it out. Ask if they have an iPhone.
My understanding: people on Apple phones (or iPads), using the Apple iMessage application, get different colours depending on the Androidness of their counterpart, and a reduced texting experience when there’s a least one Android person in the conversation.
The idea of quoting the sentence is that, if I text you “Billy got an A in maths this week” followed by “Oh yes, forgot to tell you : Aunt Sue has died of cancer” , and 15 minutes later you read all this and put a Like on the first sentence, it’s important that I know which sentence you’re referring to. If I only received a 
at my end, you wouldn’t even know I found you cruel and insensitive.
I’s not exactly a software “problem”. An iPhone normally sends a message to another iPhone using data rather than the cellular service. This means I can and have sent a message using wifi when I don’t have cellular service - I believe that there are apps that can do the same thing. If for some reason, there is cellular service but no data it will be sent as an ordinary text message.
The green or blue bubble thing only shows up on iPhones and distinguishes whether the text was sent as an iMessage (blue) or text message (green). A message sent to another iPhone might be either color while one sent to an non-iPhone will always be green.
I think that the “typing” indicator and read receipts only work with messages between iPhones and obviously the reactions show differently. It’s entirely possible that someone’s friends may not use the quick reaction buttons - I think I’ve used them two or three times.
Since I have an iPhone, I’m not at all sure what
means. I can have group chats and exchange videos with non-iphone users.
Yes, what i see and what my friend sees when we text each other can be very different.
In fact, yesterday, my sister asked if i had texted a file to her. I had not. Someone sent malware (i assume) that looked like it came from my phone number. It showed up in the middle of our chat on her phone, and there was no evidence of it on my phone.
So i think what’s happening is that iChat allows “reactions”, so an iPhone user can click a heart, or whatever. And on their phone, it just looks like a heart next to the person’s comment. And that’s what it looks like to the other person if they are also using iChat. But if they are using plain SMS (for instance, they have an Android) it comes across as “love: what the other person said”.
I use Signal to text. If I’m texting someone else on signal, i can use some emoji replies, like a heart. If I’m texting someone who isn’t on signal, it just doesn’t allow me to do that. The interface is slightly different.
(Waiting to see if my son asks about the heart i just added to something he said to me yesterday.)
Yes, I see it fairly often, from family members who have iPhones.
At least some, and possibly all, of the times I’ve seen it have been in group texts, if that makes a difference.
Since I mostly exchange texts with old people like me (70-ish), probably most of my correspondents don’t know about that shortcut, or frankly, much else about their phones. The two times I got those auto-replies, they were from people around age 40.
Most of the people I know in my age group don’t bother to find out what their techie gadgets can do. Whereas I have tweaked and customized Textra to within an inch of its life. I have separate notification sounds for Bank transactions, Amazon deliveries, and UPS deliveries. Everything has custom colors, and the picture on each account is either a person’s face or it’s a logo which I screen capture from the internet. I love my techie toys and I want to get the most from them.
Yeah, that’s true. But for me at least that’s unsatisfactory. Because especially if I get a long text I may open it to read but then not actually read for content until later. So the sender gets the “read” indication but I haven’t actually “processed”.
Again, to go back to the radio comms metaphor, the “Read” indication is a bit like an Auto-Ack that a radio might send. It merely means that the message was received and opened. The “Like/Heart/etc” tap-back is more like a “Roger” or perhaps a “Wilco” if there is a request involved.
On my android phone, I can turn off the read receipts.
I’m the only one in my family who doesn’t have an iPhone. Needless to say, I see “Loved [my entire previous text]” all the time. It was puzzling at first, but once I figured out what was happening, I was okay with it. I’m not one of those people who thinks “Like” buttons will bring about the end of civilization.
Fortunately, they haven’t asked me why I don’t “love” any of their texts. If they did, I’d say, “Android doesn’t do that,” and they’d start bugging me (again) to get an iPhone. They already hassle me enough about how they can’t use “Find My Friends” to see where I am every minute of the day.
Now that is a good example of a use for the repeat text. That never would have occurred to me to do that. Of course, I never use the quick response, so I would never have this happen to me.
Yes, I mentioned that upthread because my Android has the quick reply option, but I never use it. It’s quite possible that lot of the people I know with iPhones don’t use it either. Many are middle age or older and use their phones just as phones, with a rare text here or there.
That would definitely explain my not seeing it. I’ve probably only group texted a couple dozen times in my life.
I don’t think most of us have any problem with “like” buttons on texts. I think texts are perfect for very short replies. We just wondered why our original texts were repeated back to us rather than a simple “like.”
Cell phones initially used SMS (Short Message Service) as the technology for sending text messages and it was very limited (no multimedia, very short messages and so on). Then phones went to MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) which allowed for video and pictures to be sent as well as much longer messages.
Then, Apple invented iMessage which is their proprietary chatting system which had much better features than SMS + MMS did. This includes encryption, better multimedia support, group chats, read receipts and other things. BUT…this ONLY worked from iPhone to iPhone. If they send to an Android the iPhone defaults back to SMS+MMS and all its limitations. This is why you get “Liked [[some words]]”. While you can chat to a group of non-iPhone users it loses a lot of functionality and doesn’t display as neatly as it could on the iPhone. Photos/videos you send may be significantly degraded in quality to lower files size. This is all very intentional by Apple.
These days, Android uses RCS (Rich Communication Services) which allows for much larger files to be sent as well as some other features like group chat, read notifications, and so on. It is open source although Google has made their own version of it (modified it). It is every bit as capable as iPhone’s iMessage app but Apple still will not play nice with it to keep their users locked-in to the Apple ecosystem.