I doubt there's much you can do apart from ask the iPhone owners to stop, or switch the group to a cross-platform system like WhatsApp which would work the same for everyone. To your phone these are presumably just ordinary messages, and treated as such.

The problem is that iPhone owners will be communicating via iMessage, which is an IP-based message system, so for them it will be sending a custom flag to make an icon appear. But to non-iOS devices it sends regular sms, and it seems that Apple have chosen to send copies of messages for likes rather than just not send this stuff to non-iOS users. In other words it's a poor implementation by Apple. I doubt they have provided an option not to send these to non-iOS users, but you'd need to look through iMessage settings to see.

Of course people could complain to Apple, but since it took several years and a class action to get them to provide a solution to their iMessage deregistration bug (which put people off switching) it's unlikely they will do anything to make it less annoying for non-iOS users - they may even think that some of their customers will believe this is a problem with other platforms rather than a bad design by Apple and so it will help lock them in.

 

Or an incentive for non-iOS users to switch to using Apple.

 

To be fair, Google don't listen to Android owners either...

 

Well right, but it's much more fun to ignore that fact and just blame Apple first for all our texting woes

 

We are slightly biased of course. In a way I'm not surprised that Apple have introduced this non standard extension to texting. Just another way of locking users in. I'd like to think that Android is a more open system.

 

If you are using iMessage I guess it's like FB messaging. The problem is that they have made a bad choice of what it should do for non-iMessage users in the conversation.

 

I’m an iPhone user and I’ve noticed this happening in the last couple weeks. Believe me the people that have “loved” a preceding thread don’t realize they’ve done it. I can’t even figure out HOW to do it. If anyone knows share it so I can avoid I!

 

Is there no messaging client app in the play store that fixes this?

 

How could there be? The iPhone is simply sending an ordinary text message to anyone who isn't using an iPhone. The SMS client in the receiving phone just receives a text message and display it - it cannot know what device sent it or why there are particular words in it.

Feel free to write an SMS client that analyses all of your texts, tries to spot patterns that it interprets as this iMessage behaviour and modifies how it presents them to you. I'll guarantee that it will make misclassify some normal messages for some people, causing other problems.

The problem is Apple being stupid and sending these things to phones that aren't using iMessage. Because Apple know which recipients are on iMessage (and so receive iMessages) and which are not (and receive SMS). They have chosen to send this to people who are receiving the conversation as SMS, i.e. non-iPhone users. The problem is that since those people are not iPhone users they don't matter to Apple; indeed if they have a worse experience than the iPhone user this might even persuade a few to switch to Apple, so if anything this silliness might work in their favour...

 

Um.. I could write the logic like this. When you see the exact message appear with the words liked, loved or disliked preceding it,s show thumbs up, heart or sad face. Seriously!

 

Then do it. Then you can find out whether there is enough demand for it to have been worth doing.

That's the problem with things like this: they are an annoyance for those affected, but how many are? I've never heard anyone complain about this outside of this thread.

 

Actually something you might be interested in: QKSMS+ shows blocking messages containing specified strings as a planned feature ("coming soon"). So there may be something that does what you want in the future, though it's not available yet.

 

I don't know if anyone is still looking at this question but I formulated a way to subtly dissuade iPhoners from doing this (to me at least). If they write Loved "blah blah blah", then I give them the a text saying Loved "Loved "blah blah blah""

 

Loved I doubt there's much you can do apart from ask the iPhone owners to stop, or switch the group to a cross-platform system like WhatsApp which would work the same for everyone. To your phone these are presumably just ordinary messages, and treated as such.

The problem is that iPhone owners will be communicating via iMessage, which is an IP-based message system, so for them it will be sending a custom flag to make an icon appear. But to non-iOS devices it sends regular sms, and it seems that Apple have chosen to send copies of messages for likes rather than just not send this stuff to non-iOS users. In other words it's a poor implementation by Apple. I doubt they have provided an option not to send these to non-iOS users, but you'd need to look through iMessage settings to see.

Of course people could complain to Apple, but since it took several years and a class action to get them to provide a solution to their iMessage deregistration bug (which put people off switching) it's unlikely they will do anything to make it less annoying for non-iOS users - they may even think that some of their customers will believe this is a problem with other platforms rather than a bad design by Apple and so it will help lock them in.