The Surprisingly Complicated World of SMS: Emoji SMS Reactions
6 days ago
- #SMS
- #Emoji
- #Android
- Parents often use the thumbs up emoji in SMS messages.
- Android phones format message reactions with hidden metadata (Hair Space and Zero Width Space) to denote emoji reactions.
- Non-Android phones display the reaction as garbled text (e.g., ��� to ” Test 123″).
- The reaction includes the original message, which can increase message size significantly if converted to UTF-16.
- Reacting to a long SMS (near the 160-character limit) can turn it into a multi-part message, drastically increasing its size.