Texting has become the preferred form of communication among smartphone users. You may love texting because it’s fast, easy, and asynchronous, allowing you to correspond on your terms. Texting also keeps a history of your chats, so you can look back to see any information you need. Seeing its popularity, Google introduced several new features with its RCS messaging standard, which works on most of the best Android smartphones. One of those new features is message reactions, which allows you to like text messages on Android.
Even if your phone does not support Google’s RCS messaging standard by default, you can enable RCS in the app settings and set it as your default messaging app to use this feature. In this guide, we show you how to like text messages on Android.
First, enable RCS support on your phone
Before you can like a text message on Android, your phone and carrier must support the new RCS messaging standard. Most modern Android phones come with RCS messaging enabled out of the box. However, depending on your smartphone OEM, the feature might not work out of the box. As a rule of thumb, any Android smartphone that uses Google Messages as its default messaging app supports RCS messaging.
Here’s how RCS makes your texts more interactive
While the move from SMS messaging to RCS messaging standard on Android phones has been a little bumpy, the new Rich Chatting Service (RCS) is better for users in every way. It brings features like read receipts, typing indicators, and message reactions. So, if you have not enabled this feature on your phone, we recommend you do it now.
Below, we show how to enable RCS messaging on a Google Pixel and Samsung smartphone. However, the steps are essentially the same for any Android device that supports RCS messaging.
- Open the Messages app on your Pixel phone, and tap your Profile icon in the upper-right corner.
- Tap Messages settings.
- Open Chat features and turn on the toggle next to Enable chat features.
- If you use a Samsung device, launch the default Samsung Messages app, tap the three-dot menu, and open Settings.
- Choose Chat settings and enable the toggle next to Chat features.
How to like a text message on your phone
Now that you have enabled RCS messaging on your Android smartphone, you can like a text message or send message reactions.
- Open a message conversation thread in your Messages app.
- To like a message, press and hold a message.
- You will see a popup showing several message reactions.
- Select the thumbs-up reaction to like the message.
Change your text message reaction on Android
Apart from liking, you can choose and send any emoji as a message reaction. There are hundreds of supported emojis in RCS, giving you a variety of reactions to use as a response. You can even change your message reaction if required.
- To change a message reaction, tap the like or another message reaction you sent.
- Choose from the suggested reaction or tap the emoji+ button to access all the emojis.
- Tap the emoji you want to send as a reaction, and your original reaction is replaced with the new emoji.
Make the jump from text messages to video calls
The new RCS messaging standard has brought the default text messaging experience closer to iMessage and third-party apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. You can use RCS messaging to like text messages, send photos and videos, get read receipts, and more. If you liked this guide, check out our guide on how to make a video call on Android so that you aren’t limited to only texting when you connect with your loved ones.
