I fucking hate my family chats for this. My mom and my In-Laws all have iPhones, so of course they’re always using the chat app reactions on everything. For some reason, that apparently means I need to receive said reaction as a separate text message on android. The text “Lexi: laughed at ‘The dog farted’” never needs to be sent to my phone. Even worse is when we share baby photos or something and suddenly 20 instances of “Mom: Loved an image” “Adam: Laughed at an image” “Dad: Liked an image” start crowding out the actual conversation. I don’t even know what specific images they’re referencing! Why do I need those texts!? And don’t get me started on the potato quality of videos because Apple refuses to use anything but their proprietary compression software and doesn’t allow Android to properly decompress them.
What Android version are you on? Or perhaps which messaging app are you using?
Google started intercepting those reactions a couple of years ago. Do see if you can enable a "show iPhone reactions as emoji” option under some Advanced message settings.
Potato quality videos due to Apple’s absurdly greedy business practices may finally be resolved in iOS 18. s/o to Apple for waiting until European regulators turned the microscope on them to think about mitigating, amongst other things, some of the bullying the youngins get for “ruining” group chats by daring to have budget (or high-end but non-Apple) phones.
One of the unsung advantages of being trans and having bigoted parents is not having to deal with that bullshit. I can’t imagine loving and valuing my parents, that sounds like hell.