Typing awareness indicator more stressful than helpful

A few days ago, my friend and I were in a heated discussion over iMessage that put our friendship in jeopardy, and the typing awareness indicator was giving me so much anxiety that I couldn’t even set my phone down for a millisecond.

The typing awareness indicator, common across many platforms such as Facebook, iMessage and Whatsapp, is the gray bubble enclosing three dots that pops up when the other person is writing a message.

As an avid user of iMessage, I have  noticed people’s different typing habits.

There’s the person who makes the gray bubble pop up and go away and pop up again for what seems like an eternity. It initially makes me think that the other person is writing an extremely long and meaningful message to me, but usually  they just send something lame like “k” or “cool.”

There’s also that particular situation in which I’m drafting a message to someone, knowing the other person is watching the typing awareness indicator, but then my phone dies right when I’m about to press send. When I finally get to a charger, my inbox is flooded with messages like “What takes you so long to reply to me.”
On the other end of the spectrum, I was in the middle of a conversation with someone and I had just asked a question along the lines of “so when do you want to meet up?” only to be met with the read receipt, “Read 9:13 AM” under my text bubble and the typing awareness indicator popping up but then leaving. When it never returned, all I could think was “how rude.”

Another very annoying thing I’ve noticed with the typing awareness indicator is when someone has just sent me a message, and I’m replying, but then the typing awareness indicator pops up on their end. That leaves me wondering if I should continue to respond, or I should just stop writing my message. Usually we’ll both stop typing and the conversation just awkwardly sits there.

Interestingly, a couple weeks ago, I came across a typing awareness indicator gif, that when sent to the receiver, looks like the typing awareness indicator. Even though it seemed really stupid, I tried it on one of my friends, and when I checked my phone a couple minutes, I got a response along the lines of “Are you writing me a book or something?!”

Although the typing awareness indicator may be beneficial to some people, messaging platforms should at least include the option to enable or disable the feature. The typing awareness indicator lets people know when someone has read your message and is replying, but a read receipt would also let you know if someone has seen your message.

Most importantly, being able to keep the typing awareness indicator off would eliminate unnecessary stress of responding promptly and with the right length, something that would be much appreciated by me and other busy high school students.