Our colleague Nicole Nguyen is a personal tech columnist.

And like a lot of people, she's got a group chat with her family, but not just with her mom and dad.

It's got cousins, aunts, uncles. The group chat is called Big Fam.

It is currently 22-ish people deep.

That is a big fan.

It's a big fan.

And Nicole's big fan sends lots of messages.

I have to scroll a lot because it's a very active.

It's a very active chat.

Okay, let's see here. A lot of people are sending birthday messages to Uncle Dave.

There's a selfie of Uncle Dave at a boat parade. There are updates about my

grandma's knee surgery, grandma's on the move, a lot of texting, go grandma go.

An image of her on an iPad, sunbathing and watching K dramas. The group chat has grown over the years as kids grew up and spouses got added but one member of

Nicole's family has been left out. I'm Will Marquard and I'm Nicole Newen's husband. My husband Will, who has been a part of my family for almost 10 years now, is not in the chat.

Are you really part of the family though if you're not in the group

chat? You know at first I thought I was and then as other partners who joined the

family after me started joining the group chat I realized that maybe I'm not.

The reason Nicole's husband isn't on the group chat is because he has an

Android phone and all the members of the big fam group chat have iPhones

meaning the chat runs over Apple's eye message and all the text bubbles are blue

if Will were to join the group text using his Android, things would get messy.

If I added Will to the chat as an Android user, it would make a new chat.

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