However, you can also drink it hot - you do you.
Normally, you heat your bubble tea up to stew the flavour and then let it cool with ice. You can also get different toppings in your bubble tea, like grass jelly or egg pudding. Now known as bubble tea in the western world, the modern cup is usually made up of a scoop of flavoured tapioca, milk or fruit tea, ice and syrup.
The tapioca pearls actually came later, and it became known as boba tea (which is what the tapioca balls are also referred to as) because it's a Chinese slang term for breasts. He wanted to change the way people drank tea, so he experimented with putting tea over ice, and bubble tea was born. The inventor of the drink generally accepted as being true is Liu Han-Chieh of the Chun Shui Tang teahouse in Taichung, Taiwan. It was created from a mixture of milk tea (which was already super popular at the time) and tapioca balls/pearls (a common dessert). Bubble tea, or boba tea, was invented in Taiwan in the '80s.