Back in May, WhatsApp began rolling out a series of updates. One of those updates was the ability to react to messages with emoji. At first, you could only use six emoji characters, such as thumbs up, the red heart, folded hands, and the crying face. On Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the feature is getting an upgrade. In the near future, reactions on WhatsApp will give you access to your phone’s full emoji keyboard.
WhatsApp emoji reactions get an upgrade
“We’re rolling out the ability to use any emoji as a reaction on WhatsApp,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Monday. He also shared a list of his favorite emoji to use as reactions, including the robot face, french fries, and a guy surfing.
Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp at Meta, confirmed the news in a tweet hours later:
As you can see in the image above, reactions on WhatsApp still work the same way. In order to post your reaction, long-press on a message in a chat. The same six emoji characters will appear in a pop-up, but there will also be a plus button at the end of the list. When you tap on the plus button, your device’s full emoji keyboard will open up.
It appears that WhatsApp users will have access to virtually every emoji their device offers. That includes recently added emoji from the Emoji 14.0 collection and emoji with different skin tones. WhatsApp wants to give users more freedom to express themselves.
Other recent updates
The addition of emoji reactions is significant, but that’s not all that WhatsApp has added in recent months. As of this May, it is now possible to send files of up to 2GB in size at a time. The previous file size limit on WhatsApp was a measly 100MB.
Additionally, WhatsApp groups can now support up to 512 users, while up to 32 WhatsApp users can join the same voice call.
