WhatsApp is being updated little by little to make the messaging application owned by Meta more attractive and compete on equal terms, especially with Telegram. This past spring the possibility of reacting in WhatsApp to the different messages with a series of emojis was added.
At first, these reactions were somewhat limited to six. Today this feature is expanded and you will be able to react with any emoji.
From six emojis to anyone you can think of
In WhatsApp reactions, until now we could put an emoji of a finger doing the OK, an emoji of a heart, the face crying with laughter, a surprised and open-mouthed emoji, an emoji of sadness with a tear or an icon with both hands together (praying or asking for forgiveness).
WhatsApp reactions
We can react to all the messages that they send us but we can also add reactions to our own messages in case we need it or want to add our opinion on what we have just said.
You simply had to press and hold a message (or click on the reactions section in the web and desktop versions) and choose from one of these six available emojis to react to any message received.
Now Mark Zuckerberg just announced that the reactions function in WhatsApp is expanded and people will be able to use any emoji when reacting to a message in WhatsApp.
“We are rolling out the ability to use any emoji as a reaction on WhatsApp. Some of my favorites: 🤖🍟🏄♂️😎💯👊»
There will also be the ability to select different skin tones for emojis, just like when you insert them into a message.
How to react with a custom emoji
Thanks to the information Contributed by WABetaInfowhich has been following the development of this feature and testing it for beta users, we know that the process for adding custom emoji in addition to the initial six differs on Android and iOS.
New WhatsApp reactions (Photo: WABetaInfo)
What is common in both cases is the fact that a new “+” icon will appear in the reactions menu, to the right of the joined hands emoji.
Once pressed, when you touch the + icon, it skips the keyboard in the Android version, with a procedure similar to the one you do to choose an emoji when writing a message. Instead, when you use WhatsApp for iOS, there is a draggable section where you can easily select and search for any emoji.
At the moment, despite Zuckerberg’s announcement, we can say that we do not have this update yet, at least on Android, so it is expected to arrive in full in the next few hours.
