WhatsApp announced on Thursday that it’s adding emoji reactions to its chat app, letting you express your feelings toward a message without having to send an individual emoji as a message. Although the company announced reactions alongside its new communities feature, Meta spokesperson Joshua Breckman told The Verge that reactions will be available on all chats when they launch, which will be “soon.”
The feature will be relatively limited to start, only letting you react with six emoji (though, in my opinion, WhatsApp has picked most of the important ones). However, Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, said that it will support “all emojis and skin-tones” in the future.
We’re excited to announce that reactions are coming to WhatsApp starting with ❤️ and with all emojis and skin-tones to come. pic.twitter.com/086JnVS5Ey
— Will Cathcart (@wcathcart) April 14, 2022
It’s nice to see that this feature is coming to such a popular messaging app, as I’ve always appreciated having it in apps like Slack or Telegram (which only got them a few months ago). The company also announced that it’ll let users share much larger files, setting the max file size at 2GB, up from 100MB. It’s also increased the number of people that can be on a voice call at once from eight to 32.
