Meta-owned platform, WhatsApp is set to join other social media sites using the famed “reaction button’ on received messages.
WhatsApp joins Telegram, Instagram and other apps who already offer this functionality, with users getting to react to messages with some cool animated emojis.
The founder and CEO of Meta Inc, the parent company to Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, Mark Zuckerberg in a post on Facebook today together with a love and thanks emoji wrote that “Reactions will start rolling out today”
The new feature on WhatsApp may though not have the exact functionality as those of Telegram as the chat app won’t be offering animated emojis just yet but users can still have the leverage to react to react to certain messages with the regular, non-animated emojis.
To react to messages on WhatsApp, all you have to do is to tap on any message and the app will display an emoji box. You can then choose any one of them, after which WhatsApp will stick your emoji to that message. Users will for now be limited to only getting only six reactions, including Like, Love, Laugh, Surprised, Sad, and Thanks.
A recent report that based its findings in a development build of the app revealed that there is a prospect of a future update allowing WhatsApp Reactions users to utilise any emoji, GIF, or sticker in the messenger, with the latest version spotted in testing appearing to give access to the entire emoji keyboard when users tap the plus button.
Facebook Inc now Meta as far back as 2018 has been testing the WhatsApp Reactions feature, with the social media giant initially having the plan for sticker reactions before it metamorphosed into something closer to its final form in testing last year. The feature which is now dubbed as Emoji Reactions, Message Reactions, was referred to as Quick Reactions in the past.
WhatsApp which became the world’s most popular messaging application by 2015, with over 2 billion users worldwide by February 2020 had last month in a big reveal said Communities will bring several features over and above WhatsApp Groups, which will include enabling admins with new tools, like the ability to send a single message to everyone and control over which groups can be included in a particular community.
The chat platform has also teased more upcoming updates, one of them is the increased file sharing limit (up to 2GB) and the ability to enable group audio calls for up to 32 people simultaneously, of which so far only the latter has been rolled out.
The new update by WhatsApp will hopefully herald more notable updates like increased membership in groups and the anonymous delete message option of Telegram.
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Ayoola Faseyi, an Abuja based Journalist with interest in Technology and Politics. He is a versatile writer with articles in many renowned News Journals.
He is the Co-Founder of media brand, The Vent Republic.
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