On May 5, Mark Zuckeberg announced on his Facebook page that reactions had begun to come to WhatsApp. Since then, users have been able to react to messages with six emoji: 👍❤️😂😲😥🙏.
Not bad, but with 3,633 emojis on our keyboard, WhatsApp seems to have thought it wouldn’t hurt to let users choose which emoji to react with. And that’s exactly what’s starting to arrive in WhatsApp beta on iOS and Android: Possibility to react with any emoji.
Six emoji is not enough
This was developed by the well known portal WaBetaInfo, which is responsible for filtering what WhatsApp works on. And as discovered in WhatsApp Beta 2.22.15.6 (Android) and WhatsApp Beta 22.14.0.71 (iOS), it is already possible. react to messages with any emoji.
The process is quite simple. you just have to long press message press the “+” icon that we want to react to and will appear on the right. On Android, the keyboard is automatically invoked so we can select any emoji, on iOS it is listed in a navigable section.
This way, the user will be able to choose which emoji to react with instead. being limited to the six so far available. What remains in the air is whether we can change the six emojis that appear by default, or whether somehow WhatsApp can learn the emojis we use most often to automatically update the list. We’ll have to wait to find out.
Regardless, this function only available in beta version and for some users. It will most likely reach more users in the coming days/weeks and it won’t be long before it reaches the stable version.
via | WaBetaInfo