The long-awaited message reaction feature is now available to WhatsApp beta testers. This was previously reported to be a WhatsApp Beta feature in development and is now accessible on WhatsApp Android for those eager to try it out. With it, you can react to chat messages using 6 ready-to-use emojis.
While WhatsApp is a popular messaging app, it actually lacks several functionalities that its competitors have long since had. One of these is the ability to react to messages, for some reason, but now this feature is making some real headway.
As mentioned before, the message reaction feature does exactly what it says: users can now “react” to specific message bubbles in their conversations by tapping and holding onto the bubble briefly. This will bring up a small row of 6 emoticons: a thumbs-up, a heart, a laughing and crying face, a shocked face, a teary-eyed face, and a praying gesture. These are more known as Like, Love, Laugh, Suprised, Sad, and Thanks.
After they pop up, users can choose one emoji that attaches itself to the bottom of the message bubble, indicating that it’s been reacted to. This even comes with a cute little animation when the emoji is applied. At the moment, there’s no option to add custom reactions but we can hope that that may become a future update once this one has been publicly released.
Currently, this has only rolled out on WhatsApp Beta for Android to a handful of beta testers. You will have to wait for the next beta update to test it if your latest version doesn’t have it yet. At this rate, the other anticipated WhatsApp features in development will soon be available for testing, too.
Image credit: WABetaInfo
