After months of anticipation, the WhatsApp Reactions feature is finally making its way to users. Mark Zuckerberg himself has announced the feature via his official Facebook account. The feature has been under development for several years and leaks about it have been extensively surfacing on the internet for the past few months. Keep reading to know more about Zuckerberg’s announcement and how the feature will work for WhatsApp users.
The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has announced that “Reactions of WhatsApp start rolling out today,” followed by the size emoji reactions that will be available for now. While the feature was not available on an Android smartphone in hand (with the latest WhatsApp version), it might roll out to all users in a couple of days. Given that WhatsApp has more than two billion users around the world, it is normal for the Message Reactions to take a few days before being available for all.
Last month, WhatsApp announced the Reactions features along with communities. In the official blog post that announced WhatsApp Communities, the platform mentioned “emoji reactions are coming to WhatsApp so people can quickly share their opinion without flooding chats with new messages.” Now that the feature has officially been launched, users can avoid typing short messages for reacting to something sent by another user. Instead, they can use the reactions available on WhatsApp.
It is worth mentioning that message reactions have already been available as a feature on other instant messaging platforms including Telegram and WhatsApp’s sister platform, Instagram. Both the platforms allow users to react by tapping twice on a message. By default, reactions are set to thumbs up on Telegram and heart emoji on Instagram. As mentioned by Zuckerberg, WhatsApp will have six reactions – thumbs up, heart, laughing face, surprised face, sad face, and joined hands.
In a related news, WhatsApp is working on a new feature that allows users to react to other users’ statuses. For the uninitiated, WhatsApp Status is the equivalent of Instagram Story – it can be seen by all the people who have saved the user’s contact number and viewers can react by sending text messages as well. However, unlike Instagram, there is no option to send a quick reaction to WhatsApp Status, at least not yet.
Source: World Republic
