WhatsApp Message Reactions finally rolling out to everyone!

WhatsApp has finally started to roll out emoji reactions to all of its users - a new development, quite similar to Telegram, and Instagram's message reactions. WhatsApp is also working on increasing the sharing files size limit from 100MB to 2GB, while the group size limit will now be 512, from 256.

The ability to react to individual and group chat messages on the app was announced just last month, and since then it was being tested in the beta program. These emoji reactions are already available on the latest version of WhatsApp for Android and iOS, Google Play Store, and Apple App Store respectively.

If you're conversant with Telegram, you will know the main purpose of the reactions is to help people quickly express their thoughts and feelings about a particular message they received from personal or group chats without having to send a text or sticker reply.

The reactions on WhatsApp that allows users to express their emotions include like, love, laugh, surprise, sadness, and thank. It is expected due to a reference that appeared in a recent testing build, that soon users can be able to choose from a selection of emojis available, other than the ones mentioned above.

How to use message reactions on WhatsApp

It is very easy to add reactions to messages on WhatsApp, below contains the process to follow in other to use this new feature.

First of all, head to a message either on a group chat or your personal message, then long press on the message you wish to react to. After that, you will see a list of emojis, simply tap any emoji of your choice.

Now, the message will get the reaction your choose, and just like a regular text, voice, video message, or voice call send a notification to the user, the user will also be informed about your reaction to their message.

According to the information provided by WhatsApp on the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, users can change their reaction if they want by just holding the message and selecting a different emoji, however, they cannot add more than one reaction to a single message.

If you want to remove the reaction to the text, simply hold the text, and select the same emoji you used as a reaction, it will then be removed. This time, the sender will be unaware you have to remove your reaction.

The other features I mentioned earlier coming to WhatsApp soon include the increased file size limit for sharing files including PDFs to 2GB, with the exclusion of photos, videos, and voice messages whose limits remain 16MB.

As for the group chat members limit, finally, you can accommodate more users in a group chat instead of having up to 2 group chats. This time, up to 512 members can join a group chat.

These features are slowly rolling out to all users. So head to Playstore or Apple Store for iOS users and download WhatsApp's latest version.