WhatsApp has rolled out its message reactions feature, announced last month. Earlier this week, the messaging platform also unveiled the ability to add up to 32 people to voice calls. Meta-owned WhatsApp has announced that it is rolling out new features, consisting of sharing large files and an increased limit of people in groups.
Similar to the Facebook and Instagram chat emoji reactions, users now will be able to emoji react to the messages on Whatsapp. Users need to long-press on a message and select the emoji they want to respond to.
According to a report, the company is also slowly rolling out the ability to add up to 512 people to a group, which, till now, allowed to add only up to 256 people. The company said in a blog post, “We are excited to share those emoji reactions are now available on the latest version of the app. Reactions are fun and fast, and they reduce overload in groups too.
We will continue improving them by adding an even broader range of expressions in the future. In addition, you can now send files within WhatsApp up to 2GB in size at a time, protected by end-to-end encryption. This is an increase from the previous limit of 100MB, and we think it will be helpful for collaboration among small businesses and school groups,”.
WhatsApp has also increased its file transfer limit from 100MB to 2GB. In addition, WhatsApp has also stated that it recommends using WiFi or a strong internet connection for sharing larger files and displaying a notification counter while uploading or downloading to let users know the time that it will take for the file to be sent or received successfully.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, confirmed that the new emoji reactions are rolling out on Android and iOS devices in a Facebook post.
However, the company also stated that the latest update would be a phased rollout, and the new feature may not be available to all the users all at once. Users now will be able to emoji react to the messages on Whatsapp.
To use the new feature, users need to long-press on a message and select the emoji they want to respond to. Moreover, the emojis represented are mostly common reactions consisting of thumbs-up, laughing face, red heart, crying face, hi-fi hand gesture, and a surprised face.