WhatsApp has slowed down introduction of novelties in the app. While the competition like Telegram continues adding great news every few months, in the Facebook app these news are very limited. However, one of the most important is going to arrive soon and it already has Telegram.
In the case of Telegram, the reactions to messages it is something that has been available for only a few weeks. And it cannot be said that WhatsApp has copied it from them, since the function in WhatsApp has been in development long before Telegram included it.
Reactions are on the way
These reactions to messages are something that we already find on other platforms such as Slack, Twitter, Instagram or Discord. In them, we can put an emoji to a message, so that we do not have to respond with another text message. Also, if it is a message in a group, it is faster and more comfortable to know the opinion of the people using emojis for it.
The function was known to arrive in 2022, but users of the latest beta for iOS 22.2.72 are getting the ability to turn notifications on and off when someone sends a reaction to one of our messages. It is possible to turn off reaction notifications for individual and group chats, and what tone you want to hear when you receive that notification.
Thanks to this, we can see that WhatsApp is preparing to launch the function almost immediately. In fact, it would not be unusual for the function to be already available in the code of the latest versions, and for WhatsApp to only have to do one remote activation of the function to start working. The arrival should not be delayed beyond a few weeks.
How could they be?
We still don’t know much about the design, but it should be similar to the one we found on Telegram, where there is a limited number of emojis to choose when clicking on a message. WhatsApp could also choose to add an icon to the right of the message that allows us to use an emoji to react.
These reactions will only be available to those who update to the latest versions of the app. In the case of having an old version and receiving a reaction, an image will appear saying that “You have received a reaction. Update your version of WhatsApp to see the reactions. For this, we will still have to wait a bit.