WhatsApp’s emoji reactions, communities, bigger file size support, rolls in

WhatsApp’s emoji reactions are finally here and that’s not all. Meta has also rolled out support for sharing of files that are up to 2GB in size. Just for perspective, earlier, WhatsApp allowed sharing of files that were upto 100MB in size. The company had announced these features last month and had then said that these would br “coming soon”, and they are finally here. Additionally, it has also been announced that the maximum size of the group chats is also getting doubled.

While first announcing reactions, Meta had said that WhatsApp users would only be able to use a select few emoji reactions in the beginning ans support for “all emojis and skin-tones” would be added “in the future”.

To be honest, WhatsApp’s emoji reactions are not the most important new feature that the platform needed, but others like Slack and Telegram has had them for a while, so it is understandable that Meta needed to add it. As The Verge pointed out - “if you want to be able to show that a message made you laugh without clogging up the group chat, you’ve now got a way to do that”.

The important new addition on WhatsApp is the expansion of the default maximum size of group chats that has been doubled from 256 to 512. And that fact that you can now send files up to 2GB over chats.

WhatApp explained in its blog that this ‘larger groups’ feature is being slowly rolled out and the support for emoji reactions, and increased file size limits is being made available in the current version of the app. Meta spokesperson Vispi Bhopti told The Verge that the emoji reactions will be available to all users in “about a week”, while some users might have already received it.

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