Meta-owned messaging giant, WhatsApp, continues to innovate its platform, with its latest venture being the addition of animated emojis. This exciting new feature is expected to significantly improve the user experience by adding a touch of humour and personality to chat messages.
Popular WABetaInfo has reported that Meta is in the process of developing animated emojis for WhatsApp, with the feature spotted in the beta version of the desktop app.
Animated emojis are designed to mimic existing emojis by adding motion, making them more lively and engaging.
According to WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is utilising Lottie, an optimised library for creating animations with minimal package sizes, to develop these animated emojis.
This choice ensures that the animations remain scalable without compromising on image quality, making them suitable for use across a range of devices with varying specifications.
One of the main advantages of Lottie is that it allows for easy scalability of images, ensuring that the overall quality remains unaffected as the image size increases.
This feature is particularly important for WhatsApp, given its global user base of over a billion people and the need to cater to a wide array of smartphones with differing storage capacities and processing power.
The animated emojis feature is currently being tested in the WhatsApp desktop beta version. However, it is widely anticipated that this feature will be made available on all versions of WhatsApp once fully developed and released.
Users can look forward to enjoying an enhanced messaging experience, complete with animated emojis to liven up their group chats and conversations.
In addition to the introduction of animated emojis, WhatsApp is also reportedly making minor improvements to its contact view feature. Android users on the latest beta version may notice subtle changes to the “About” text displayed under contact information.
The text size has been reduced to allow for multiple lines of text to be visible, improving readability for users.
While animated emojis may not be a game-changer for WhatsApp, they certainly promise to make the messaging platform more enjoyable to use.
Competing apps such as Google’s Messages and Apple’s iMessage have already offered animated emojis for years, making this move an effort by WhatsApp to catch up with its rivals.
As WhatsApp continues to focus on enhancing its user experience with the addition of features such as animated emojis, it remains to be seen whether users will have the option to disable these animations if desired.
For now, though, the messaging app’s loyal users can look forward to an upgraded experience that promises to add a touch of fun and personality to their chats.
