WhatsApp working on adding support for animated emoji

Damien Wilde | Apr 19 2023 - 3:02 am PT

As one of the biggest cross-platform messaging services, WhatsApp evolves at a constant rate. A feature that has been spotted in the works is the potential addition of animated emoji within WhatsApp chats.

Code-digger WABetaInfo has uncovered work by Meta to bring animated emoji to WhatsApp. This would stack with other findings in recent months that heavily imply that we’ll get more options for in-app stickers and emotes.

According to this find, when sending specific emoji, this will mimic Telegram’s existing feature by automatically adding animation to the outgoing or received message. This is merely a cosmetic change, but one that might be of interest to many users that might never have used rival services that already have similar features.

It appears that the animated WhatsApp emoji are designed and created using Lottie. This is an optimized library that makes it quick and easy for designers to create animations but keep the package size small. Scalability is touted as a benefit, as increasing image size shouldn’t impact on quality.

At the moment, the only indications of the option coming to the messaging platform come via the WhatsApp desktop beta. However, it’s highly likely that animated emoji will be available on all version of WhatsApp when released.

WABetaInfo also has noted some minor improvements are arriving for the contact view within WhatsApp. Android users on the latest beta may spot minute changes to the “About” text that shows underneath contact information. The text used is now smaller so that multiple lines of text are now visible. It’s a tiny change that might help you out if you are enrolled on the latest Android beta build.