Of the devices available on hand, WhatsApp emoji reactions were available on the iPhone 11, Samsung Galaxy M51, and the Galaxy Note 8. Out of these, the iPhone 11 was the first to receive the feature.

Meta-owned WhatsApp was founded in 2009 and was acquired by Facebook in 2014, and the messaging app has over 2 billion monthly users — so that’s a lot of emoji reactions coming to your phone.

WhatsApp’s new emoji options aren’t out of the blue. Meta brought the same feature set to its Facebook Messenger service a while ago, so it’s simply pulling both services into sync.

The addition of emoji reactions is significant, but that’s not all that WhatsApp has added in recent months. As of this May, it is now possible to send files of up to 2GB in size at a time.

WhatsApp announced updates to the app, like Communities and emoji reactions, in April in response to messaging app competitors like Telegram. Facebook, which last year rebranded itself as Meta ...