After months of anticipation, the WhatsApp Reactions feature is finally making its way to users. Mark Zuckerberg himself announced the feature through his official Facebook account. The feature has been in development for several years and leaks about it have surfaced on the internet over the past few months. Keep reading to learn more about Zuckerberg’s announcement and how the feature works for WhatsApp users.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that “WhatsApp reactions are starting to roll out today,” followed by the size emoji reactions that will be available for now. Although the feature is not available on an Android smartphone in hand (with the latest version of WhatsApp), it could be rolling out to all users in a few days. Since WhatsApp has over two billion users worldwide, it’s normal for Message Reactions to take a few days to be available to everyone.

WhatsApp announced feedback with communities last month

Last month, WhatsApp announced Reactions features along with Communities. In the official blog post announcing WhatsApp Communities, the platform mentioned that “emoji reactions are coming to WhatsApp so people can quickly share their thoughts without flooding chats with new messages.” Now that the feature has officially launched, users can avoid typing short messages to react to something sent by another user. Instead, they can use the reactions available on WhatsApp.

It’s worth mentioning that message reactions are already available as a feature on other IM platforms, including Telegram and WhatsApp’s sister platform, Instagram. Both platforms allow users to react by double-tapping a message. By default, reactions are set to thumbs up on Telegram and heart emoji on Instagram. As Zuckerberg mentioned, WhatsApp will have six reactions: thumbs up, heart, laughing face, surprised face, sad face, and folded hands.

In related news, WhatsApp is working on a new feature that allows users to react to other users’ statuses. For the uninitiated, WhatsApp Status is the equivalent of Instagram Story – it can be seen by anyone who has saved the user’s contact number and viewers can also react by sending text messages. However, unlike Instagram, there is no option to send a quick reaction to WhatsApp Status, at least not yet.