You can react to WhatsApp messages with any emoji now

Our long international nightmare is over. We can breathe easy.

By that I mean, you can finally use emoji to react to messages in WhatsApp. The news comes courtesy of a Facebook post by Mark Zuckerberg, which is both an inconvenient place to announce news and a reminder that he owns WhatsApp, too. In the post, Zuck said they’re “rolling out” the ability to react with emoji, but didn’t give a timeline for when everyone would be able to do it.

He's got favorite emoji! He's just like us! Credit: Facebook

The coolest part is that you can apparently react with any emoji. Other services like iMessage and Twitter DMs, for comparison’s sake, only let you react with a pre-selected roster of five or six emoji, which severely limits expression. Sometimes you just have to use the poop emoji to express your distaste for something, you know?

WhatsApp beta lurkers first spotted hints of this feature coming to the popular messaging service back in March. Interestingly, at that time, it seemed as though it would work like those other aforementioned apps, with a small selection of emoji to react with. They were conventional choices like the laughing face, crying face, and thumbs up. Boring.

We can all thank our lucky stars that the WhatsApp developers saw the light and changed it so users can respond with any emoji instead. Good luck out there, folks. Try not to ruin any family relationships with that poop emoji.