The emoji reactions feature, which was introduced last month in Google Messages, has had a love-and-hate relationship among its users. Some users love those animated reactions that fill up the entire screen, while others find them annoying. Well, for the latter group of people, Google might soon introduce a toggle to disable expressive reactions.
The latest version of the Google Messages beta v20240422_01_RC00 has a string of code that says “Show expressive animations.” Google is notably, testing a new toggle that would allow users to turn off Reactions and Screen Effects in the Messages app.
The Reaction Effects in Google Messages lets you react to a text message with 10 different emojis, such as thumbs up, thumbs down, heart, crying, laughing, party popper, tears of joy or crying laughing, surprise or shock, poop, angry, or enraged. The feature is similar to iMessage’s emoji reactions.
Now, Google seems to have understood the plea of users who hate the animated reactions feature with the new toggle that is currently spotted in an APK teardown of the latest Google Messages beta. Here is what the string looks like:
Show expressive animations
It is a straightforward toggle to disable expressive animations in Google Messages and doesn’t allow for any granular tweaks, like turning off a specific reaction, etc. As noted by 9To5Google, the toggle could also impact Animated Emoji.
This is not the first time Google has reverted a feature that it introduced to an app. Recently, it took back the most disliked UI feature, where it separated the chat box and the bottom bar as a double-line composition box. Thankfully, the two-line message compose box was updated back to a single line.
Now it remains to be seen when Google Messages gets the ability to disable expressive reactions. Since this was found in the current beta, its roll out could be imminent.