14 DAY TRIAL // WhatsApp is finally getting its very own universal set of emoticons, which means that all the smiley faces will finally look the same regardless of the mobile operating system you’re using.
A beta version of the mobile messaging app comes with an early version of this emoji pack, and by the looks of things, they all look very similar to the ones available on Apple’s iOS devices, albeit with small differences here and there.
As you can see in the comparison shots below published by Emojipedia, there are obvious similarities between Apple’s emoticons and the universal WhatsApp emoji pack, though it’s pretty clear that the designing team behind the messaging platform spent some time to make them look a little bit different.
The Facebook-owned service is still testing this emoji pack for the time being with a private beta version currently the only one featuring it, but if testing advances without any major bugs, everyone should be getting them very soon.
Launching by the end of the year
Of course, iPhone users could feel like home when installing the new WhatsApp version given the resemblance between the standard Apple emoticons and those being used by the messenger, but on the good side, there’ll be more consistency across platforms.
At this point, there’s no target date for when we should expect the release of the new version of WhatsApp with a built-in universal emoji pack, but the end of the year is probably a safe bet for now.
Emoticons have become quite a big deal for large companies in the last couple of years, with Apple itself introducing a new feature called Animoji that’s exclusively available on the iPhone X. Animoji is a set of animated emoji generated using Face ID hardware face scanning and with users’ own facial expressions rendered in 3D.
As compared to WhatsApp, however, which is available cross-platform and will bring the same set of emoji on Android too, Apple’s Animoji would only be offered as part of iMessage, thus being limited to iOS devices exclusively.