Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Screen Effects add some big screen-filling animations to your Google Messages chats.
- So far, Screen Effects have been activated by using specific text trigger phrases.
- Messages now appears to respond similarly when you send pairs of certain emoji.
Whether you’ve meant to or not, anyone using Google Messages for long enough has likely triggered one of the app’s Screen Effects — those full-screen animations you’d see when entering specific phrases into your chat. Google first announced the feature with 15+ animations, and we later managed to uncover some two dozen. But so far, it’s looked like the only way to activate these has been by typing in one of those associated trigger phrases. Now it appears that Google has expanded that to include certain emoji.
Messages already includes lots of animated effects to liven your conversations up, from individual emoji to message reactions. Now we’ve observed that when sending texts consisting of two of the same emoji, we’re sometimes getting a Screen Effects response, taking up the whole display.
You don’t have to just send the emoji by themselves, and the animations seem to work just fine when also accompanied by some text.
We’re not entirely sure when Google first started making this functionality available, but it’s not something we’ve ever noticed before, nor heard Google talking about in any official Messages announcements. That also means that we’ve far from exhaustively test which emoji this works with, nor do we yet know if there are any that may call up animations we’ve yet to see associated with any of the known text trigger phrases.
Next time you’re engaged in an RCS chat on Messages, try some double emoji in your responses and see what Screen Effects you’re able to activate. We’d love to hear your favorites down in the comments.
