WhatsApp introduced large animated "beating" heart emoji to some iOS users in beta testing back in January. However, the feature was disabled within a few weeks of that testing due to reasons best known to the company. Meanwhile, Android users who caught wind and have been awaiting the launch of this feature for months will be pleased to know that it is under development for their devices as well.
WABetaInfo spotted this feature, which is currently a work in progress and has not yet made it to the beta testing stage. Users with this feature will have all heart emoji characters animated, irrespective of their color. To view the animation, the feature must also be enabled for the recipient of the message. It is currently unknown if the heart emoji animation will be re-released on iOS devices.
WhatsApp began working on these animation changes for iOS last December. At the moment, only the red heart emoji is larger and carries the animation feature. While all this seems like a minor addition, animated emoji reactions can be a great way for sharing non-verbal cues and dynamically expressing one's emotions. Additionally, in addition to the heart being a symbol in and of itself, different colors can code those heart reactions in different ways.
However, WhatsApp rival Telegram is far ahead in the emoji reactions and sticker creation game with a wider range of animated reactions on offer. Telegram also offers support to convert regular videos into stickers via any video editing program. Moreover, Telegram Premium will soon be launching exclusive stickers with animations and a set of 10 new emoji reactions. In comparison, WhatsApp is only just getting its toes wet in the business of animated emoji and you can count the number of stickers it's got on your fingertips. To be fair to WhatsApp, though, it has recently introduced some improvements to group calls as well as better privacy controls.
It's not known when the animated emoji reactions will be available on Android. This update has been in development for some time and may still need to go through beta, so take that as a sign. Still, we hope these beating hearts come soon enough.