Google Messages now lets emoji trigger Screen Effects animations

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.