- 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.
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.
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.