Google Messages Gets More Expressive With Single-Emoji Full-Screen Effects

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Summary

Google Messages now allows full-screen animations triggered by single emojis.
You can send emojis like 🌙, 🐝, and 🥳 to activate different full-screen animations in the app.
Users can turn off the excessive animation flair by disabling expressive animations in Google Messages settings.

Like WhatsApp and Telegram, Google Messages lets you send emojis to express yourself better. But to celebrate a big occasion, you can also send a couple of emojis or a specific message to trigger full-screen animations. Google’s texting app first rolled out this feature in February 2024, but it quietly disappeared for a few months before making a comeback in July. Now, Google seems to be testing another change with full-screen animations, letting you trigger them with just a single emoji.

A Google Messages user on Reddit first reported being able to trigger full-screen animation in the app with the 🌙 and 👏 emoji. According to replies in the thread, several other emojis — including 🐝 , 🌋, 💤 , and 🥳 — also activate a similar full-screen visual response. Additionally, sending a “Happy Birthday” message will also lead to a full-screen effect, something which I don’t remember happening up until a few weeks ago.

I could trigger the animations using a single emoji on my Xiaomi 15 Ultra running Google Messages v20250430_01_RC000 beta. The animations will play regardless of whether you send the emoji (or text) in an RCS conversation or a regular SMS chat. There’s no way to know which individual emoji will play a full-screen animation; you’ll have to manually send them individually to find out.

Note that the animation only plays when you send a single emoji as a message. If the emoji is part of a longer text, the full-screen effect won’t activate. Full-screen animations are also different from animated emoji.

When Google initially announced the feature, it teased support for over 15 hidden full-screen animations. It’s unclear whether the company has added more or is simply making the existing ones easier to trigger.

You can dial down the animation flair

Admittedly, having full-screen animations triggered by just one emoji might feel excessive to some users. If that’s the case, navigate to Messages Settings and turn off the Show expressive animations toggle.

Google seems to be rolling out full-screen animations with a single emoji either through the latest Google Messages beta or a server-side push. Try updating to the newest beta build of the app to find out if full-screen animations work for you. If they still don’t show up, you might have to wait for a wider public release from Google.