Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
Tl; DR
- The screen effects add large screen filling animations to your google messages cats.
- Until now, the screen effects have been activated using specific text trigger sentences.
- Messages now seem to respond in the same way when you send pairs of certain emoji.
Update, March 25, 2025 (01:03 pm HE): We have worked to identify all the Emoji pairs that manage to activate these full screen animations, and here are the ones we see trigger screen effects:
Original article, March 24, 2025 (16:23 pm HE): Whether you want it or not, anyone using Google messages long enough has probably triggered one of the application screen effects – these full screen animations that you would see when entering specific sentences in your cat. Google first announced the functionality with more than 15 animations, and we later managed to discover two dozen. But so far, it seemed that the only way to activate them has been to type one of these associated trigger sentences. It now seems that Google has expanded this to include certain emoji.
Messages already include many animated effects to animate your conversations, from individual emoji to messages reactions. Now we have observed that when sending SMS composed of two of the same emoji, we sometimes get a screen effect response, taking the whole screen.
You don’t have to send the emoji by themselves, and the animations seem to work very well when they are also accompanied by a text.
We are not entirely sure that Google has started to make this feature available, but it is not something that we have never noticed before, or heard Google talk in any announcement of official messages. It also means that we are far from exhaustively testing with which emoji work it work, and we do not yet know if there are some who can call animations that we have not yet seen associated with one of the known text trigger sentences.
The next time you are engaged in a RCS cat on messages, try double emoji in your answers and see what screen effects you are able to activate. We would like to hear your favorites in the comments.
