WhatsApp seems to want to make emojis move

WhatsApp appears to be working on animating the now-static emojis, code in the chat service’s desktop app shows. It is unknown whether the animations will be disableable. WhatsApp uses AirBnB’s Lottie library.

By default, the app will send an animated version of an emoji if it’s available, reports WABetaInfo. The code is now in beta of the desktop app, but not yet active. The animated emojis will also come in the Android and iOS versions, the site says.

whatsapp used Lottie for animating the emojis. AirBnB made that library open source years ago for animating static images in apps for iOS and Android and in React Native. These are vector images that need to be relatively light.

These are static images. The moving gif can be found here.