How to Use All the Emoji on Your iPhone to React to Messages Now [CNET]

You don’t have to wait for iOS 18 to do this.

Apple unveiled iOS 18 at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, and one of the new features coming to Messages is the ability to use all your emoji to react to texts. 

Apple’s react feature, called Tapback, with iOS 10 in 2016, and the feature lets you react to a message in one of six ways: a heart, thumbs up or down, a “Haha,” exclamation points, or a question mark. Some people might be confused or irritated when they see someone react to their message with one of these. 

Luckily, you don’t have to wait until iOS 18 is released this fall to react to messages with whatever emoji you want because you can do that now. Here’s how to use an emoji to react to specific messages on your iPhone.

Read more: How to Decipher Each Emoji

How to react with emoji

1. In the appropriate iMessage conversation, tap the blank iMessage bar across the bottom of your screen like you’re going to type something.
2. Tap the emoji keyboard icon — the smiley icon — in the bottom left corner of your screen.
3. Long press on the emoji you want to use.
4. Drag the emoji to the message and release it. 

Now, instead of giving something a thumbs-up or an exclamation point reaction, you can give the raised hands emoji, the eyes emoji or even both. You can use multiple emoji to react to messages, pictures and gifs sent in conversations between you and another person, or in group messages. 

You can also use this feature to combine emoji. To do this, you have to layer emoji on top of a sticker in iMessage. Here’s how to create your own emoji combos.

Layer emoji over stickers for fun combos

1. In the appropriate iMessage conversation, tap the plus sign (+) next to the blank iMessage bar across the bottom of your screen.
2. Tap Stickers.
3. Tap and send your chosen sticker.
4. Tap the blank iMessage bar again, then follow the above steps for using emoji reactions.

You can add as many emoji as you want to each sticker, so you could have fun and make small scenes if you want to. You can’t save these combined emoji, so you’ll have to recreate them each time. Hopefully, Apple will let people save them in the future.

For more on iOS 17, here’s what could be included in iOS 17.6 and our iOS 17 cheat sheet. You can also check out what to know about iOS 18 so far and everything Apple announced at WWDC 2024.