A discreet iPhone feature that’s been around since iOS 10 could make the iMessages you send to family and friends more immersive overall. One particular element, if you’ll pardon my years of slang, is the “bomb”for emoji.
And no, I’m not talking about text bombs, i.e. automated texts sent out in quick succession to unleash a barrage of pre-written messages on the target. I’m talking about screen effects. They’ve been in Messages since iOS 10, but the effect that seems to have been created for emoji didn’t show up until iOS 11.
The trick that allows you to send an emoji avalanche, explosion, echo, or whatever you want to call it, has been appearing on TikTok year after year, although it has been around since 2017. However, that doesn’t make it any less impressive.
To add an emoji effect, enter up to three emojis, then press and hold the send button until a menu of hidden effects appears. Click “Screen”at the top and you should see the “Echo”screen effect, the first one on the list. This is the one you want. Click the “Submit”button if you’re happy with the full-screen emoji effect.
Your emoji will then randomly multiply a character or group of characters across the entire background for approximately three seconds, filling the entire screen. If the recipient’s audio is heard, they will hear the normal send signal with a reverb echo that will disappear when the effect ends.
The effect looks great with one, two, or three emojis, but you’ll just see the usual blue comment echo on the screen if there are four or more. If you want the blue bubble echo to be more impressive, send more than four emoji to make the bubble bigger.
For an even cooler presentation, add spaces between emojis by inserting multiple line breaks. You can even indent one or two characters to make it look more random on the screen.
If the echo doesn’t animate for you, you may have screen effects disabled. Go to Settings -> Accessibility -> Motion, then make sure “Autoplay Message Effects”is turned on. If this is already enabled, you may have “Reduce Motion”enabled in the same menu. Both can stop the animation from automatically playing, but you can always hit the replay button in messages to start it manually.
These effects only work in iMessages, so if you try to send these emojis to your Android friends, they’ll just get emojis that say “Sent with echo”next to them.