How to React to Messages on Your iPhone with All Emoji

Apple introduced iMessage reactions, called Tapback, with iOS 10 in 2016, and the feature lets you react to a message in one of six ways: a heart, a thumbs up or down, a “Haha”, exclamation marks or a question mark. But some people might be confused or irritated when they see someone reacting to their post with one of these.

If you react to one of your crush’s messages with a thumbs up. You may just be saying, “That looks good!” ”, but they might read the reaction as: “This conversation is over. Bye. Congratulations, you played yourself and now your crush thinks you hate him. But using emoji allows you to quickly tell the other person what you really mean, in a more direct way, and it gives you the full emoji spectrum to do so.

Here’s how to use an emoji to react to specific messages on your iPhone.

Learn more: How to Decipher Each Emoji

How to react with emoji

1. In the appropriate iMessage conversation, tap the blank iMessage bar at the bottom of your screen as if you were going to type something.
2. Tap the emoji keyboard icon (the smiley face icon) in the lower left corner of your screen.
3. Long press 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, you can give a raised hands emoji, an eyes emoji, or even both. You can use multiple emoji to react to messages, images, and gifs sent during conversations between you and another person, or in group messages.

You can also use this feature to combine emoji. To do this, you need to overlay emoji on a sticker in iMessage. Here’s how to create your own emoji combinations.

Overlay emoji on stickers for fun combinations

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

You can add as many emoji as you want on each sticker, so you can have fun and create little scenes if you want. However, you cannot save these combined emoji, so you will have to recreate them each time. Hopefully Apple will let people back them up in the future.

For more Apple news, here are the features of iOS 17.5 And iOS 17.4. You can also check out our iOS 17 cheat sheet and what we want to see in iOS 18 at WWDC 2024.