Let’s first clear up a common misconception about emojis and emoticons. Though text-based “emotion icons” have been around since the 1880s, the first digital emoticon is said to have been created by a college professor in 1982, and it was a super simple one that we all know: :-)

From there, hundreds and hundreds of emoticons were created, which eventually gave rise to the emoji—a cartoonish image that is converted from a string of punctuation, such as this one:

These days there are literally thousands of emojis, ranging from faces like the one above to animals, foods, objects… you name it, there’s probably an emoji for it. There are so many, in fact, that most messaging platforms no longer require you to input them first as text; they make them available for you in a lengthy list. Emojis are fun, and they can enhance the flavour of a conversation that would otherwise simply be text.

And they’re so tiny.

Typically, emojis are designed to fit into the same space that a line of text would fit in. For example, if you texted a message that said, “That was so funny!” followed by our emoji example above, that emoji would be no larger than the exclamation point at the end of the message.

This may not seem like a very big deal—until you consider that a recent study showed that more than six billion emojis are sent worldwide every single day. We’re using them more and more to enhance our conversations, to reply in a simple but meaningful way, and to show emotions that regular text just can’t convey, the same someone would use inflection of their voice.

And once again, they’re very tiny.

We have to admit, here at SnatchApp, we didn’t think much of it at first. Then we heard about the study we cited above, and someone posed the question: “If they’re so important to people and the way we communicate… why don’t we make them bigger?”

The answer is simple: We can, we should, and we did.

So let’s go back to our previous point. When you send an emoji within a text message, it’s going to be limited to the size of the text. However, if you send just an emoji as a response, out into the world on its own, they can be whatever size we want—so we made them huge.

No more squinting to see what emoji someone sent you. No more deciphering or second-guessing. You’re going to know what you’re looking at, because it’s quite large—enormous, we dare say. Titanic. Mammoth.

SnatchApp is going to keep making strides to improve our platform, and in the meantime, you can begin sending colossal emojis now by downloading the latest version of the SnatchApp desktop app.