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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

I admit it, I don't get the draw of these things. I can vandalize people's messages with stickers now? And from the keynote, "Nothing beats a fullscreen moment!"? Ookay.

The amount of applause for "We made emoji bigger!" was ... surprising to me. I got on board the Snapchat train, but I just can't get excited about being able to tap words to turn them into emoji.

In the words of Principal Skinner: Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.

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>I admit it, I don't get the draw of these things.

On the other hand these aren't features Apple is pioneering. Stickers, larger emojis and other text effects have been in WeChat/Line/FB Messenger/Snapchat for a while now.

Now that iMessage has them, Apple just decided to give those features the classic Apple marketing fanfare.

So in short, "the children" have been using these features for a while now, Apple just decided to let you know they exist.

I clapped for at bigger-emoji line. But I'm over 40 and have to squint to read the pictograms my wife and kids send me.

I'm young, and I don't have to squint for the emoji I recognise, but some of them are more intricately detailed, and so it's difficult to figure them out without squinting. This is a welcome improvement.

Ah that's a good point. My eyes are still at a point where one prescription works for near and far vision.

If it's an improvement it's an improvement and it might as well be as good as it can, but "we caught up to facebook messenger" doesn't feel that exciting to me.

I was really hoping for the iMessage on Android rumors to pan out, but now that they've gone and created an iMessage extensions system it seems a lot less possible moving forward.

Also an app for rolling dice in iMessages, I can't wait until someone does that.

No, seriously, someone please do this :-)

That's one I could get behind.

I wonder if it displays which app an image came from. Could I make my own fake dice extension that rolls whatever I tell it to?

Well the fun stuff is just gives more way to express yourself. We might not use it but all these other chatting apps have had this for a while now. Apps, though, like any other thing that opens itself up to apps, have a lot more practicality. For example, the food ordering demo. I'm sure there are other things that would be useful to do without leaving the message thread (think Slack integrations).

I do use facebook's Pusheen stickers. If there are people out there whose states of mind don't correspond as well with a cartoon cat, I suppose they should have the same communication opportunities.

Less the subtitle, my spirit animal: http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/383/574/c45...

It's for teenagers. The sad thing is the number of developers, sitting through this, including me, wondering what happened.

But then again - 72% are first-time attendees. In other words, developers aren't coming back, but a ton of newbies want the experience?

It's a mindset thing more than it's an age thing.

My mom uses more emojis than my 14 year old niece.

And my mid-40s sister-in-law sends more Bitstrips than she does regular texts. (I doubt my niece would be caught dead sending a Bitstrip.)

The stickers are equal parts feature-chasing the competition, and a 'serving suggestion' for developers about to code for their platform.

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