Gboard is working on supersizing your emoji

Even if we sometimes feel a little burnt out on them, it’s hard to deny the fundamental appeal of emoji. Including just the right one brightens up a dull text, or even helps convey some emotional subtlety that might have otherwise gone missed. But in order to get the most out of emoji, we need to be able to clearly see them, and it looks like Google’s working on a change in Gboard that could soon help out with just that.

Right now, you’ve got two main screen-scaling options in Android: You can set font size, and you can set display size. The latter scales everything, while the former is helpful if you’re just struggling with text. But emoji sort of exist somewhere right on the cusp of text, and it’s not always clear how software should treat them.

So far, Gboard’s emoji picker has only responded to changes in display scaling, and not font. No matter how large you set your system font, you’ll still see emoji the same size there — but increase display size, and they’ll grow.

In Gboard’s version 16.7.4.861137547-beta-arm64-v8a update, we’ve uncovered a new feature that finally lets those emoji get bigger. This isn’t user-facing just yet, but when Google’s ready to flip it on, we should find a new Gboard setting that allows us to scale emoji along with font size.

Once selected, emoji can grow with your font as you adjust system display settings. You can see in the middle and right screenshots above how text remains the same size, but after the option is enabled, Gboard starts rendering its emoji larger.

The only slightly wonky bit we’ve noticed so far is that this setting only seems to pay attention to changes to Android’s system-wide font size. Gboard has its own internal font setting, where you can elect to match the system size, or select a new one. But changes here don’t impact emoji sizes in the same way.

Admittedly, this is only a small quality of life tweak, but one that seems sensible enough. With any luck, Google makes this option publicly available soon.