Gboard is among the most feature-rich keyboards you can get for your Android smartphone today. As you would expect, emojis are a big part of its experience. After tinkering with the layout last year, only to reverse course a few months later, the Gboard team now has some fresh updates in the works for the emoji interface.
Right now, if you set a larger or smaller font on your phone, pretty much everything on Gboard updates to match it, except for the emoji tray. It looks like this could change in a future update with a new toggle in settings, according to Android Authority’s findings.
Looking into the Gboard app (version 16.7.4.861137547 beta), the publication activated a “Scale emoji with font size” toggle, which makes the emoji “appear bigger or smaller based on your font size.” When available, the toggle will appear within the Emojis, Stickers & GIFs page in Gboard settings, positioned as the third option under Layout.
One caveat right now is that this particular toggle only works when the font size is changed system-wide (Settings > Display & touch > Display size & text > Font size). Gboard has its own font size adjustment mechanism via the Preferences menu on its settings page. Here, users can either set a custom font size for the keyboard or stick to the system default font.
But there are some inconsistencies
As the second and third screenshots above show, the size difference between the two emoji trays is quite apparent. The larger size also means users will have to scroll further down to find the right emoji. But this is a small price to pay to distinguish between two or more similar-looking emojis.
Unfortunately, it looks like this font-size-matching emoji tray will only work when the font is changed system-wide and not via Gboard’s settings. There’s every chance that Google will remedy this particular inconsistency when it’s ready to roll out widely, which could be anytime between the next few weeks or months.
The fact that Gboard has gone so far as to create a dedicated toggle suggests there have been a few complaints about this particular issue. This toggle will also be a welcome addition from an accessibility perspective. Smaller emojis can be harder to distinguish for some people, particularly due to subtle details and other minor visual differences.
