What you need to know
- Google has been spotted testing a “Scale emoji with font size” toggle, fixing a quirk where emojis were tied to display scaling rather than text size.
- The potential change will allow emojis to grow alongside your system font, making it easier to distinguish between similar-looking icons.
- Currently, the scaling only triggers through system-wide font settings, not Gboard’s internal font preferences, though this could change when the feature hits public release.
Gboard has been the top choice for Android keyboards for a long time, but it hasn’t always handled emojis well. Even if you made your system font bigger to help with reading, emojis stayed small and didn’t match the rest of the interface. That could be about to change.
Google is currently testing a new feature in Gboard (beta version 16.7.4.861137547-beta-arm64-v8a) that introduces a “Scale emoji with font size” toggle, as spotted by Android Authority. This change addresses a long-standing technical quirk in which emoji scaling was tied strictly to display size rather than font size.
In the current public version, if you only adjust your text size to keep things legible without making every icon on your home screen massive, your emojis stay tiny. This update bridges that gap, allowing the emoji tray to expand or shrink right alongside your text.
Once this rolls out widely, you’ll find the new option buried in Gboard’s settings under Emojis, Stickers & GIFs > Layout. Activating the toggle ensures that when you dive into the emoji picker, the icons are large enough to actually tell the difference between a 😬(grimacing face) and a 😐(neutral face) without needing a magnifying glass.
There’s one thing to note: right now, emoji size only changes if you adjust your phone’s main font size in the Display settings. If you change the font size just for Gboard, the emojis won’t resize yet. Since this was found in an APK teardown, Google will likely fix this before the final release.
This is a big improvement for accessibility. People who need larger text often struggled with small, hard-to-see emojis. By letting the emoji tray scale up, Google is making it easier for everyone to read and use emojis online.
Android Central’s Take
I’ve often found myself squinting at my screen to make sure I’m sending a “sweat smile” and not a “crying” emoji, so I think this is a great improvement. It shows that Google is starting to treat emojis as real characters, not just decorations. This change makes typing feel more natural and personal, and it helps your keyboard match your display settings.
