GIFs Are the New Emojis with this App

If you have a cat gif addiction that you were hoping to slowly rid yourself of, bad news: We've discovered the Riffsy GIF Keyboard app, free via the iTunes App Store, which allows you to save any GIF you see online to your smartphone and then send it to your friends with your keyboard. Sorry!

Upon downloading GIF Keyboard (you need ios8) , you're guided through a series of quick tasks that will activate the keyboard function. Much like emojis, the keyboard builds itself into your text message app and allows you to select, copy, and paste any GIF into your outgoing message. If you've ever read someone's text and felt inhibited by the fact that you couldn't respond with an eye roll, you are now free to do so. The app allows you to send any GIF you've saved on Safari via text message, iMessage, and Facebook Messenger.

The app also has a pre-existing set of GIF collections tagged and ready for the most epic texts conceivable. If at any time somebody's buggin', it's as simple as delving into the #FacePalm collection. If you want to cheer up a pal, send them a little something from #Aww. The possibilities are pretty endless. In other words, all of your dreams have come true.

There are a lot of steps for set-up but, once it's enabled, it's pretty simple to maneuver. There's a section for your most used, or "Favorites," "Recents," and "Saved" which keeps tabs on all the GIFs you download, and of course there's the requisite cat folder. That one's actually mine but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's almost mutinous not to have a special folder allocated for cat GIFs at this point in Internet history. At any rate, it looks like this:

And here are those hashtagged collections:

Again, it's notable that GIFs can only be saved on the Safari browser:

I usually use Google Chrome so this was a change for me.

The face of the app itself is pretty simple. As I mentioned, you can create a bunch of unique collections that reflect your love of everything from Game Of Thrones to mischievous felines, which I appreciate because my tastes are obviously both broad and sophisticated:

It's also come in seriously handy when communicating with my boyfriend. I'm able to express my deep emotional intelligence with ease:

All in all, I'd say this app is going to be making a lot of people very happy. It's already been downloaded by more than one million users and its ratings are consistently positive. But, a few common complaints have been that the GIFs are too small (first-world problems) and that the app itself requires full access of your information. It comes with this warning when you enable it:

It will transmit ANYTHING I type and ANYTHING I have previously typed? Yikes. Is this a ploy by the NSA? That's a pretty serious caveat, but unfortunately I think a lot of people would be willing to casually click "Allow" when the other option is NOT having that Taylor Swift GIF accessible with the click of a button. Be careful, guys.

Images: GIF Keyboard (7); Giphy (1)