As a millennial, sharing emotions with my friends using images is nothing new. Emoji have taken the texting world by storm, but animated GIFs are the next logical step when it comes to sharing thoughts in visual form.

Thanks to PopKey, a new app for the iPhone, users can easily find and share animated GIFs that fit their mood through text messages. Apple’s Messages app comes with support for GIFs built in, so they’ll automatically loop in animated form once someone has sent them.

It’s a fun way to spice up a conversation that has been exploited by a number of other apps – including Ultratext, one of our past picks for App of the Week – but what sets PopKey apart is that all the GIFs are accessed as a keyboard, rather than through a separate app.

The way it works is fairly simple: users switch to the PopKey keyboard, search for a particular keyword or pick from a popular list, and the app serves up a number of GIFs to choose from. When first viewed, they’re only static images, but users can tap on an image to download the GIF and preview it in a tiny thumbnail format. At the same time, PopKey will copy the animation to the phone’s clipboard, so that users can paste it into their message.

If there’s a particular GIF that you like, PopKey will save it in your favorites for easier access in the future.

Inserting the resulting GIFs in Apple’s Mail app will attach them to the message, but they may not have the desired effect when delivered to a message’s recipient. Different email services and apps handle GIF attachments in different ways, and they may not appear where you’ve inserted them, or play automatically. Still, when it comes to sharing with people who don’t text, the email option will work fine.

One of the other features that sets PopKey apart from its other competitors is the ability to upload GIFs to the service itself. It’s a good way to add something in to the service for future use. There’s one problem, though: in order to gain access to the feature, PopKey demands that users give it access to their contacts and invite them to the service. That’s a bridge too far for me.

The GIFs aren’t particularly high-resolution, but they get the job done when conveying emotion. Odds are, people who have spent a reasonable length of time hanging out on the internet will already be able to identify them by sight, so it makes sense for PopKey to optimize for faster transmission and a lighter burden on everyone’s data plan.

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If there’s one thing I hope the app adds at some point in the future, it’s in-app purchases that take away some of its greatest flaws. I’d like to see the request for my contact list go away, as well as the ability to remove the PopKey branding from every GIF users share.

I understand why PopKey does those things – informing users of the app’s existence will get more people using it – but they’re annoying and intrusive. I’d happily chip in a few bucks to spare my friends from a forced viral pitch, and those people who would rather stay on the free app train can do so.

Still, when it comes to sharing funny snippets of animation with friends, I’m happy to have PopKey in my arsenal. It’s definitely drawn some of the most interested reactions from the people I know out of any of the apps I’ve used recently, so that’s definitely a vote in its favor.

Popkey is available for free from the iOS App Store.