The WhatsApp application does not cease in its efforts to create new functionalities to improve the experience of the millions of users – more than 1,000 million worldwide – who use the application every day. These will be the updates that will arrive in the coming months:
1. Touch ID and Face ID
This security feature will prevent third parties from reading our messages. It can be enabled in the privacy settings and activate Touch ID or Face ID to unlock the application.
2. Limit the forwarding frequency
Forwarded messages, which often contain unverified information, harass many users on WhatsApp. In fact, fake news is one of the biggest problems WhatsApp users face around the world. According to the LiveMint website, users will now be able to see how many times a message has been forwarded. Also, WhatsApp has introduced a limit of “five” when it comes to forwarding a message. In this way, messages forwarded up to four times will be considered “frequently forwarded”.
3. Ranking of contacts
Users will be able to keep their favorite contacts at the top of the list with the help of this feature. Depending on the level of interaction, WhatsApp will organize the contacts for easy access.
4. Night mode
A long awaited update, the dark mode or night mode is a battery saving feature. It has been in development for a few months and users were waiting impatiently for WhatsApp to introduce it. We have already seen it in its beta version and it basically consists of modifying the default colors to a dark gray tone; the screen will have less light and it will bother us less when using the mobile phone and it will also help us reduce battery consumption.
5. Hide the status
Users can now customize their status and choose who can and who cannot see their status by tapping the “hide” button above the muted update section.
6. Share WhatsApp status on other platforms
Now you can share your WhatsApp status on Facebook, Instagram, Gmail and Google Photos without linking the accounts. However, this feature is not automatic and we will have to actively share the post on each platform to avoid security breaches.
7. Privacy settings for groups
Another long-awaited feature: this new privacy setting and invitation system helps users to have more control. Users will be invited to the groups and can choose to approve or decline within three days. In this way, they will have more control over the group messages they receive. To enable it, you have to go to Settings, then Account> Privacy> Groups and select one of the three options: “Nobody”, “My contacts” or “Everyone”. “Nobody” means that you will have to individually approve each of the groups to which you are invited, and “My Contacts” means that only the users you have in your address book will be able to add you to the groups.
8. New web and desktop features
To celebrate the success of the WhatsApp Business app, certain features of the Business app have been added to the desktop and web version. These features are: Quick Replies, which are frequent messages to answer common questions, Tags to organize contacts and chat conversations, and Chat list filtering that allows the user to manage conversations in various filters such as unread messages, broadcast lists, and groups. .
9. Sticker with animated version
Apparently, the moving stickers will arrive before 2019 comes to an end. The usual stickers have been working for a year.
10. Ignore archived chats
The “vacation mode” will change the name to “ignore archived chats”. What you will get by activating it is that you will not receive the notifications of the chats that you have archived and they will not appear in the chats tray until you decide to deactivate this functionality.
