WhatsApp took a long time to start implementing more features on its messaging app. While its major competitor Telegram has been adding features in an exponential manner every year, the company took a while to adopt some interesting features. More recently, we saw the debut of multi-device support. However, it still giving its early steps to become convenient as it is on Telegram, but it’s better later than never. The company will also introduce larger groups with an all-new communities feature. Now, it is adopting another feature that has been present on Telegram and other apps such as Slack – Chat reactions.
The Chat Reactions feature was announced back in the last month. It allows the user to react to certain messages. So for example, you can give a thumbs up to a message rather than replying with an emoji or giving an Ok. The feature has been present in other apps and allows users to react rather than reply directly. It works in a similar form to Facebook’s reactions. It is particularly useful in groups where an admin can send a message and users can react to confirm they’ve read without typing. However, it will also be available for individual chats. You just need to long-press on a WhatsApp message and select the emoji you want to react with.
For now, you’ll be able to choose from six emojis. However, WhatsApp promises to bring support for more emojis and more skin tones in a near future. The message reactions, interestingly, are already available for some users running the latest WhatsApp version. However, it will be a week or two before all WhatsApp users get this feature worldwide.
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As aforementioned, it’s interesting to see how WhatsApp has been raising its efforts to make its platform feature-rich. But we have to say that the messenger has come to a long path since its acquisition by Facebook back in 2014. Meta has introduced a bunch of big features, and we can list the Status section, the voice calls and video calls, and many other features. The company also introduced a Business branch of the messenger and is about to launch a paid subscription program.
WhatsApp expands file-sharing cap to 2 GB
The current update brings more than just reactions. According to the changelog, the update also allows users to share bigger files. That’s a very important addition since it raises the maximum file transfer from 100 MB to 2 GB. In addition to that, the update doubles the max number of participants in a group chat. It was 256 before and now it allows groups with 512 people. However, this update will reach users in a gradual form. Some countries won’t get it right now, Brazil will need to wait until the end of the year to get this feature.
We are curious to see if Meta will keep implementing more features on WhatsApp until the end of the year. Worth noting, that the company is preparing to bring some important innovations to the Status feature pretty soon. Furthermore, a massive update includes the possibility of running two independent (device) stances of WhatsApp at the same time.
