With over 1 billion active monthly users, WhatsApp is one of the most popular apps for both Android and iOS platforms and for good reason. The instant messaging app is packed full of really great features and is working on adding more stellar features with each new update.
Facebook-owned WhatsApp has introduced a variety of cool new additions to its beta users on Android and will eventually make their way to all its mainstream customers worldwide. Here are the best features that Android smartphone users can look forward to in the next WhatsApp update.
One of the main highlights is the PIP feature that has been rumoured about extensively in the past few weeks. The app will natively support Picture-in-Picture (PIP) mode in its video-calling feature and will come along with the Android O operating system.
With the new 2.17.285 version, WhatsApp will allow group admins to add a description to their group, meaning it can be seen by anyone with a group invite link and decide whether to join the group or not.
WhatsApp now offers options to bold, strikethrough, and italicize text in a chat. This feature is already available to many users, however, it is still being steadily rolled out to the rest of the users who didn’t receive it yet.
In a similar case, the latest WhatsApp update lets you select and send multiple photos from the camera UI directly. With the last update, the limit of the number of photos you can share at a time was increased, and the viewing was made easy by compiling them in the form of tiles within the chat.
Users on Android Nougat 7.0 or newer versions of the OS can now access App Shortcuts. The feature was already available to the iOS users and is now making its way to Android. This feature lets the users perform certain functionalities by long pressing on the WhatsApp icon.
The app has constantly been perfecting its live location feature with each update it releases. This feature allows the users to share their location via WhatsApp in real time or groups or contacts, however, the latest update is said to let you share your live location between 4 to 8 hours.
WhatsApp users on Android will now get the possibility to zoom in the profile picture of a contact or the group icon.
The next update will bring with it an option to monitor the chat size, multimedia, documents, and voice messages within the app to keep in check the phone’s memory usage. This feature is finally being made available to Android long after iOS and Windows received it.
In case of an unknown contact, the app will now show you the Push Name under the person’s info card.
WhatsApp has also been working on the possibility of switching to a video call during an ongoing voice call. A small video call icon will be visible while on a voice call to enable easy switch over to a face-to-face conversation.
