Facebook, the parent company of WhatsApp at the first day of F8 Developer Conference keynote has announced the roadmap for its products going forward. Alongside some key announcements related to Facebook and Instagram, the social media giant announced two new massive features which are coming to WhatsApp. One of them is the group video calling, and the other one is WhatsApp Stickers support. We have been hearing rumours about WhatsApp working on group video calling platform for quite some time, and finally, Facebook confirmed this news yesterday. WhatsApp Stickers will surely change the way on how people are interacting daily.
"Voice and video calling are very popular on WhatsApp, and we’re excited to share that group calling will be coming in the months ahead. Stickers are also coming to WhatsApp soon," said WhatsApp in a blog release.
As usual, WhatsApp did not give any timeline for the rollout of both the features, but with the company already working on them, it will be a matter of time for the company to push them to the users. Alongside this, Facebook revealed some key numbers of WhatsApp.
Facebook didn't provide the overall user base of WhatsApp at the moment, but last year, it revealed that over one billion people use WhatsApp actively on a daily basis. So the number could be around the same. However, Facebook revealed that WhatsApp users are now sending roughly 65 billion messages every day. Also, users are consuming more than 2 billion minutes of voice and video calls every day.
The WhatsApp Status feature, which was rolled out last year now has over 450 million people active users on a daily basis. Since the introduction, WhatsApp Status feature has been one of the most used ones on the platform. It works similar to Instagram Stories and allows users to share photos, text, small videos and animated GIFs which disappear after 24 hours.
So the group video calls and stickers feature are no more a secret on WhatsApp, but it will be interesting to see when WhatsApp is going to roll out them to the public.
