The Facebook-owned instant messaging giant, WhatsApp is the most favourite application out there when it comes to messaging. People all over the world, regardless of the platform they use, indulge in conversing over WhatsApp for a substantial time of their day. This essentially means that a lot of time of the people’s days is spent over WhatsApp. As such, the company is very keen about the features that it pushes for the users of WhatsApp and in that regard, 2019 has been a big year for WhatsApp, since the users got to see some major updates that made their way to WhatsApp to refine the user experience of the people. Here are some of the major WhatsApp features which were most notable and were loved by the users.
Directly Sharing Status to Facebook or Instagram
While WhatsApp Status in itself was a massive change for the users of the app and reminded them of Instagram Stories, there was still the issue of users having to share the picture multiple times, first for their inner circle on WhatsApp and then on Instagram or Facebook again for the rest of their friends. However, WhatsApp saw this gap and rolled out a feature which allowed the WhatsApp users to directly share their status from the app only to their Instagram story or Facebook story. This allows the users to skip the hassle of sharing the same picture multiple times on different platforms.
Fingerprint Lock
Privacy remained another big issue for WhatsApp again in 2019. A lot of the WhatsApp users had requested a feature which allowed them to protect the application from intrusions. While there were third party applications like app locker and others, there was no such solution from WhatsApp. But, in 2019 WhatsApp catered to this request and introduced a fingerprint lock on its application which allowed the users to protect the application from intrusion.
Frequently Forwarded
Another one of WhatsApp’s issue was to tackle fake news spread on the application. To do this, WhatsApp had first introduced the forward limit to stop the users from rampantly forwarding messages to contacts everywhere. However, this did not stop the problem entirely, which led to WhatsApp introducing another feature called the Frequently Forwarded Tag. The frequently forwarded tag lets the recipient of the message know that the message being forwarded has been forwarded to five or more contacts as well.
Group Video Call or Voice Call
Another one of the useful features which WhatsApp users appreciated this year was the Group Video and Voice Call. While the voice calling and video calling feature were not something new to WhatsApp, the Group call feature allowed the users to add multiple people on the call. Using this, the users could select the group members they want to get on a call with and then call them all at once.
Revamped Group Invitation System
Another issue with WhatsApp previously was the group invitation system. Previously, the users of WhatsApp did not have any control whatsoever about who could add them to groups. But with the updates, now the users can decide whom they give the power to allow the people to add them into groups.
Consecutive Voice Note Playing
Another very quirky and small feature which voice note fanatics might have loved is the consecutive voice notes feature. Using this feature, the users just have to tap on the play button once, and all the following voice notes are played back to back, and there is no need to tap the play button multiple times. Since a lot of people use voice notes to communicate over WhatsApp, this feature must have come handy for a lot of people.
