As a communication platform, WhatsApp hasn’t evolved too much since it first burst onto the scene and became a game-changer for personal messaging on mobile devices. With competition increase of late though it’s had to build a lot of new services in around group chats, improved video calls, all while keeping is its end-to-end encryption model a focus.
Now, to keep ensuring the Facebook-owned service can stay relevant and popular with people, they have announced a collection of new features to make adding contacts a lot easier, improve video calls and adding a whole set of new animated stickers into the mix.
The first feature is that of being able to scan a person’s QR code to add them as a contact. Something which I guess is a lot less intrusive than just asking a person for their number, though likely still have the same results for Nick. Group video calls are also being tweaked to allow you to quickly maximize the video feed of any one of a call’s maximum of eight participants, and there’s also going to be a new video icon added to group chats of up to eight people to allow you to quickly start a group video call in the first place.
Stickers have also now had animations added to them, along with a new dark mode for the services desktop and web clients. These latter two are minor updates that don’t offer too much but may appeal to people who already enjoy these sorts of offerings. These features will be rolled out to different clients over the next few weeks.
Last Updated: July 3, 2020
