Whatsapp: New update delivers great features for users

The social media app, Whatsapp, last week rolled out a series of features that enhance user experience on the app. While Facebook (now Meta) founder, Mark Zuckerberg, took to his Facebook page on May 5, 2022, to announce the rollout of new reaction emojis on Whatsapp, the app followed with the announcement of other features, which include the expansion of group size limit.

The group limit expansion on Whatsapp may have come as a response to complaints by users and the movement of groups to a competing app, Telegram, which allows up to 2,000 in a group. Still, the increased number is far below what Telegram offers.

Here are the new Whatsapp features unveiled in the course of the week and which users will be receiving as they update their app:

Group participants limit increased

WhatsApp users will now be able to add up to 512 people to a group. This was increased from the maximum 256 earlier fixed by the platform

Admin Delete

Although this may be controversial, this new feature allows group admins to remove errant or problematic messages from everyone’s chats. In cases where a group member sends an offensive message, the admin now has the power to ‘delete for everyone’.

Increased file sharing size

Whatsapp users will now be able to send files up to 2GB in size at once on the app, which is a massive jump from the previous limit of 100MB.

WhatsApp Reactions

The new reaction emojis will allow users to react with six different emojis on the platform: laughing face, red heart, surprised face, thumbs up, teary face, and hands together.

To use the feature, just long-press on a message and choose one of the displayed emojis. Just like Instagram, users can change their reactions to a different one by long-pressing the same messages and changing the emoji or just clicking on the same one to remove it.

WhatsApp also notes a few things about the Reaction feature: Users can only add one reaction per message, and it disappears when the messages disappear. Also, users will not be able to hide the reactions or the reaction counts. The recipients might see the reaction before you remove it or if removing it was not successful.

Larger Voice Calls

This feature allows a one-tap voice calling for up to 32 people with all-new design for those times when talking live is better than chatting.

Bottomline

These new features will, no doubt, enhance user experience on Whatsapp. That users can now send large files up to 2GB is a great improvement over the previous 100MB limit. But the 512 limit for group participants is still a drawback that will continue to push groups with larger numbers to Telegrams.

(Naira metrics)