WhatsApp adds 5 new Interesting features

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app globally with over 1.5 billion users. WhatsApp regularly adds new features to the app for Android, iOS and desktop platforms. The Facebook-owned company also works on several features in beta, some of which make it to stable release.

Dark mode on WhatsApp has been rumoured since last year. There have been sightings of dark mode on WhatsApp beta as well. With dark mode turned on WhatsApp there’s a dark grey coloured background. The icons and headings are all highlighted in WhatsApp’s signature green colour while the sub texts are visible in white colour.

This feature isn’t available on public beta for WhatsApp as yet. There’s no word on its official release either but it would be a much needed UI change for WhatsApp. Dark mode is available on apps like YouTube, Twitter and Messenger.

WhatsApp gives users the maximum possibilities of privacy on the app. Users can hide their last seen, and read receipts on WhatsApp. But even with these features turned on, WhatsApp still shows online status of users. Enabling this feature would give users complete control over their activity on WhatsApp.

WhatsApp is the easiest and most convenient platform to send photos. Over the years, WhatsApp has improved photo sharing with albums, contact shortcuts, and increasing the number of items. One thing that has remained constant is reducing the image resolution of photos.

WhatsApp automatically reduces the file size of photos which reduces the resolution. While this makes for faster file sharing, it leads to fine details being hidden from photos.

Using the same WhatsApp account on different devices is pretty easy and fast. WhatsApp lets users backup their chats and restore them on the next device they switch to. While this feature is very convenient, one issue is with switching from Android and iOS. On Android WhatsApp chats are backed up on Google Drive and iCloud for iPhone users.

For users switching from Android to iPhone or vice-versa, they lose all their backed up chats. Since Apple is pretty strict with user data it’s understandable that chats are saved only on iCloud. However this leads to inconvenience for cross-platform users.

WhatsApp started testing UPI-based payments last year. WhatsApp Pay is still running on beta with an official launch awaited. Sending and receiving money is as easy and simple as sharing a photo. Users need to create or link their UPI account on WhatsApp to start payments on the app.