TL;DR
- The new features are rolling out to users, as of May 5, 2022.
- WhatsApp has detailed its new communities feature coming to the app.
- The company has also announced a bunch of other features, including the ability to share larger files, emoji reactions, and more.
Updated, November 4, 2022 (11:47 PM ET): WhatsApp has announced today on its blog that it has begun rolling Communities out globally. The company says that the feature should be available to everyone over the next few months.
Updated, May 5, 2022 (05:37 PM ET): WhatsApp has confirmed its new Communities on WhatsApp features are beginning to roll out to users with the latest update.
The new features include emoji reactions and the ability to have groups that include up to 512 people. Another major upgrade is the ability to send files up to 2GB in size, up from the previous limit of 100MB. The company hopes these new features will foster more WhatsApp-based online communities, and bring some nice quality-of-life improvements.
Original article, April 15, 2022 (12:21 AM ET): WhatsApp has officially acknowledged several upcoming features. The company wrote a blog post detailing all the new options coming to the chat app, including the communities feature, perhaps one of the biggest additions to the platform in years.
According to WhatsApp, communities will encompass a collection of separate groups. They will allow organizations like schools, local clubs, and non-profits to come under one umbrella and get things done more efficiently.
“People can receive updates sent to the entire community and easily organize smaller discussion groups on what matters to them,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Admins of communities will get powerful tools to control which groups can be included. They will also be able to broadcast announcement messages to everyone in the community.
Moreover, WhatsApp assures that chats within communities will be end-to-end encrypted.
There’s no specific date for when communities will come on board the platform, but it shouldn’t be long now.
Meanwhile, more immediate updates headed to WhatsApp include stuff we’ve been hearing about for the past couple of days.
You’ll soon be able to react to messages using emojis. Group admins will be able to remove errant messages from everyone’s chats. The file-sharing limit will be increased to 2GB. And lastly, one-tap voice calls will now allow up to 32 people to talk to each other.
Once again, There’s also no word on when all these new features will hit WhatsApp. We’ll update this article when we have more details.
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