SL;DR
- New features rolling out to users, starting May 5, 2022.
- WhatsApp has detailed its new community feature coming to the app.
- The company has also announced many 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 they have started rolling out Communities globally. The company says that the feature should be available to everyone over the next few months.
Updated, May 5, 2022 (5:37 AM ET): WhatsApp has confirmed its new Community on WhatsApp feature is starting to roll out to users with the latest update.
New features include emoji reactions and the ability to have groups of up to 512 people. Another major improvement is the ability to send files up to 2GB in size, up from the previous limit of 100MB. The company hopes that these new features will encourage more WhatsApp based online communities, and bring some good quality of life improvements.
Original article, April 15, 2022 (12:21 PM ET): WhatsApp has officially acknowledged some of the upcoming features. The company wrote a blog post detailing all of the new options coming to the chat app, including the community feature, perhaps one of the biggest additions to the platform in years.
According to WhatsApp, the community will include a separate set of groups. They will allow organizations such as schools, local clubs, and nonprofits to come under one umbrella and get work done more efficiently.
“People can receive updates sent throughout the community and easily set up small discussion groups about what matters to them,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Community admins 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.
Additionally, WhatsApp ensures that chats within the community are end-to-end encrypted.
There’s no set date for when the community will join the platform, but it should be soon.
In the meantime, the speedier update heading to WhatsApp covers the stuff we’ve been hearing over the past few days.
You will soon be able to react to messages using emojis. Group admins will be able to remove erroneous messages from everyone’s chats. The file sharing limit will be increased to 2GB. And lastly, one tap voice dialing now allows up to 32 people to talk to each other.
Again, no word on when all these new features will be available on WhatsApp. We will update this article when we have more details.
