Billions of people use WhatsApp to stay connected with work, family, friends, and their interests every day. Meta cannot ignore WhatsApp’s dominance and has spent the better part of 2023 working to maintain its lead, even if we often spot a feature or two inspired by other fantastic messaging apps on Android, such as Telegram. It's at the point where new features are seemingly always around the corner, and that helps keep things exciting and fresh.
October was rife with updates from Meta’s engineering team, reiterating WhatsApp’s commitment to user privacy and security while adding several new features we longed for. We can now use passkeys to sign in, and switch between multiple accounts on the same device without using hacks like app cloning. October also saw Communities pick up more features and a few devices lose the ability to run WhatsApp. There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s crack on.
Use more than one account
Ever since WhatsApp made secure instant messaging convenient over a decade ago, we've wished we could use the app with all our phone numbers. Doing so usually entailed using third-party software to clone WhatsApp on your device, or using a secondary Android phone just for WhatsApp (we’ve all been there) because the app only allowed signing up with one phone number per device. Development efforts to change this began in June this year, and this month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced official support for multiple user accounts on the same device.
Account switching is rolling out now
This makes dual-SIM phones practical again, and WhatsApp has taken every effort to ensure user accounts share device resources like storage and contacts while keeping conversations, privacy settings, and notifications separate for each account.
Passkeys are the future
In line with WhatsApp’s relentless focus on user privacy, the developers also added passkey support to our favorite messaging app. This means you can bypass the SMS-delivered two-factor authentication (2FA) code and use secure on-device biometrics like a fingerprint to sign in to your account. The feature only comes into play when you’re setting up a new phone or resetting an old one, but passkeys have several advantages making them more secure. For instance, they eliminate password reuse, and reduce the risk of falling prey to phishing scams and password stealer scripts.
Passkeys support is official on WhatsApp now
Passkeys use a match between cryptographic keys on your device and WhatsApp servers to check if it's you signing in. On your device, the biometric authentication confirms your identity. This makes passkeys immune to person-in-the-middle attacks which can intercept SMS-delivered 2FA codes. It's also faster and easier to use than a conventional password or OTP.
Your text, formatted your way
This month, WhatsApp also played around with several new features in the beta channel, like the addition of text formatting options already available on rival apps. WhatsApp already allows bold, italics, underline, and strike-through formatting to lay emphasis on elements of your message, or make corrections if required. A beta this month added formatting for code blocks, quote blocks, bulleted lists, and numbered lists. The former could help distinguish instructions or code from other messages, while the latter are fantastic for maintaining shopping lists with WhatsApp’s self-messaging feature.
New formatting options are in development
More features for voice messages
This October, Meta also focused on voice messages, testing out a way to have them self-destruct after the recipient plays them through once. This would effectively add voice messages to the list of supported view-once media formats on WhatsApp, which are currently limited to just photos and videos. WhatsApp is also working on voice message support in channels, so that administrators can record and share clips with a larger audience through channel updates. It would be a big step forward because channels only allow sharing images, videos, and text at present.
Voice messaging and stickers could come to channels soon
Speaking of channels, we also spotted Meta in the early stages of adding sticker pack support. The addition would make channels more engaging for audiences, but the feature is still in development and unavailable to beta testers this month. WhatsApp beta tested link sharing for specific messages in a channel, just like one can share links to specific updates from a Telegram Broadcast Group. A link to a channel update gives the recipient immediate access to the specific information the sender wants to convey, without the hassle of scrolling through other messages in the channel. It also gives recipients a direct link to see the channel’s content without subscribing for future updates.
Community events on text
While channels serve as WhatsApp’s one-to-many broadcast utility, the platform introduced communities earlier this year to facilitate interactions at scale through topical groups — you could equate Discord servers and channels to WhatsApp Communities and groups. This month, Meta built a few features into communities, so members can gather at a stipulated hour and partake in Community events via text. Participants can schedule a community event for later using the attachment button in the message box.
WhatsApp Communities will soon be a place for online text-based events
Interface redesign reaches more people
WhatsApp has been testing a new UI design in the last few months, but availability was always limited to a handful of testers. In October, it expanded through a server-side rollout seen in beta version 2.23.21.12, reaching many more beta testers, including members of the Android Police team. Changes include a new bottom-aligned navigation bar to cycle between chats, updates, and call tabs along with new Material Design 3 toggles in the app settings. Meta also changed the shade of green used for sent messages, made the chat background darker, and switched to a different color for the in-app logo.
Keep chats locked and hidden
Yet another privacy-focused change in the beta channels this month allows hiding chats you locked for privacy reasons. Hiding private conversations out of sight from prying eyes provides another effective layer of security on top of locking the chat. You will need to enter a customizable yet pre-configured secret code in the WhatsApp search bar to reveal the hidden chats, followed by the unlock code for every locked chat. Talk about 2FA within WhatsApp itself!
WhatsApp beta settings include a toggle to hide your locked chats
Slashing redundancies
Because WhatsApp has been around for all these years, Meta is forced to ensure new features are backwards compatible with older Android versions too, and this can quickly become a limiting factor when deploying advanced features like Companion mode. As a result, most developers regularly drop support for aging Android versions, and WhatsApp recently did the same, dropping Android 4.4 and older versions from the list of supported builds. WhatsApp now needs at least Android 5.0 to run, but based on Android version distribution stats, this move should affect less than 1% of users worldwide.
These beta changes should trickle through to the stable channel after sufficient testing. However, the company rarely provides timelines for us to track and look forward to.