WhatsApp announce WhatsApp Communities as a new feature to help users have multiple groups together under one place. This announcement comes months after the feature was spot in testing on the Web.
WhatsApp Communities will enable admins with new tools, including the ability to send a single message to everyone and control over which groups can be include in a particular community.
In addition to the WhatsApp Communities feature, WhatsApp introduce a list of updates, including increase file sharing limit, reactions, and the ability to enable group audio calls for up to 32 people simultaneously.
WhatsApp will enable users to have separate groups in one place to let them receive updates from these groups from a single screen without scrolling through different chats.
This will be helpful especially in case of schools, local clubs, or non-profit organisations that need to deal with multiple groups on the app.
Users in a Community will be able to look at its description and all the groups that are a part of it.
It will not allow users of a particular group to see the phone numbers of people available in other groups.
They will see the numbers of the members available in their groups.
Admins will also be able to see the phone numbers of all group members.
Users of one group will not be able to see the conversations taking place in other groups, though they will have the option in place to join other groups in their Community.
Admins will also have new tools to better manage group discussions in their Communities.
One of the tools will be the announcement messages that admins will be able to send to everyone.
Group admins will also have the control over which groups can be include in their Communities.
WhatsApp Said in a blog post :
“We think Communities will make it easier for a school principal to bring all the parents of the school together to share must-read updates and set up groups about specific classes, extracurricular activities, or volunteer needs,”.
The main purpose of WhatsApp Communities seems to enable people to easily organise smaller discussion groups on the platform that could make WhatsApp an even useful solution for group discussions.
As it would also help make important groups different from any of their random family groups where they mostly get just “Good morning” messages or some casual stuff.
Users in Communities will have the options to report abuse, block, accounts and leave any of them similar to how they are open to do all such things in regular groups.
WhatsApp also promise to continue to protect messages in WhatsApp Communities with its end-to-end encryption.
The feature will protect user privacy by hiding phone numbers from the Community at large.
There will also be “sensible limits on size, discoverability, and forwarding“, WhatsApp note in a detail document about the WhatsApp Communities feature.
WhatsApp Said :
“We will rely on all available unencrypted information including the Community name, description, and user reports to take action against abuse in Communities,”.
There is no specific timeline on when WhatsApp Communities will be available to users around the globe.
WhatsApp are getting emoji reactions to help people share their opinion about particular messages without flooding chats with new text inputs.
This works similar to how you can add reactions to messages on Facebook’s Messenger or Apple’s iMessage.
WhatsApp has been testing reactions for some time.
The new addition also recently appear for some beta testers on Android.
Group admins will be able to remove errant or problematic messages from everyone’s chats.
WhatsApp is also introducing one-tap voice calling for up to 32 people with an all-new design.
It allows up to 8 participants in a group voice call.
WhatsApp is increasing file sharing size to support files of up to 2GB.
This is a very important expansion from the existing file size limit of 100MB.
The increase file sharing size limit will be applicable to both individual chats and groups.
It is important that the update will be limit to documents and will not be applicable to media files including photos, videos, and voice messages as they will still have the existing 16MB limit.
WhatsApp said that all these new features will be rolling out in the coming weeks before the arrival of WhatsApp Communities.
