Popular Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp today received a handful of new features added, along with the global rollout of its new Communities feature.
Communities are designed to allow users to bring together separate groups under one umbrella, providing users with a way to receive updates sent to an entire community and then organize smaller discussion groups on important topics.
An example use case could be for parents of students to create a global “School” community, which splits into smaller groups based on the school year and other factors. WhatsApp started testing Communities in April, and now they’re gradually rolling out around the world.
The crypto chat platform has also won polls in chat, something that has been in beta testing since March. Users can now ask a poll question and group members can choose from predefined answers. Like chats, polls are end-to-end encrypted, which means only people in the group can see the poll and the results.
Additionally, video calls can now have up to 32 participants, and the maximum group size has been doubled from 512 to 1024 users.
WhatsApp has been working to improve the group chat experience over the past few years in an effort to keep pace with competing platforms, introducing group descriptions, catch-up functionality, one-way messaging option and protection for users who are added multiple times. to the groups they left.
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