Every new feature that matters
WhatsApp is the go-to messaging platform for literally billions of people, supporting both disappearing and regular encrypted conversations with individuals, groups, and now communities. Under Meta’s ownership, we’ve seen WhatsApp focus on convenience and features that help larger groups interact fluidly, much like rival service Telegram. Changes also made their way to WhatsApp’s calling utilities, making it easier for you to host voice conferences. With all that’s been happening, here’s a quick look at what WhatsApp did to improve voice and video calling in 2022.
If you prefer WhatsApp calls to regular ones for the convenience alone, you’ll be glad to know muting people is easier than ever — you just need to long-press a participant on your screen and hit the mute button. You can also message any participant confidentially while keeping the call active in the background. This could be useful when reminding a participant to mute their audio, or sharing private information with them mid-call.
Around the same time Communities were added, WhatsApp upped the participant limit for video calls from eight people to 32. This makes virtual family gatherings on video a breeze. Inviting people to a call and planning them ahead of time is also super convenient on WhatsApp — once you’re up to speed with using call links, you can just share the links around and hop on a call as decided.
We saw our fair share of visual changes this year, too. Every participant in a call gets a unique color around their on-screen avatar and for their audio waveform, making it that much easier to figure out who’s the active speaker. Earlier this year, the service also introduced the banner that notifies you every time someone joins your call.
As for what we’re looking forward to next, there are a few interesting features on our radar. For instance, Meta is beta testing picture-in-picture (PiP) on WhatsApp for iOS, a dedicated call logs tab for Windows, and support for a second smartphone as a companion device. Until these arrive, we suggest you take WhatsApp’s recently introduced Avatars for a spin, adding some flair to your holiday season greetings.
