WhatsApp is making life easier for large organizations that use the platform.
On Thursday, the company announced that groups are getting twice as big as before, going from 256 people to 512 people. With the move, WhatsApp is becoming a bit more like Telegram, which is still ahead with the ability to add up to 100,000 people into a “supergroup.”
WhatsApp says the feature is being slowly rolled out, so don’t worry if you don’t have it yet.
Another new feature include the ability to share files up to 2GB in size, which is a massive improvement from the previous limit of 100MB. WhatsApp says the files are protected by end-to-end encryption, and suggests you use Wi-Fi for sharing particularly large files, though uploads and downloads of such files will show a counter that will tell you how much longer you’ll have to wait.
Finally, the company says that emoji reactions to messages, which were announced in March, have gone live with the latest version of the WhatsApp app. WhatsApp says it will continue to improve on this feature by adding a broader range of reactions in the future.
Last month, WhatsApp announced Communities, which are another way to expand group chats by knitting Groups together into a Community (yeah, just like Slack). The company says the feedback it received from the announcement of Communities has been very positive, and that many new features are coming.
