WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, has announced that it is launching a new WhatsApp app for Windows desktop.
Meta tout that it will load more rapidly and enables group video calls of up to eight people and audio calls with up to 32 participants.
The announcement marks one of the few Meta has made themselves. At the same time, the speculation of new and upcoming features is often relied on by third-party blogs.
However, Meta announced that it was improving device linking and better syncing across multiple devices.
“We’re also introducing a new Mac desktop version of WhatsApp, currently in beta.
“Today, we’re introducing a new WhatsApp app for Windows that loads faster and is built with an interface similar to the mobile version of the app,” the company said on Thursday.
The company said that WhatsApp users would now be able to host group video and voice calls with more participants, with the potential of this increase even further in the future as Meta continues its push toward more community engagement, safety and privacy across all of its platforms.
“We’ll continue to increase these limits over time so you can always stay connected with friends, family and co-workers. WhatsApp is the largest platform to provide a fully end-to-end encrypted messaging experience that allows cross-platform communication between mobile phones, computers, tablets and more. This means that your messages, media and calls are always end-to-end encrypted across all your devices,” Meta said.
Since the introduction of multi-device capabilities, WhatsApp has made new improvements to enhance user experience, including easier device linking, better syncing across devices, and other new features like link previews and stickers.
“As we continue to increase the number of devices that support WhatsApp, we’ve recently introduced a new WhatsApp beta experience for Android tablets and Mac desktops currently in the early stages of beta. We look forward to bringing WhatsApp to even more devices in the future,” Meta announced.
Most recently, WhatsApp introduced new functionality to allow users to report certain status updates from contacts that may violate WhatsApp’s Terms of Service while offering the ability to permanently mute contact statuses, which was also first discovered by the independent WhatsApp reporting blog WABetaInfo.
“This feature is enabled for your account in case you see a new ‘report’ action within the status options. When you report a status update, it will be forwarded to WhatsApp for moderation reasons,” WABetaInfo previously said.
Introducing the new feature could see users being suspended or even banned if reported by their contacts, who may dislike or be offended by the statuses they post.
IOL Tech