It is the new design that gives them more importance.

Ever since Channels came to WhatsApp, states have had to make room for them, giving them the majority of space in their renamed News tab. Now, states seem to be regain some of its importance with a new design, still under testing.

And WhatsApp didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, since everything it needed to make its statuses stand out more was in another homegrown app: Facebook. So, status previews included

and with a larger design.

The biggest statuses on WhatsApp

To find out if one of your contacts has posted something in their statuses, simply go to the news tab. If so, you will usually see a row of profile pictures with a ring around them. This is how statuses are displayed on WhatsApp since channels arrived in the application and occupied almost all the available space.

We have seen in the past attempts by WhatsApp to regain the importance of states by creating its own screen called “All States” (not yet active for everyone) and a redesign with previewssimilar to how Facebook stories are displayed in the app.

In addition to being able to see a preview of the status, the design change highlights the window space. It is split between chains and states at 50%

whereas with the previous design we had a split around 66% / 33%. Meta engineers are always thinking about how they can improve these two features without overshadowing each other.

We already discovered that WhatsApp was planning to change this design months ago and now it appears in one of our accounts, indicating that some users are being activatedfirst in beta.

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