What’s new in WhatsApp: Communities, files up to 2 GB and more

WhatsApp is one of the most used daily applications by most users. In recent months, the development team of this messaging service has pulled together and released major updates. The last, for example, relied on the redesign of the voicemail interface which allowed for greater versatility within the application. Today WhatsApp wanted to go further by presenting its new news pack. Among them, the launch of Communities, sending messages up to 2 GB or reacting to messages via emojis. We tell you.

The great package of WhatsApp news presented by communities

Communities on WhatsApp will allow people to bring together different groups while maintaining a structure according to the needs of each case. This way, people will be able to receive updates sent out to the wider community and easily organize smaller discussion groups to talk about what’s specifically relevant to that group of people. The Communities feature will also offer powerful new tools for admins, such as sending announcement messages to members of all groups or assigning which group to share information with.

The main novelty is the presentation of the Communities on WhatsApp. The large number of groups to discuss topics around an organization, an idea or a goal is a reality that abounds in our inboxes. This new Communities feature will allow you to create a kind of “collective WhatsApp” to try to avoid the large number of unorganized groups. For example, you can create a community of ‘Neighbors’. In this section You can create as many groups as you want and the user will decide which groups to join, always having the option to leave the community, groups or join them.

In this new feature the role of the administrator will take on a more relevant role. Administrators will be able to send messages to the whole community, to certain groups within it, as well as the possibility of creating new groups according to the needs of the group.

Similarly, WhatsApp announced home group admin feature enhancements (independent of the Communities). These improvements did not materialize, but we know that one of them will be the possibility of deleting messages from users for everyone in the same way that we can delete messages for everyone written by us.

The other side of the coin: reactions to messages and files up to 2 GB

But we don’t just have news about WhatsApp communities. The press release was used to announce voice calls up to 32 people with which we can have group conversations in a simple way. Soon the number of users in video calls could be increased, although the work will be more difficult since the screens are what they are and their size must be functional with the increase in the number of users in video calls.

Something was also announced that was much fought over by users: send files up to 2 GB in groups and in individual conversations. Until now, the limit was 100MB, a ridiculous amount considering other WhatsApp-like services and apps that had a 2GB limit.

To finish, Reactions with emojis to posts will be included. This is something that we had talked about a lot in recent weeks and that we could see in the last public betas of WhatsApp. To end the company’s announcement, they refer to the competition:

While other apps create chats for hundreds of thousands of people, we decided to focus on supporting groups that are part of our daily lives. Communities on WhatsApp are just getting started and one of our goals is to keep building new support features throughout the year. We are very happy to put communities in people’s hands.

All these new features They will gradually appear in the official WhatsApp application over the next few weeks. We’ll let you know when they appear, but the easiest way to get them all is to keep the app up to date.