Summary

  • WhatsApp recently moved the app navigation bar to the bottom for easier access.
  • The app still uses a custom media picker UI. Meta developers could remove the tabs for Recents and Gallery here.
  • The new beta version may replace tabs with a scrolling Gallery section. The design may need refinement.



WhatsApp recently moved the tab bar to the bottom of the screen, giving us the convenience of swiping between tabs for chats, calls, communities, and updates. The logo design and search bar placement was suitably adjusted thereafter. The flurry of UI changes isn’t unexpected, because the app interface was left largely unchanged in the decade Meta owned WhatsApp. Now, this popular instant messaging app could get rid of tabs in the image attachment UI.


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WhatsApp hasn’t switched to the default Android media picker UI, and has stuck with its custom UI for a while now. Usually, when you hit the paperclip icon, selecting the Gallery option opens the image picker UI with a Recents tab and a Gallery tab. The former saves time sifting through folders if you’re attaching something you clicked or downloaded recently, and the latter enables pragmatic browsing through various device folders — handy if you’re attaching an image edited in Lightroom, for example.


The tabs could make way for scrollable menus



While the system is intuitive and familiar, reputable tipster and app researcher AssembleDebug on X (formerly Twitter) spotted an upcoming change in beta version 2.24.9.20 of the app. The redesigned interface ditches the tabs for a Gallery section with individual folders at the top followed by your recents. They are both vertically scrolling sections, so WhatsApp could use some smarts to detect when you’re scrolling within the Gallery section and when you’re swiping up on the page to reach the Recents section instead.

We believe setting the Recents section up to precede the folder-style section would help get to recent images quicker, but the tipster notes this UI looks unfinished. Changes to the design are likely before large-scale beta testing ensues, because we aren’t seeing this UI on our devices running the same version of the app — usually indicative of large-scale testing.