Summary
- WhatsApp continues to improve its user experience with updates such as private pings and mute for status updates.
- The latest beta reveals upcoming features for privately notifying contacts and controlling status updates.
- These updates are not rolling out now but should arrive in a future update.
WhatsApp is still one of the best encrypted messaging apps that you can use in 2024. In addition to its impressive set of features that includes end-to-end encrypted messaging, voice and video calls, you also get frequent updates that improve the overall user experience. Now these updates can be small quality of life updates like chat filters, or more major ones like adding privacy features that really allow the app to stand above others in the same category.
With that said, it looks like WhatsApp is evolving status updates in two new ways, giving users the ability to ping specific contacts, without other contacts knowing. And the other feature will let users freely mute status updates, which will go a long way to prevent spam and other unwanted interactions on the platform.
Users will get more control with status updates
The details were discovered by the folks at WABetaInfo, who managed to uncover the new details in the latest beta of the app, version 2.24.9.16, that was released on the Google Play Store. The new and upcoming feature will allow users to privately ping contacts in a status update. When the user is mentioned, it will automatically notify them to check out the status update. This should be great if you’re looking to keep certain folks more engaged with the information that you’re sharing, like maybe family or a close set of friends.
The great part about this feature is that the status update won’t indicate who is being pinged to the public, and the notifications will privately go out to only those that are mentioned. In addition to this nifty feature, WhatsApp is also apparently set to introduce a new feature that will allow users to mute status updates from users as well. While interesting, it looks like we’ll have to wait a little while longer to see these features come to fruition as they are not quite available yet.
If you want to be a part of the WhatsApp beta, you can always sign up through the Google Play Store. After you become a part of the beta, you will be able to download the beta app from the Play Store directly and get the latest features. What’s great is that if you become tired of the beta and want to switch back to the regular version, it’s as easy as uninstalling the beta app and just installing the normal version found on the Play Store.
