In its latest update, Whatsapp has rolled out some exciting new features, which are likely to make life more easy for users. Starting with file transfer, users can now send any type of files on the platform. Following a brief beta period, WhatsApp has now finally rolled out this feature to all its users.
Initially, WhatsApp used to not have any file sharing capabilities. It started off as just a simple messaging application by supporting a very few file formats like Video, Audio, and Images. As the WhatsApp developers started to see demand for document file sharing feature, they started off by allowing their users to send documents (including CSV, doc, pdf, ppt, txt, xls, and other similar document formats) to each other. It was just most recently that Whatsapp has allowed us to send GIFs to our contacts. Then, just last month a new update for the beta channel of WhatsApp was released and it expanded support for all file types.
It means, now you can share any kind of file through WhatsApp, be it a software, Android APK, EXE, zip files or some other format. Just select the document option and then along with displaying only document files previously, Whatsapp will now display all supported file formats.
The feature also works for WhatsApp Web making it easier to share software setup files. However, the advantage does come with a limit. As of now, you can only send files with a maximum size of 64MB on WhatsApp Web, 100MB on Android, and 128MB on Apple iOS.
With the latest update, apart from sending documents or files, you can now also send uncompressed photos and videos. Meaning that you can now share those high-quality raw files from WhatsApp itself. Being able to share the actual original file, in all its uncompressed glory, could be a minor game-changer. But it is worth noting that when you share, for example, an original photo, it doesn’t display in chat as a photo — you’ll just see the raw file name.
The popular messaging app has also introduced the feature of shared media bundling, which will enable users to directly share existing photos and videos from WhatsApp’s in-built camera tool. You can either swipe photos and videos from right to left on the camera screen or swipe up to get a gallery-style view.
Further, users will now be able to bundle files together and send it to others. This means, when you send or receive multiple photos or video in a row, they will be automatically grouped together as an album, creating a tile display within your messages. Earlier, this feature was only available for iOS users.
Moving on, various text formatting options like bold, italic, and strikethrough, which were activated earlier using shortcodes, can now be enabled by long-pressing the text while chatting. The Facebook-owned company has also introduced some design improvements for voice and video calls. Users will now have swipe up to accept or decline a voice or video calls.
These features are available from the version number 2.17.261 for Android and 2.17.31 for iOS.
