Organizations like schools, local clubs, and nonprofits now rely on WhatsApp to communicate securely and get things done – especially since the pandemic has forced us all to find creative ways to work together while we’re apart. . Given the many comments we have received, we believe we can do more to make it easier for people to handle these busy conversations between these types of groups. This is where the Communities come in. WhatsApp communities will allow people to group individual groups under one umbrella with a structure that works for them. This way people can receive updates sent across the Community and easily organize smaller discussion groups on what interests them. Communities will also include powerful new tools for administrators, including bulletin boards that are sent to everyone and control which groups can be included. We believe that Communities will make it easier for a school principal to bring together all the school’s parents to share information they need to read and to form groups on specific classes, extracurricular activities or volunteer needs. We also make some improvements to the way teams work on WhatsApp – whether they are part of a community or not. We believe that these will help users to share in new ways and reduce congestion in larger conversations. These features will be released in the coming weeks so users can start trying them out even before the Communities are ready.
Reactions – Emoji reactions are coming to WhatsApp, so that people can quickly share their opinions without flooding the conversations with new messages. Delete Administrator – Group managers will be able to remove incorrect or problematic messages from everyone’s conversations. File sharing – We increase file sharing to support files up to 2 gigabytes so that people can easily collaborate on projects. Longer voice calls – We will introduce one-touch voice calls for up to 32 people with a brand new design for moments when live chat is better than chat.
Communities are inherently private, so we will continue to protect messages with end-to-end encryption. This security technology has never been so necessary to protect the privacy and security of people. Close groups – schools, members of a religious church, or even businesses – want and need very much to be able to have secure and private conversations without WhatsApp monitoring their every word. While other applications create conversations for hundreds of thousands of people, we choose to focus on supporting the teams that are part of our daily lives. It’s too early for WhatsApp Communities and creating new features to support them will be our main focus for next year. We look forward to taking the Communities into the hands of the people and we look forward to the comments from the people.
