WhatsApp is rolling out new features today, including emoji reactions, bigger file transfers, and larger groups.
WhatsApp’s new “Tapbacks”-like message reactions has been in development for quite a while now, working to perfect it since last summer. The feature allows users to quickly react to a message with reactions – such as thumbs up or thumbs down – without the need to type out a response.
We’re excited to share that emoji reactions are now available on the latest version of the app. Reactions are fun, fast, and they reduce overload in groups too. We’ll continue improving them by adding an even broader range of expressions in the future.
In addition, you can now send files within WhatsApp up to 2GB in size at a time, protected by end-to-end encryption. This is an increase from the previous limit of 100MB and we think will be helpful for collaboration among small businesses and school groups. We recommend using WiFi for larger files and we’ll display a counter while uploading or downloading to let you know how long your transfer will take.
One of the top requests we’ve consistently received is the option to add more people to a chat, so now we’re slowly rolling out the ability to add up to 512 people to a group. Building private, safe, and secure communities takes work and we think this series of improvements will help people and groups stay close to one another.
WhatsApp users will also soon see a larger 2GB limit on file transfers between WhatsApp users. While the service has allowed file sharing within conversations since 2017, it has been limited to a 100MB file size. The considerable increase in allowed file size will allow users to share large video clips and other large files, which will be transferred securely using the same end-to-end encryption that is used to secure messages.
WhatsApp is also extending the maximum size of group chats, increasing the limit from 256 to 512 users. The service says the larger group limit is being slowly rolled out, while message reactions and larger file size transfer limits should be available to users.
