Only recently WhatsApp announced the roll-out of video calls, and now the company is gearing up for another smart feature already present in other social media apps. Video calling is in beta testing phase right now, and will soon be made public.
WhatsApp is now looking to launch another feature that has been made famous by Snapchat – quick snaps and videos to share with friends. This feature was introduced by Snapchat, and since then has also been adopted by Instagram, in the form of Instagram stories.
The new feature will come in the ‘Status’ tab that will allow you to quickly take a photo or video and send it to your contacts for a limited period of time. The new interface also seems to have been revamped to accommodate these temporary stories.
“You can see that a little bit in the announcement and launch of Instagram Stories and what we’re doing with Messenger and some of the additional tests on Facebook and the camera work that we’re doing in WhatsApp. So this is across the whole family of apps. This is a big part of the product experience that we want to deliver,” Mark Zuckerberg said, hinting at the video feature in the apps.
How to get this feature?
Unfortunately, this new feature is available only to WhatsApp beta testers, and can work only on a rooted Android smartphone or a Jail broken Apple smartphone. If you have one of these, you can go straight to the link here and get the latest version on your smartphone.
For everyone else, the company will release a public version after thorough testing of this feature is done across the platforms.
What does the new feature bring?
The new feature brings a major overhaul to the app. Instead of three tabs in the beginning – calls, chats and contacts, this new version brings four tabs. On the immediate left is a camera tab, that allows you to click photos and videos immediately.
Then the next three tabs are chats, status and calls. The new ‘Status’ tab is the one that introduces the quick snap feature. It will have all the photos and videos shared by your contacts under one roof. You can view and browse through them like you do on Snapchat.
This status tab allows you to set your status as well, so there is no ‘status’ option in the settings anymore. Just like other services, you can doodle on your images and videos, edit them on the app itself and share them with a restricted audience.
WhatsApp has not added a timer for ending the photo and video share and we do not know if the company is going to do that soon. Considering this feature is in beta, we can expect WhatsApp to add more features and bring it in line with its competitors.
If you have a rooted Android phone or a jail broken iPhone, get the beta version of WhatsApp and check out this feature. For the rest, the company should announce this feature along with video calls soon.
Source: BGR