WhatsApp to roll out vacation mode in Android app soon

WhatsApp has been working on its Vacation Mode feature for a long time. But last month reports said that the Facebook-owned messaging app had shelved the feature for good after developing it for nearly two years. Now, a fresh report suggests otherwise.

As per a report by WABetaInfo, WhatsApp has renewed its efforts towards the development of Vacation Mode, which was also called ‘Ignore Archived Chats’ briefly.

To give you a quick brief about this feature, WhatsApp’s Vacation Mode feature lets users ignore archived chats completely. At present, WhatsApp pushes the archived chats to the bottom. However, whenever a new message arrives in the archived chat, it pops back on the top. This defeats the purpose of archiving the chat in the first place. Vacation Mode seeks to change by keeping the archived chats hidden.

WhatsApp has renewed its efforts towards developing Vacation Mode and this time around, it is working on implementing it with a major change. As per the images shared by the blog site, archived chats will now have a dedicated section that will be present on the top of the chat window. When users click on the Archived Chats section, they will see all of their...well...archived chats along with a Notification button. This notification button will enable users to customise the section as per their requirements.

As of now, the Notification section has two toggle buttons. While the first button -- Notify new Messages -- enables users to see when they get a new message in their archived chats. This is also the way things work currently. Disabling this button will hide archived chats completely. The other button called ‘Auto Hide Inactive Chats’ will archive a chat automatically if there is no activity in a chat for six months. This feature is still in the development phase and hence not available to the users.

Apart from Vacation Mode, WhatsApp is also working on implementing new media guidelines in the app. This feature will enable users in aligning stickers, text and emojis and stickers in videos, images and GIFs perfectly. This feature is also in the development mode.