WhatsApp battles bitter rival Telegram, showers love on users

WhatsApp is battling bitter rival Telegram to retain its users. For users, this means a virtual shower of new and exciting features.

With Telegram downloads reaching the 1 bn mark, WhatsApp has gone into the hyperactive mode to keep its customers satisfied. (Bloomberg)

WhatsApp is planning to launch a host of new features on its users phones. WhatsApp is working on a new feature called Reaction Notification that when released will give WhatsApp's iOS app users more granular control over another feature called Message Reactions that is also at the development stage at the moment. Now, the latest revelations have it that the WhatsApp app is working on adding some more features. WhatsApp has increased th flow of new features to its app over the last few months. Notably, during this period, its top rival, Telegram, has gained a huge amount of subscribers with its app downloads hitting the 1 billion mark to WhatsApp's 2 billion. Users can, therefore, keep expecting WhatsApp to shower more love on them in the foreseeable future.

WhatsApp Undo and Done buttons

The first set of these new features are Undo and Done buttons. These buttons will help WhatsApp users to edit their media files within the messaging app easily. Both the Done and Undo buttons will appear when users are editing an image within WhatsApp. WABetaInfo, the blog that tracks developments in WhatsApp, in a post said that pressing the Done button will be required to use another drawing tool. And if users don't like the changes that they made to the image, they can restore it to its original form by pressing the Undo button.

“Note that the undo button is already available normally, but WhatsApp is planning to add it to restore the previous text,” the blog site wrote, adding that these buttons will be available in a future update.

New WhatsApp Icons

Apart from this, WhatsApp is also planning to make subtle changes to icons within its messaging platform. For instance, the Security Settings icon while the dark theme in WhatsApp has been enabled earlier featured a light green coloured lock that was placed inside a white coloured shield and sky blue coloured circle. In WhatsApp beta for Android version 2.21.21.11, WhatsApp has turned the lock black, shield dark green and the outer circle a deeper shade of dark green.

WhatsApp Group Ended

WhatsApp has the ability to end specific groups. The blog site says that ‘WhatsApp cannot see their content, because messages, media and calls are end-to-end encrypted, the moderation team uses an advanced machine learning technology based on recorded bad group information.'

WhatsApp can automatically end groups when they are reported multiple times from different users, or the group has suspicious information such as illegal group names and descriptions. When a group is ended, its participants will no longer be able to send messages and read the chat history. They will also not be able to open the group info and read the list of other participants. If they try to open an ended group, they will be greeted with a dialog box that says, “This group has ended”. This dialog box will have two buttons -- the Back button will enable users to go back to WhatsApp' main menu, while the Support button will let them contact WhatsApp support. This feature is still at the development stage.