WhatsApp has started to add a much-awaited feature to the famous chat platform – the ability to send any kind of file including zip-files, .apk files, and a lot many hitherto unsupported formats.
So far users have only been able to share photos, videos, and music files with each other. A more recent update had added the ability to send document files such as pdfs and Word files. However, that’s still not enough. Most users feel that they should be able to send any file on their phone without having to go through any third-party cloud storage service.
This feature was first found (and brought to the public) by a website called WABetaInfo. There’s another small feature that’s coming as part of the next update (presumably):
“The other neat addition noted by the tipster is that with the new sharing feature, WhatsApp also allows you to send uncompressed photos and videos without compromising on the resolution, but the ceiling limit is too low for high-quality video clips of sufficient length.”
And finally, WhatsApp is also said to be working on a “recall feature”, which will allow you to un-send, or “recall” messages sent by mistake! Isn’t that something!!??
Now before you get all excited, we’d like to clarify that as of now, these features are not available on iOS. They have only been spotted so far Android and Windows phones. Even among them, the percentage of phones that have seen this update is very, very low! It’s because WhatsApp is doing a “staggered release”. Meaning that the updates appear randomly to a few people and based on the feedback, features are either added or removed.
We’d like to see all these features come early to iOS as well. But Apple’s high standards of quality for the App Store means that WhatsApp will have to sort out all the little kinks before launching an iOS version. Which is why it’s likely to take some time before we get to use these features on our iPhones…
