In line with what was leaked recently, WhatsApp has started rolling out its revamped Status feature. Going beyond text updates, the revamped feature lets you share photos, videos or GIFs as status updates that can be shared with friends. As you may have probably guessed looking at the above image, this updated feature seems inspired by Snapchat Stories.
In a blog post, Jan Koum, CEO and co-founder WhatsApp wrote that the company will reinvent the status feature coinciding with the app's 8th birthday on February 24. The new WhatsApp status updates will also be end to end encrypted.
"After we added messaging in the summer of 2009, we kept the basic 'text only' status functionality in WhatsApp. Every year, when Brian and I would plan projects to work on, we always talked about improving and evolving this original 'text only' status feature," Koum wrote.
In essence, WhatsApp will now let you click a photo or shoot a small video, overlay them with funky text or emoticons and share with others. These status updates will be visible to people on your contact list via a new ‘status’ tab, and it will disappear after 24 hours. Just like the messages on WhatsApp, these status updates will also be protected by end-to-end encryption. The revamped WhatsApp Status feature is being gradually rolled out on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. At the time of filing this story though, the update hasn’t reached our phones.
WhatsApp will be the fourth Facebook-owned product that now comes with this Snapchat-inspired feature. It was first rolled out last year on Instagram, and the likes of Facebook Messenger and Facebook quickly followed. Despite being a copied feature of sorts, there’s been a huge uptake and within a matter of months over 150 million people were actively using Instagram Stories every day. With WhatsApp boasting over 1.2 billion monthly active users, it is anything but surprising that Facebook has brought the ephemeral feature to the messaging app.
With the number of users steadily growing every quarter, WhatsApp has been busy making improvements and rolling out new features. Just recently, it rolled out two-step verification as an extra layer of security. Other recent features include the ability to send messages without internet connectivity, GIF search, a video streaming feature, and video calling among others.
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