Your Guide To WhatsApp’s New Updates

WhatsApp, the global instant messaging service owned by Facebook has released an update about two of its functionalities. The first about when WhatsApp ends groups and why. While the second is about a new feature, Reaction Notifications. Here’s all you need to know about WhatsApp’s new updates.

Group Ended

Quite unknown to the masses but, WhatsApp has the ability to end specific groups. WhatsApp cannot see any messages, calls and media in the group owing to the fact that they are end to end encrypted. But WhatsApp’s moderation team uses advanced machine learning technology which is based on recorded bad group information.

According to WABetaInfo:

“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: in this case, the group may be automatically or manually ended.“

Naturally when a group ends, the participants will no longer be able to send messages and read the chat history. Furthermore they are also unable to open the group info and read the list of other participants. The image below shows what an ended group looks like.

WhatsApp also enables users to contact customer support within the ended group, so that a request can be forwarded to restore it.

Reaction Notifications

Following the publication of message reactions, WhatsApp is now working on a way to manage reaction notifications. The feature is included in WhatsApp’s latest submission of the Test Flight Beta Program bringing the version up to 2.21.210.15.

During the development WhatsApp had announced that there are no plans about ‘reaction notifications’. But it was then learnt that “some people wanted to receive notifications for incoming reactions, other users didn’t want to be notified.” WABetaInfo says: WhatsApp is planning to let the user manage how reaction notifications work. In particular, WhatsApp is working on new settings to disable reaction notifications or change their tone:

The Reaction Notifications feature is currently under development and so far the release date for the feature’s official roll out remains unknown.