After being acquired by Facebook, WhatsApp has been constantly adding new features to help it gain more users and to stay ahead of other messaging apps like WeChat and Line. The latest feature that WhatsApp is working on is the ability to hide your online status, so only your chosen contacts can see when you are online on WhatsApp and sending messages. This could make WhatsApp even more popular in countries like India where they have very poor internet connectivity, but still want to stay in touch with their friends and family. But how exactly will this work? WhatsApp to soon allow users to hide their online status
Why it’s a good move
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In many ways, WhatsApp is a text-based version of Facebook. The app offers group chats and shares a lot of information with its parent company. Its latest move is clearly an attempt to differentiate itself from Facebook Messenger, which has offered these features for some time. But it’s also another way that WhatsApp is working on making conversations more private—the app already lets you delete individual messages from your own phone’s archive and plans on implementing full end-to-end encryption for all communications by April 2017.
What you need to know
Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp is reportedly testing a new feature that will enable its Android users to easily switch between online and offline statuses. This means you can tell everyone that you are busy right now but still receive messages, chats and calls. The function works similar to Facebook Messenger’s online button. When active, it turns blue and displays how long a user has been away from their phone – 30 minutes in our case – before it switches back off again, letting friends know you are busy or away from your phone for an extended period of time. It doesn’t appear as though WhatsApp is testing a similar function on iOS just yet.
What this means for people who troll
It won’t be too much longer before WhatsApp will allow its 1.2 billion active monthly users to hide their real-time presence on a chat thread—effectively creating a fake online status. This change is undoubtedly in response to a slew of complaints about cyberbullying, trolling, and just plain rudeness when it comes to group chats.
And while it may not completely solve that problem, WhatsApp has announced that they’re now going to give people more control over how they appear in group threads as well as private chats.