Ngozi Okpala
A mobile software development community, XDA Development, is reporting that WhatsApp group chats may soon get a ‘community feature.’
XDA states that while its observation is still a speculation, a string addition to the Android-owned cross-platform centralised instant messaging service indicates that WhatsApp is working on a new community feature.
XDA notes that WhatsApp is one of the biggest instant messaging platforms around, but, despite being this big in size and popularity, the app is slow to add features, adding, “Nevertheless, we now have learned that WhatsApp could be working on a new Community feature for its app, and from the looks of it, it could be different from the current implementations of Groups.”
“An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by the developers in a future build,” XDA added.
The software development firm states that it based its speculation on the observation that WhatsApp‘s latest beta, v2.21.21.6, comes with several new strings that point to an upcoming feature called “Community”.
“All of these are new string additions to WhatsApp, indicating work on a new Community feature. And from the looks of it, the Community feature will have a fair share of overlap with the existing Groups feature too,” XDA stated.
It explains, “Here’s speculation on our end on what this Community feature could be: Community could possibly be a social media function within WhatsApp as an IM [instant messaging] app, similar to what a Facebook Group is right now.
“However, as mentioned, note that this is speculation on our end. There still is a possibility that WhatsApp could simply be renaming Groups to be called Community, and the string replacement has not happened with this beta release.
“There are a few other improbable possibilities too. With the speed of feature introduction on WhatsApp, it could also take years before this feature comes to a stable release. For now, these new strings are all the information we have,” XDA added.
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