Chat with Yourself
Keeping a personal record of important things is a big need for every person, whether they use native tools or third-party applications for the same. Unfortunately, the issue with native tools like your File Manager or Note app is that you can not guarantee its safety from unexpected data purges, as well as from hackers who find it a lot easier to access your info from such open platforms. Plus, since the information is scattered over the phone, it is harder to keep track of it all.
To help avoid this, Whatsapp will not let you have a personal encrypted chat with your own self, where you can store messages, lists, links, documents, photos, videos, and anything else that you need to keep saved for future reference. This feature will be accessed through the add new chat feature and the contacts list, which will now feature a separate contact for your profile.
Group Chat Profile Pics
We already use our profile pics as an extension of our day-to-day persona and fashion sense. People often change their profile pics multiple times a week to showcase all the great looks they are trying out and what mood they are in. This representation will work overtime in group chats, where messages will appear along with a profile pic thumbnail in addition to your name or preferred handle.
This will give users a stronger feeling of representation, as well as recognition when it comes to interacting with their online friends. Users will be not only able to set their own profile pics but also those of other contacts in your app so that they can place their own favourite pictures to represent their favourite people. If you haven't set any specific picture in this place, it will default to the profile icon that is often used to denote male and female members. This will also happen if you disable the profile pics function from your group chat settings.
Blur Image Tool
Another way to help ensure your privacy will be the new Blur Tool, which will allow users to blur out various parts of your images before sharing. This way, you can hide any private or sensitive information while also sharing the parts that you want to be seen. Reports suggest that the company is working on two different blur styles, with multiple size selector tools to give you more control over the hidden data. This will be a great help to business and governmental users, who usually have to deal with these sorts of redactions before they can share important documents with each other on third-party platforms.
Auto Download on Desktop
Even though Whatsapp Desktop sounds like a great idea, considering the larger screen size and the presence of a dedicated keyboard and mouse, it is still an unfinished product, with various features missing or not implemented completely. One such feature is the ability to automatically download any image, video, or file that is shared with you through a Whatsapp chat. A lot of people keep this feature disabled on their smartphones because of bandwidth and storage restrictions. But on a proper computer, these issues shouldn't be that much of a hurdle. This is why it was surprising that it took the brand this long to make this feature a reality on the web and desktop platforms.
