Enlarge (credit: WhatsApp)
WhatsApp rolled out two-step verification last week, and now it’s updating an existing feature to compete with Snapchat. The Facebook-owned messaging app announced today it’s updating Statuses, which lets you tell friends where you are or what you’re up to at the moment. New Statuses can include photos, videos, and gifs to make shared posts more fun and personal. These decorated or animated statuses disappear after 24 hours, making them akin to Snapchat Stories and story-sharing on Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook).
The Status update coincides with WhatsApp’s eighth birthday (February 24), and the new feature will roll out to Android, iOS, and Windows users from now until that date. When WhatsApp first came out, the Status feature was its only feature, as the app was built to let friends and family know what you were doing or where you were. Once messaging was added, Status remained a text-only feature that you could update on a whim.
Now you can choose to add photos, videos, and animated gifs and scribble over them to add more personality to your statuses. Any update you make to your Status will remain on your account for 24 hours before it disappears. If you update it multiple times a day, that will create a string of status updates that are presented much like Snapchat and Instagram Stories. Friends can watch your status story and reply to you privately, but all one-to-one communication still has to be done within private messaging windows. Like every other correspondence in WhatsApp, all status updates are end-to-end encrypted.
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