About 20 days have passed since the official arrival on WhatsApp of the reactions, the most recent way of interacting with messages or multimedia contents received in the chats of the popular messaging app.
The development team continues to work to further optimize the functionality, enrich it with new possibilities, or simply make it easier to read: the novelty we are talking about this morning wants to point precisely in this second direction.
WhatsApp: another news related to reactions is coming
The reactions of WhatsApp are just one of the myriads of features recently (or that will soon be) introduced within the app, on all available platforms and for all users, at the end of a very long development path.
For those who have lost it, reactions are a way to interact with messages (including multimedia content) received in WhatsApp chats, without the need to write a reply message but simply leave a reaction (in fact) quick choice from one of the six emojis currently made available in the “basic” version of the feature.
It is right to talk about the “basic” version because we have known for some time that the WhatsApp development team is working to expand the emoji park with which it is possible to react (to any message) to all those actually available.
This morning, however, again thanks to the punctual WaBetaInfo portal, we discover that the developers are also working in another direction, to solve the problem of readability of the reactions when they are left to one of the images of the albums that WhatsApp is used to create automatically (when sending/receiving multiple photos at the same time).
Currently, in fact, in this particular case the reactions become difficult to read because, at a glance, it is impossible to understand which of the images in the album the reaction refers to unless you “open” the album and do not the reactions left to the single image are displayed.
As you can see from the previous screen, in a future WhatsApp update the functionality of the reaction will be optimized to facilitate the reading of the data in this particular case: in the case of reactions left to the images of an album, on the far right of the summary screen it will no longer be shown only the emoji with which the user “reacted” to the image but the image to which it refers will also be shown, allowing users to no longer have to open the album and go to sift through the information image by image.
Although the screenshots come from the iOS version of WhatsApp Beta, the development team will bring the same possibility to the Android and Desktop counterparts as well. The feature is currently in development, so it’s not even available to beta testers running preview versions of the app. More details will emerge in the coming weeks and we will find out more about this when it is released on the development channel.
How to download the latest beta version of the app
Although the news is not available even to beta testers, it is still possible to download the latest version of WhatsApp Beta for smartphones based on the Google Android operating system, by subscribing to the Beta Program of the app (you can find the page dedicated to the program following this link) through the Google Play Store.
If the Beta Program is temporarily full, it would still be possible to test the latest versions of WhatsApp Beta in preview, proceeding with the manual installation of the related APK files, which can be downloaded from the APK Mirror portal (whose dedicated page can be reached by following this link).