WhatsApp issues important advice to all users and ignoring it could be costly

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WhatsApp is bringing a raft of useful new features to its popular app in the coming days and weeks which include being able to add even more people to Group Chats and responding to messages via simple emoji-style reactions rather than typing out lengthy replies.

These are both welcome additions to the platform but there is another big upgrade that could actually end up being quite costly. WhatsApp has announced that it’s upping the file size limit available to its billions of users from a pretty measly 100MB to a whopping 2GB.

This means you’ll soon be able to shoot a pixel-packed 4K video and send it to friends and family without any need to start compressing files or cutting down on the quality. It’s what many have been asking for but it does come with a warning.

Millions of smartphone owners remain on contracts that don’t offer unlimited data. Once things run low, most networks will then ask customers to buy more and it’s not exactly cheap.

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For example, buying 1GB of data from EE will set customers back over £5 with Vodafone charging over £3 for the privilege of topping up your allowance should it run dry.

It’s currently unclear if users will be warned before they start downloading content that’s been sent to them via WhatsApp but the Meta-owned firm has issued a warning to anyone who has a limit on their data plan.

In a post on its blog page, WhatsApp said: “You can now send files within WhatsApp up to 2GB in size at a time, protected by end-to-end encryption. “This is an increase from the previous limit of 100MB and we think will be helpful for collaboration among small businesses and school groups. We recommend using WiFi for larger files and we’ll display a counter while uploading or downloading to let you know how long your transfer will take.”

These changes will be rolling out in the coming weeks so be warned if you’ve only signed up for a small amount of data from your network as you could find you’re faced with a surprise bill.

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