The age of WhatsApp and other messaging services has given us all sorts of ways to ruin our own lives.
Just imagine, if you will, snapping an erotic picture of yourself and then sending it to your conservative boss, colleague or grandmother.
The shame and cringe is almost too much to think about.
So praise be to WhatsApp, which looks set to introduce a new way of making sure you don’t send graphic or intimate pictures to the wrong person.
It wants to help you know exactly who you’re transmitting an image to so has introduced a new design in a beta version of its software for Android.
Currently, when you send an image you can see a profile picture showing the face of your intended recipient.
It’s easy to see how this could lead to disaster if you weren’t paying attention.
In the update, the name of the recipient is shown at the bottom of the screen as well, so you can make sure you don’t unleash a nude upon a person who shouldn’t be seeing it.
You can see how this small, but important, change will look in the tweet below.
There are 1.5 billion WhatsApp users in the world and they are forever anxious to hear about new features coming to the messaging service.
But now the app’s biggest fan has launched an extraordinary broadside against WhatsApp and highlighted its worst bugs and missing functionality.
The WhatsApp user who runs the website WABetaInfo has published a rundown of problems under the headline: ‘It’s 2019 and we’re still in 2014.’
Normally, WABetaInfo is known for rooting through new versions of the app before they are released to the public in order to uncover new features.
Its latest article is significantly angrier, however, and suggests users of the app are not happy about its direction.
‘I’m not really satisfied about the WhatsApp development,’ the editor of WABetaInfo wrote.
The site said WhatsApp was too slow to introduce new functionality when compared to its competitors.
‘I don’t understand why they are so slow,’ it added.
‘I understand that a feature must be developed carefully, because WhatsApp is a really famous app.
‘But, for example, I think: “Why is Telegram so fast with features?”
The website added: ‘WhatsApp doesn’t seem interested in the community and probably one day we won’t be interested in WhatsApp if they continue.’
Here are some of the things which WhatsApp’s biggest fan finds really annoying:
- You cannot send uncompressed photos ‘natively’ within WhatsApp. This means you can’t send gigantic, high-quality photographs because the app automatically makes the file smaller.
- Users cannot listen to a voice message whilst switching to a different chat.
- Dark mode has not been introduced even though we’ve known it’s coming since 2018.
- You can’t hide your ‘online’ status, which means contacts will be able to see you’re active – even if you want to hide from them.
- It’s not possible to cancel an iCloud backup on iOS and it takes up a lot of space on Apple’s cloud service.
- WhatsApp users cannot send files bigger than 100mb.
- You can no longer save copies of your contacts’ profile pictures (although you could just take a screenshot).
- Individual chats do not have the options to automatically download pictures. So, for instance, you can’t turn off downloads for a busy chat with loads of images and turn it on for family conversations where fewer but more important snaps are posted.
- There will soon be adverts on the Status feature, which goes against WhatsApp founders’ early promises.
- Dark mode has still not been rolled out.
Source: Read Full Article