WhatsApp Users should expect a “Communities” feature

A growing body of evidence suggests that WhatsApp may be developing a Communities feature. The potential was first discovered by XDA Developers in October, and now WABetaInfo has come up with data that are comparable.

It appears that the Communities feature, according to WABetaInfo, gives group administrators additional control over their groups. Groups inside groups may be created, which may be comparable to how channels are organised under an umbrella Discord community, among other features.

As shown in this example, users can create a Community forum. At the moment, it’s more like a group chat than a social network: it’s still a secure location where people may communicate with each other.

For the sake of clarity, you’ll notice that this screenshot’s community icon is square with rounded corners, rather than the circular ones you’d see in an instant messaging group chat. It appears like WhatsApp has mistakenly enabled this layout for all profile photo thumbnails and promptly removed it from the WhatsApp beta for Android 2.21.21.7 upgrade.

There will be a group chat for administrators, and they will be able to put various communities together, such as a degree course, which includes all of its teaching classes as a group. To give yet another example, the official Discord server of the World of Warcraft can be considered a community, while its channels can be considered divisions of the community (or groups of the community).

While this feature is still in construction, the community will provide administrators with advanced capabilities to better manage all of the community’s groups, but these advanced tools are currently unclear. Admins can invite new members. Users can be manually added or join using a “Community Invite Link” issued privately or publicly by the admin. 

For now, there is no official release date set for the “Community” feature yet, so it could undergo changes before it is officially made available to beta testers on Android and iOS. As with any feature under development, it’s hard to ascertain when something like this will be ready for release.

We don’t have any more information at this time, but we’re keeping an eye on things and will keep you updated if anything further happens.

If WhatsApp is working on a Communities feature, it might be an attempt to close the growing gap between it and other messaging apps like Telegram and Signal.

Whatsapp’s updated privacy policies prompted confusion among users about what it would share with Facebook, which resulted in a large migration to other messaging apps earlier this year. Telegram attracted a startling 70 million new users last month when WhatsApp and Facebook’s entire network of applications went down..