Evidence of a WhatsApp Communities feature being worked on is mounting, with reports confirming that the Meta-owned company is now actively developing the feature.
HIGHLIGHTS
- WhatsApp Communities is a private group chat feature being worked on
- These chats offer new management tools and are end-to-end encrypted
- A community can have multiple group chats going on
WhatsApp Communities is like a group chat on steroids
WABetaInfo has been able to spot signs of this feature now being under development on WhatsApp Beta for iOS and Android after XDA Developers recently spotted references to WhatsApp Communities. Not to be confused with regular chats, communities are distinguished from regular group chats with rounded community icons.
You can invite others to privately join a community by choosing Invite to Community, which creates an invite link you can share with people or publish online. You can also reset the link or create a QR code for joining the community,
Admins can send messages in this group chat and they will be able to group some groups related to the community: for example, a degree course can be considered a community, and all its teaching classes are groups included in this community. Another example: the official Discord server of WBI can be considered a community, while its channels are groups of the community.
Messages and calls made in such chats are end-to-end encrypted. “No one outside of this chat, not even WhatsApp, can read or listen to them,” reads a message in the app.
A community’s settings can be changed to allow only admins to edit it and do things such as create groups within groups, something you cannot do with regular group chats. Not much else is known at this point about WhatsApp Communities, but we’ll be making sure to keep you in the loop. Read: How to check your user name in WhatsApp for iPhone
WhatsApp seems to be playing catch-up to popular secure messaging services like Telegram and Signal that provide Communities-like features or Discord-like channels.
There’s no word on when the Communities feature will be officially rolled out beyond stating that it will be available in a future update to WhatsApp for Android and iOS.