whatsapp is the most widely used instant messaging service in the worldsomething that is largely due to the fact that it was the first to become popular among iPhone users (remember that it reached iOS before Android), thanks to its simplicity, good performance by the standards of the time and, of course, because it was free, compared to the cents we had to pay for each SMS message sent (yes, maybe you didn’t remember it anymore, but WhatsApp and SMS coexisted for a few years).
However, there is no doubt that other services have evolved faster in various aspects, from the addition of new functions or compatibility with more devices to security policies that are much more complete than those of the Meta service. For a few years, while we watched other services constantly innovate, WhatsApp seemed complacent about being number one on the chart and was therefore far less active when it came to innovating.
This started to change between 2020 and 2021, and since then we have seen how the arrival of new functions, experiments in beta versions and others have grown substantially, to the delight of the more than 2,000 million users that, according to various studies, WhatsApp currently has. And given the Meta numbers, and the importance that the service will gain in them, we can expect that this will continue to intensify in the future.
This lack of action for quite some time explains why, today, we see advances and news that in reality should have arrived a long time ago, but hey, better late than never. The main example of this was the multi-device mode, which began to be deployed in November 2021, and which just a year later began to allow the use of more than one smartphone per account, something also highly anticipated. Tablets, for their part, could already use WhatsApp from the end of 2021.
However, as surprising as it may seem, the WhatsApp interface for tablets has not been adapted to the screen size of these devices, so it is shown with the same design as smartphones, something that does not make any sense. However, and as we can read in WABetaInfo, fortunately this is about to change, since WhatsApp is testing a “new” interface design specific to tablets.
Surely you are wondering why I have quoted new, right? Well, the explanation is actually very simple, since It is the same design, with its distribution of elements, that we have been seeing for years in the WhatsApp web interface, as well as in the app for Windows 11. Thus, with this design, the screen is divided into two panels, the list of conversations on the left and the content of the currently open conversation on the right, in a larger section.
We will still have to wait, however, for this new design to become widespread, since at the moment it has only been seen in the beta version of WhatsApp for Android. There is no scheduled date for its arrival in the final version, and neither is there any reference to its availability for iOS. So, the good news is that they are working on it, the bad news is that, surprisingly, we still have to wait for something that, by now, should have been resolved and implemented a long time ago.
