WhatsApp has a user count of over 1.5 billion across the world. It is one of the most popular applications on both the Apple App Store and Google’s Play Store; and has millions of active users at any given moment. In India alone, the application has over 400 million users. The company behind the popular chat app is starting to roll out four long awaited new features with its latest builds.
WhatsApp Inc, owned by Facebook, is rolling out the latest build in a staggered manner so most users may not immediately get the feature.
Fingerprint Lock Feature
The features is not exactly a brand new addition to WhatsApp security functions. Earlier this year, iOS devices have already received the update that enabled this particular feature. Now, a whole seven months after, the feature is finally available on Android devices. In February 2019, iPhones had the ability to safeguard their app with biometric security either with FaceID or TouchID. The feature is cuurrently live with WhatsApp beta version for Android that are on the latest version 2.19.3 for those that wish to try it. A live build iteration is expected to arrive soon.
WhatsApp From Facebook
Previously, we had reported that Facebook the parent company behind WhatsApp and Instagram, wants to integrate the three social media platforms. It means that the company wants the user experience to be almost seamless with transitions in between any of its social networking services. Users can find the “WhatsApp from Facebook” tag in the apps Settings section.
Frequently Forwarded
Ill natured users on WhatsApp have been accused on multiple occassions of facilitating the spread of fake and false news in India. Hence, it has been a considerable effort from the company’s part to fix the issue. One of the moves employed to curb the forest fire nature of false information was identifying such texts and labelling them with the “Frequently Forwarded” tag. It would allow indentification of how many times the message has been forwarded by alerting the user.
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Consecutive Voice Notes
One of the latest features being introduced is a real quality of life improvement in the user experience. The feature which was first seen in the iOS version of Whatsapp has the user no longer having to play consecutive voice notes manually. In simpler words, Users can now automatically play voice notes one after another seamlessly. Additionally, the chat app notifies the user with a sound after finishing one audio message before starting another.
This may not be the most welcomed feature for a lot of users who like to capture screenshots of their chats and share them with their friends. What a lot of people don’t realize is the fact that sharing screenshots is a violation of the privacy policy, which prohibits users from sharing personal information with a third party. Even though the fingerprint authentication feature is not yet available on Android, the presence of such a feature combined with the “No-screenshot” feature may be a decent security detail for the application. 
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Facebook’s spokesman stated that the company is acknowledging the issue faced by users and that all steps are being taken to resolve the issue. Apologizing for the inconvenience, the spokesman refused to divulge the cause of the outage. Rumours are floating around, which state that the reason for the outage of Facebook services was most likely a DDoS (Denial of Service) Attack. In a Denial of Service attack, multiple network nodes try to disrupt the server by accessing it at the same time. 
Downdetector.com indicated that at the peak time, over 12,000 users reported issues with Facebook connectivity throughout the world. Regarding other applications, Instagram had an outage count of over 7,000 users, whereas Whatsapp peaked at 3,000 user reports. The live outage map on the website clearly exhibited that the majority of issues arose from the Asian and European continental regions.
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As per sources, the first instance of the app was seen on the Mexican App Store. Shortly thereafter, the app was also spotted in France, Brazil and Panama. As mentioned before, the app provides direct connectivity between clients and businesses. WhatsApp business offers companies the option to create a tailored profile which can exhibit information regarding the business, like store hours, website link and a short “info” section that helps the user know more about the company.
Companies can even program some quick replies that will automatically be sent to customers when they message the business via the application. A greeting message can be created for clients to give the impression that the service is actively performing. Moreover, companies will be able to categorize their “WhatsApp customers” and label them as per their agenda. Also, the statistics option lets the business keep a check on how many messages it is receiving and how many sent messages have been read. 
