Five hidden features of WhatsApp that are secret for users

Instant messaging platform WhatsApp has come a long way since its start, with many updates from time to time. The popular messaging app now has over 1.5 billion monthly active users.

The company has been updating the app with new features and time to time beta versions. This updating has achieved the company the growth of active users per day as well as per month.

Some key features which the company updated in the last year and this year include the ‘Delete for Everyone’ message option, ‘WhatsApp Status’ option, and ‘Share your live location’ option.

While some of the features are quite popular among the people, there are many which are still hidden and a ‘secret’ for the users. Some of them are:

1. Watch YouTube videos on the app without switching the screens

The latest update by WhatsApp is the picture-in-picture mode, which lets the users watch a YouTube video without exiting from any one of both the apps. Users can directly play the YouTube video by using the picture-in-picture mode by tapping on the YouTube link received in a conversation. This will allow the app to play the video in a floating window. Apart from this, the user can also navigate through the chatting app without any interruption in the video, along with changing chats.

2. Send or receive money

WhatsApp recently rolled out its new feature of UPI-based payments in India. The benefit of the new UPI-based payments feature is that the user can either send or receive money from a friend of his through the messaging app. The sent or received money will directly be credited to the recipient’s bank account. The new feature can be accessed in the chat window where other option like Documents, Audio, Video options are given.

After clicking on the Payments option, a new window will pop up which will show a list of the banks from where the users can select their preferred bank account to connect with the UPI. The next step will be to create an authentication pin if the user is accessing the Payments option for the first time. The user will have to create a UPI account through UPI app or respective bank’s website/app if they don’t have one. Both the sender and receiver need to have the UPI feature updated on their respective smartphones to share money.

Also Read: Instagram to introduce features of voice calling, video calls, say reports

3. Hide blue ticks (read receipts)

The blue ticks on WhatsApp show when a message is read or not by the recipient, but there is a way to disable them. Go to Settings > Account > Privacy > Read Receipts > Tick it off. However, by unticking the read receipts, the user themselves will lose their ability to check if someone has read their message or not.

Another way to hide your read receipts is by putting your phone on Airplane Mode before opening a chat. However, the user need to remember to close the chat window before switching off the Airplane Mode.

4. ‘Unsend’ or ‘Delete’ Message

WhatsApp recently introduced the ‘Delete for Everyone’ message option. The user can delete a wrongly sent message to the sender within a span of seven minutes, but now the app has raised the time bar to 4,096 seconds, which makes it approximately 68 minutes. When you delete the message by tapping on the ‘Delete for Everyone’ option, the message will get deleted from both the user’s and the recipient’s chat window.

5. Use of Starred messages on WhatsApp

The starred feature lets the users bookmark a particular message which the user wants to refer to it later. To star a message, the user needs to long press on a message, and select the star icon on the notification bar. Users can also check the list of the starred messages in the Menu option.