The feature was spotted in the beta version of WhatsApp on both iOS and Android. — Photo by Mourizal Zativa on Unsplash
While some have been sending messages to themselves in WhatsApp using workarounds like going through their contacts or a chat link for a long time now, the messaging app is finally adding improvements that allows users to do this natively in-app.
According to a report from WABetaInfo, the feature was spotted in the beta version of WhatsApp on both iOS and Android, when users selected the new message button and were shown the option to “message yourself" in the contact list.
Before, tapping the button would only display contacts on the device with a registered WhatsApp account, which excluded the user’s own contact, thus requiring the aforementioned workarounds.
The beta version of the messaging app also saw an update which gave users the ability to automatically mute groups that they join that have more than 256 members. This feature was only spotted on the Android version of WhatsApp beta.
Adding an automatic muting feature is likely being done to help prevent users from being inundated with messages whenever they join any particularly large groups in the app.
When a user joins a group larger than 256 members with the setting enabled, they will see a message that reads “This group has over 256 participants and was automatically muted to help reduce notifications”, along with a button to unmute the chat instead.
This comes after the update last month where the maximum number number of members in a group was raised for the second time this year from 512 to 1,024.
It is currently unknown when exactly both these features will be rolled out to all users.
Over the past months, the app received feature updates which added things like support for emoji reactions, invite links for calls, the ability to listen back to voice messages before sending them, and Communities.
