New WhatsApp features are a bit like the buses. You’re waiting for one for ages and then two come along at once. The dust has barely settled on the Fingerprint lock feature for WhatsApp on Android that we’ve just published and we’re already here again to tell you about another interesting feature coming our way. This is a feature WhatsApp users won’t have seen before, but if you’ve ever used Instagram, you’ll no doubt be familiar with it already.
WhatsApp is developing a boomerang feature
Instagram’s Boomerang feature is simple enough but has proven very popular. It allows you to record a short video and then play it in a loop. Not a regular loop, but one that plays like a boomerang. The video plays from start to finish, and then plays backward from finish to start before then repeating the process ad infinitum.
It has now been reported by WABetaInfo that WhatsApp is working on a Boomerang feature of its own. The feature will be available in the small Video Type panel that at the moment allows the choice between sending a video as a video file or first converting it into a GIF. The only caveat is that Boomerang videos will only be possible on WhatsApp if the video is less than seven seconds long.
WhatsApp’s new Boomerang feature is still in the very early stages of development, however, so at the moment it isn’t even available to advanced users of the WhatsApp beta program. According to the WABetaInfo report, however, the WhatsApp Boomerang feature will come first to WhatsApp on iOS and will then follow on Android. Although the report does specifically say that it will come to both iOS and Android, there is no mention on when either version will see a release.
As we always like to point out when we report on these advance beta version feature releases, we can’t guarantee any sort of timeline. To give you an idea of how long these things can take, we first broke the story we’ve just published on the new Fingerprint lock for Android back in January and that only came to the beta version of WhatsApp for Android this week. This means that the general release of this feature to all versions of WhatsApp could still be a way off.
How to try new features on WhatsApp before anybody else
Learn HowIf this all sounds too tantalizing for you, and you want to try out these advanced new features as soon as is humanly possible, don’t worry. We’ve prepared a handy guide that points out how you can sign up to the WhatsApp beta program. To read it, click the link above.
If you think you’d like to try out advance features on many of the other pieces of software, apps, and programs we feature on Softonic, we’ve got you covered there, too. Check out the link below to find out how to sign up to the beta programs for many, if not all, of your favorite programs.
How to test beta versions of apps
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