WhatsApp is the biggest messaging and communication app on the planet. It basically made type and voice texting, and voice and video calling anybody anywhere in the world free. There are other messaging apps though, that offer these services but in their own way. Telegram is one such app that is famous for its privacy, its file-sharing capabilities, its massive group chat features, all of which outstrip the WhatsApp equivalent features, and more. Well, it looks like WhatsApp is finally closing that gap, by a little at least.
We reported a while back that WhatsApp was working on an update to increase file size transfers of up to 2GB, which brings it on par with Telegram. We also reported that WhatsApp was testing bigger group sizes of up to 512 members instead of 256 members. We can now report, that if you have a stable and up to date version of WhatsApp on your phone, the bigger WhatsApp group update should be available to you now.
To be fair, this update doesn’t even bring WhatsApp close to Telegram, as Telegram groups can have up to 200,000 members. WhatsApp and Telegram groups are two fundamentally different things, however, with WhatsApp groups mostly being much more intimate than Telegram groups, which are supposed to service much larger online communities and so are often full of strangers. Up to 512 members is still a lot though and opens up WhatsApp groups to new use cases such as moderating social club communications or small to medium-sized member organisations.
To find out if you have the new larger group sizes available on your version of the app all you have to do is go to a group you are already in and click on participants. At the top of the list, you will see how many participants there are in the group out of the maximum number. This will either say 256 or 512 if you have received the update.
Make sure you check out our top 10 expected WhatsApp features for 2022 to see what other new features you can expect to see landing on the app this year.
