FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
Story image
WhatsApp brings slew of new features to Android
Fri, 24th Jul 2015
FYI, this story is more than a year old

WhatsApp has added new features to the instant messaging application for Android users.

Now, a user can mark any message as ‘unread' by tapping and holding the conversation. This enables a user to easily find the conversation again at a later date.

This doesn't change the status of messages inside the chat, and the sender will still see the two blue ticks which indicates a user has received and read the message.

WhatsApp for Android now also includes custom notifications settings.

Users can ‘mute' a conversation for eight hours, one week, or one year; and can also assign ringtones, vibration lengths, lights or popup notifications to certain conversations.

Furthermore, the app now has a new low data usage option for voice calls on cellular data networks. Users monitoring data useage can also check the amount of data sent and received by WhatsApp.

There are also options such as ‘Google Drive backup bytes sent' and ‘Google Drive backup bytes received'. This doesn't trigger a Google Drive backup, but could indicate Drive backups may be coming to the app.

These latest features are available on version v2.12.194 of the app and can only be downloaded manually.