14 DAY TRIAL // Believe it or not, the more developers are leaving Windows Phone, the bigger the updates WhatsApp releases for Microsoft’s mobile platform, and the latest beta brings another important improvement for users who still stick around.
A “Send as GIF” option is now being tested as part of the most recent beta version of WhatsApp for Windows Phone, but it could be released to all users in the stable final update likely to see daylight in the coming weeks.
MSPU reports that users can send as GIF any video stored locally and version 2.16.232.0 of WhatsApp for Windows Phone automatically cuts the clip to 6 seconds and delivers it as an animation to your contacts. The video is thus sent as a looping animation that has the sound removed, but your recipients can open it just like a typical GIF file, which helps with transfer speed and compression.
GIF support in WhatsApp
GIF support is one of the features that Android and iPhone users have been dreaming about for a long time, and at some point, WhatsApp even started testing it before abandoning the idea shortly after that.
As you can see, however, the implementation that Windows Phone users are getting isn’t quite GIF support the way we know it, so it might still take a while until WhatsApp users can send animations in their conversations.
iMessage on iPhones, for instance, received support for GIFs with the release of iOS 10, and users can include animations in their conversations quite easily. Third-party iMessage add-ons such as Giphy make this quite a breeze and this is how GIF support should be implemented in WhatsApp as well, especially if this feature is offered cross-platform.
For the moment, however, this is one step in the right direction and Windows Phone users seem to be the first getting it, even though it could take a while until the Send as GIF button lands in the stable version of WhatsApp.