The feature could be inspired by Telegram’s channels

Oct 11, 2021 12:15 GMT  ·  By

WhatsApp is working on all kinds of improvements for its mobile clients right now, and one of the features that have only recently been discovered is called community.

Very little is known at this point, but an APK teardown performed by XDA reveals that WhatsApp could be working on something similar to groups or channels currently available on Telegram.

A community feature is clearly a way to bring together more WhatsApp users, but at this point, it’s not exactly clear how the whole thing would work. However, the parent company plans to allow users to send others a link to join a community.

“Anyone with WhatsApp can follow this link to join this community. Only share it with people you trust,” the link generation feature reads.

WhatsApp communities

Without a doubt, the purpose of communities is to serve as an expansion to the existing groups already available in WhatsApp, though it goes without saying the Facebook-owned company is planning some new capabilities that would allow participants to communicate more efficiently.

At the first glance, building something similar to the channels available on Telegram appears to be WhatsApp’s main idea, but of course, nobody can tell this for sure since the feature is still in its early days.

“Channels are a tool for broadcasting public messages to large audiences. In fact, channels can have an unlimited number of subscribers. When you post in a channel, the message is signed with the channel's name and not yours. You can appoint additional administrators to help you manage the channel. New subscribers can see the entire message history in a channel once they join,” Telegram says in the description of channels.

At this point, however, it’s not known when WhatsApp could officially announce its new community feature for Android and iPhone in the production channel.