whatsapp is the most widely used instant messaging service in the worldwhich is largely due to the fact that it was the first to become popular among iPhone users (remember, it came to iOS before Android), due to its simplicity, good performance by the standards of the time, and of course, because it was free, compared to the cents we had to pay for every SMS message sent (yes, you may not have remembered, but WhatsApp and SMS existed together for a few years).

However, there is no doubt that other services developed faster in a variety of ways, from adding new features or compatibility with multiple devices to security policies that are much more complete than Meta’s. For several years, while we’ve watched other services constantly innovate, WhatsApp has seemed content to be number one and thus has been much less active when it comes to innovation.

This began to change in 2020 to 2021, and since then we’ve seen the arrival of new features, beta experiments, and more grow substantially to the delight of the 2,000+ million users that WhatsApp currently has according to various studies. And given the Meta numbers and the importance the service will gain in them, we can expect it to intensify further in the future.

This lack of action for some time explains why today we see advances and innovations that really should have come a long time ago, but hey, better late than never. The main example of this was the multi-device mode, which began to be deployed in November 2021, and which just a year later began to allow the use of more than one smartphone per account, something that is also highly anticipated. Tablets could use WhatsApp as early as the end of 2021.

However, as surprising as it may seem, the WhatsApp interface for tablets has not been adapted to the screen size of these devices, so it is displayed with the same design as smartphones, which does not make any sense. However, and as we can read in WABetaInfo, luckily that will change since then WhatsApp is testing a “new” tablet-specific interface design.

You must be wondering why I quoted new, right? Well, the explanation is actually very simple because This is the same layout design that we’ve seen in the WhatsApp web interface for years, as well as the Windows 11 app. So with this design, the screen is divided into two panels, the list of conversations on the left and the content of the currently open conversation on the right, in a larger section.

However, we will have to wait for the expansion of this new design, as at the moment it was only seen in the beta version of WhatsApp for Android. There is no planned date for its arrival in the final version, and there is no mention of its availability for iOS either. So the good news is that it’s being worked on, the bad news is that strangely we still have to wait for something that should have been resolved and implemented a long time ago.