WhatsApp race for catch up with competing instant messaging services It has undoubtedly become a marathon, at least in terms of its duration. But let’s do a little history to understand it better. We’ve just started 2021, when Meta, then still Facebook, announced a more than controversial change to its terms of service. The response of many users was immediate, in a “migration” movement from which Telegram was the main beneficiary. WhatsApp has maintained its first position in this market, but we can say that it has seen the ears of the wolf and since then it has stepped on the gas in terms of adding new features and improving the existing ones.

Since then, practically constantly we had the chance to see that every few weeks they surprise us with a new feature. Although, if we are honest, we have to point out that many of them were already present in other services, which is why Meta tried to provide its users with more complete services to try to avoid the temptation to jump to another platform for their functions. Nothing new under the sun, really and totally understandable.

The latest example of this comes as close as this week, when WhatsApp confirmed that the same account can now be used on multiple smartphones. I won’t say it was the most awaited feature by users, but at least it was was among the three most wanted historically in service. In this case, and we’ve seen it in others, the tests may take longer than you might imagine/expect, but the Meta seems to want to make sure they arrive mature enough, which is welcome.

Well, if there are still users who don’t know about this new feature, we will find another news in WABetainfo, also very interesting, namely WhatsApp is already testing the synchronization of chats over the local networkIn other words, without having to make a round trip to the cloud, which is the normal way, but is terribly inefficient, considering that the two devices can be physically separated by less than a meter.

A feature that was discovered in WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.9.19 It’s not available, at least at the moment, to all users who have it, so we can infer that WhatsApp opted for a fairly limited initial rollout, presumably to gather as much feedback as possible about its traffic before scaling its reach. This seems quite reasonable given the nature of the data transferred in this process.

There’s no indication at the moment if this feature will come to iOS, although technically there’s nothing stopping it, so we can hope it will. However, we will have to wait for further information about dates, scope and more.