Hisham Sarwar
In 2019, WhatsApp had a relatively exciting year. The Facebook-Owned company introduced many new exciting features and the company plans to un-surface many new features in the year 2020.
While all Facebook-owned apps were surrounded by controversy amid security concerns and data leak news, WhatsApp continued to be one of the most promising text/video chat service by adding more subscribers regularly.
There were some security issues surrounding WhatsApp too. The news of buggy new updates that the company later patched to avoid massive data leak did scare the users. Facebook added its logo on the WhatsApp splash screen recently and aims to combine all Facebook-owned apps in 2020.
The foundation has already been laid down by supporting stories from one platform to another. Encrypted or not encrypted is a subject to another discussion but Facebook’s motive of interconnecting Instagram and WhatsApp stories with Facebook stories tells a lot about what is expected in the future.
Let’s take a look at what is expected of WhatsApp in the year 2020.
Dark Mode:
It was rolled out in the beta version only to be rolled back in the next update. However, it seems like the dark mode will finally be available for every WhatsApp user in 2020 as it is already rolled out for some selective users.
Self Destructing Messages:
More on the lines of SnapChap stories, WhatsApp aims to roll out self-destructing messages in 2020. The messages will auto disappear after a certain time leaving no signs to trace any conversation. The initial news is, messages can be deleted automatically after an hour, a day, a week, a month or a year which gives an idea that users will be able to manually select the time of removing messages from a conversation directly from the app settings.
Ads:
This was always on cards. In order to make the app self-sufficient, the company aims to provide ads to the stories.
Coming Soon to @WhatsApp…
– WhatsApp Status (Stories) to get Ads in 2020
– WhatsApp for Businesses to get richer messaging format options
– WhatsApp product catalog to be integrated with existing Facebook Business Manager catalog
h/t + 📸 @Olivier_Ptv
at #FMS19 pic.twitter.com/Z5LsbADNbP— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) May 21, 2019
There is also a strong possibility of payments in WhatsApp for businesses.
Bye, Bye Old Phones:
WhatsApp will stop working on these phones in 2020. The company does not plan to provide any future updates for old phones.
Following the footsteps on Microsoft who stops providing Windows update facility to old PC’s and Older Windows version, WhatsApp now will only cater to certain phone operating systems.
