WhatsApp Communities are finally rolling out to beta users, ready to supercharge group chats


Select WhatsApp beta for Android users are gaining access to the Community feature


In April this year, Mark Zuckerberg officially announced WhatsApp Communities, letting you create sub-groups within groups. He called the feature a “major evolution of WhatsApp” and revealed that it had entered the testing phase. Since Communities would be a significant addition to the messaging, the company planned to roll it out slowly. It has been a few months since Facebook’s announcement, but Communities has not made its way to any WhatsApp user. That’s seemingly changing as select WhatsApp beta users have gained access to the feature.

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WABetaInfo reports that the Communities tab is showing up for certain users who updated to WhatsApp beta for Android v2.22.19.3. You can try force closing the app and relaunching it to see if that enables Communities for your account if you are already running the latest beta. In case you are among the lucky users to have access to the feature, you should see the Communities tab instead of the Camera tab on the main WhatsApp screen. You can head over to the tab and start by creating a Community where you can add up to 10 groups with support for up to 512 participants.

WhatsApp-Communities
Source: WABetaInfo

A community member can decide which sub-group to join based on their interest. They can also exit the sub-group whenever they want without leaving the community itself. The messaging service is also working on hiding the numbers of sub-group members from other participants for privacy reasons. However, this feature is not active in the current Communities version. WhatsApp will automatically create a new announcement group when you create a community. Admins can use this group to make announcements and send messages visible to all community and sub-group members. Additionally, admins can disable the community altogether if they wish to.

WhatsApp was first spotted working on Communities in November 2021, so the feature has been under development for a long time. Given that the Meta-owned company is finally rolling it out to select beta testers, we should see a public release before the end of the year.



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