New features will be rolling out on Android phones starting today.
World’s most popular instant messaging app, WhatsApp has introduced new features that include Snapchat style drawing and stickers for photo and video sharing.
WhatsApp announced the rolling out of new features in a blog post that says “Today we’re introducing new ways to customize and enhance the photos and videos you share with friends and family around the world. With WhatsApp’s new camera features, you can now write or draw on photos and videos, as well as add emoji to express yourself.”
The Facebook-owned company, which till recently enjoyed the honeymoon days with very few serious competitors to race along has now fastened up to take on the fight put in recently by Google that announced Allo, a WhatsApp-like instant messaging app.
The new update that WhatsApp has introduced includes similar kind of stickers used by Twitter and Snapchat. The stickers that widely known as Twemoji and is an open source available for anyone to use under MIT and Creative Commons License.
The Twemoji can be superimposed on any multimedia content including videos and images along with an option to add text in the size and font of the user’s choosing.
WhatsApp user can also draw shapes or write on the images using various colors and can add multiple stickers to the multimedia content. The strikers dropped into the media content can me resized accordingly using the simple drag and pinch gestures.
The new WhatsApp sticker feature also comes with a range of color gradient, much more than what is currently available in snapchat. Using the gradient tool users can change the color of the sticker and the text written.
In addition to these features, the new update also brings to life the additional option to use speech and through bubbles in multimedia content.
With the forwarding and share menu tweaked, users can now send messages to multiple chats from the same window; a very significant change that WhatsApp has introduced with the new update. While forwarding the file, the list of most frequently contacted people comes first making it easy for the user to forward the message.
Another major feature added to WhatsApp is the apps ability to zoom in and zoom out while recording videos. Adding to this user can now switch between front and back camera just by double tapping on the screen.
Another handy feature to come up with the latest WhatsApp update is the screen flashing feature, which makes the screen go brighter while taking selfies in low light conditions.
WhatsApp has confirmed that the new feature will hit phones across the world soon and this also mark the move of Facebook in including features from Snapchat.
Recently Facebook announced that it will soon implement augmented reality overlay on Facebook Live and will also soon test a new feature, very similar to Snapchat’s ‘Stories”.