WhatsApp Launches New Communities Feature

WhatsApp is launching today the Communities feature that was previously announced back in April. Communities will let WhatsApp users connect multiple groups in one place with admin controls and end-to-end encryption for all messages.

According to WhatsApp, the new Communities feature company should be useful to connect people in the same neighborhood, parents at a school, and workplaces. WhatsApp users will be able to add existing groups to new communities or start a new one from scratch.

Welcome to Communities 👋

Now admins can bring related groups together in one place to keep conversations organized.

Organized. Private. Connected 🤝 pic.twitter.com/u7ZSmrs7Ys

— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) November 3, 2022

Each community will have an announcement group where admins can send important messages to all members. Each group in a community can welcome up to 1024 users, with support for 32-person video calls, in-chat polls, message reactions, and larger file sharing (up to 2GB). All these new group features will also be available for WhatsApp groups that don’t belong to a community.

“With Communities, we’re aiming to raise the bar for how organizations communicate with a level of privacy and security not found anywhere else,” the company said today. “The alternatives available today require trusting apps or software companies with a copy of their messages – and we think they deserve the higher level of security provided by end-to-end encryption.”

WhatsApp Communities will roll out to all users over the next few months. They will live in a dedicated tab at the top of your chats on Android and at the bottom on iOS.