There is evidence that the WhatsApp may be working in a Communities feature. XDA developers first identified the possibility in October, but now WABetaInfo has made similar findings.
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According to WABetaInfo, the Communities feature appears to give group administrators more power over groups. This includes the ability to create groups within groups, which can be similar to the way channels are organized in Discord.
Administrators can invite new users through a community invitation link and then start sending messages to other members. It’s hard to say exactly what these chats might look like now, but WABetaInfo notes that they appear to be encrypted end-to-end.
It also appears that a subtle design change will help distinguish Communities from regular group chats. As WABetaInfo points out, community icons will be squares with rounded corners, a format WhatsApp mistakenly enabled (and then quickly disabled) in October. There is no information on when Communities will officially launch.
When working on a Communities feature, WhatsApp may be trying to close the growing gap between it and other messaging apps such as Telegram and Signal. Earlier this year, WhatsApp’s new privacy policy caused confusion among users about what it would share with parent company Facebook, triggering a mass exodus to these other apps. When WhatsApp crashed along with the entire Facebook app network last month, Telegram gained an impressive 70 million users.
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