Despite being the most widely used messaging app on planet Earth, Whatsapp He still keeps the strange secret that not everyone knows. For example, Did you know that at first it wasn’t even a messaging app?, Or that the maximum number of participants in a group has a technical explanation?.
We have already told you about the first case, but so far we had not explained why WhatsApp groups only support 256 people. Neither 255 nor 257. And the truth is that, while rivals like Telegram continue to increase that number to unsuspected limits – today there are already 200,000 people who can be part of a Telegram group, and on the rise – WhatsApp remains faithful to this curious and technical figure published in 2016.
WhatsApp groups only support 256 people, but there’s a reason
To understand why WhatsApp, at the time, decided choose this very specific number As the maximum number of members that can be added to a group, you should take into account some of the IT fundamentals, like the binary system which uses 2 digits to represent –0 and 1–.
As the user points out dat_sylveon on Reddit, WhatsApp stores each user in a group with a unique ID. Therefore, taking into account that 256 is the maximum number of participants, and the binary system uses 2 digits, we can deduce that each unique user ID uses 8 bits, since 2 to the power of 8 is 256, which is the maximum number of unique identifiers that can be obtained.
What is certain is that 256 is one of the most important numbers in the field of computing, since this is the largest number of elements that can be represented with a single byte – eight bits, or what in binary system would be “eight one” -. For example, 256 is the maximum number of colors that can be found in a GIF or the number of characters in the ASCII language.
WhatsApp could easily assign unique identifiers consisting of a greater number of bits. It is possible that over time, 2 bytes would be allocated instead of 1 as before, which would translate into a maximum number of participants of more than 65,000 people per group, a figure which today would be unnecessary for the vast majority of platform users.
We don’t know if WhatsApp will increase this limit sooner or later., and if so, to what maximum number of participants. But at least we already know why, after expanding the limit for the first time in groups, 256 was the number chosen by the company.
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