The change should happen by the end of the year and follows the same logic as Instagram or Telegram, in which each person has a unique name with an @ before it.
A radical change is coming in the way we use WhatsApp. Until now, the most used chat application in Portugal and in almost all of the western world (Telegram and WeChat dominate other markets) uses the users’ phone number to identify them. But that will soon change. Everyone will now have to have a unique username, using an @, as it exists, for example, on Instagram or an email address.
That is, instead of your identification being your phone number, it could be, for example, @mariasilva1977. The name is chosen by each user and will be unique in the world, there cannot be two people with the same name. And it will be this name that you will give to people you want to connect with in the chat app.
The information was released by the WaBetaInfo channel, fully dedicated to information about the news on WhatsApp.
Remember that this type of identification is already used by WhatsApp’s main competitor (which belongs to the Meta group, owner of Facebook and Instagram), Telegram.
This change should already start to be introduced in the latest beta version of WhatsApp for smartphones with Android operating system in version 2.23.11.15. Even so, it will only be, in an initial phase, on very few phones, in a testing phase.
The fact that you have a unique and exclusive username does not mean that this name is visible to others, as you can edit the name you want to appear in front of your photo. Nowadays, that doesn’t happen, and the name visible to other users is the one they choose, as it shows the name by which a given phone number is saved in the contact list.
The main advantage of this new form of identification is the fact that your phone number, which is often personal and used in various private accounts, is not exposed. before all the people who want to have it on WhatsApp.
Another of the main novelties in this WhatsApp revolution is the fact that conversations can be marked with a star, which are always at the top of the page, and the fact that conversations can be hidden using a password or face id to unlock them. Both solutions are already being tested in the iOS version.
2023-05-27 07:00:00
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