A short, intuitive and easy to put into practice guide to discover some tricks that simplify our lives on WhatsApp
WhatsApp is a popular free messaging service, mainly for one reason: using it is very simple. Yet not everyone knows the techniques to make the most of this application: usually you just chat, exchange photos and videos.
WhatsApp has more than a billion active users worldwide: in India alone, where it is undoubtedly the most widely used messaging app, it has about 200 million subscribers. Not all users of the service, however, are familiar with the application: often, in fact, we limit ourselves to using WhatsApp to hear from friends and family and to chat with a group of colleagues, and we don’t know that the service has a whole series of features that can improve our experience.
Here are some tricks to make the most of WhatsApp, even if we are newbies and don’t have a great knowledge of messaging applications.
Format Text
For quite some time now, WhatsApp users can format the font of their text with the use of some strings of code. For example, simply inserting a message between two asterisks will result in bold writing. However, this method is anything but fast. So the developers have solved the problem: now all you have to do is select the text you want to edit and then click on the three dots on the keyboard after Cut, Copy, Paste. And that’s it.
Multiple Sending
When it was born, WhatsApp only allowed you to send one message at a time per contact. For some time now, however, thanks to several updates you can send the same text to multiple contacts and even within multiple groups. Doing so is very simple, just select the text you wrote and long press the Next button. In this way the list of our contacts will appear and we can decide to whom we want to send the multiple message.
Send a broadcast message
On WhatsApp you can also send, with a single touch, a broadcast message, that is, the same message to multiple people (up to a maximum of 256), without having to create a specific group. To do this, just go to the main page and click the menu icon at the top right. At this point, from the pop-up menu we select the item New Broadcast: all we have to do is select all the contacts and that’s it.
Email function
When we make a call via WhatsApp and the contact we try to contact doesn’t answer we have three options: the first is to delete and return to the previous screens, the second is to try to call back the person who didn’t answer us. But there is also a third option that few people know about: leave the contact a voice note, directly by clicking on the available option. In this way, the app works almost like an answering machine.
GIF Search
On WhatsApp, you can send animated GIFs directly from the keyboard. On Android, to select the most appropriate GIF just open the emoji keyboard and tap the button that you see there next to it with the words GIF. The search icon will appear at the bottom left of the screen: just tap it to search for the best GIF using keywords. If you’re an iPhone user, on the other hand, you have to press the + button (next to the chat window), and tap the GIF search button at the bottom left to search for, precisely, the desired GIF.
Siri reads messages
A new WhatsApp update allows iPhones with iOS 10.3 or higher to activate Siri to read messages out loud. The feature is especially useful while driving. To activate the service, simply use the voice command, “Siri read my latest message on WhatsApp.” Be careful, however, the message can only be read once after which Siri will not repeat.
Which chats are taking up memory space
Retaining to the functions for iPhone users, on WhatsApp they can know which chats are taking up more space in the phone’s memory. A useful service especially in case you have groups where you send a lot of multimedia files such as photos and videos, because you can immediately understand which ones take up memory and then delete the junk files that clog the storage space.
In fact, WhatsApp is subject to continuous updates that improve its functionality. Or that expand them. The latest one concerned images: smartphones with Android operating system now no longer show the image as it is, but a preview with text above or below, even without opening the application.