WhatsApp Increases Participant Limit in a Group Chat to 512 People, Adds Reaction Feature

Sophie Webster, Tech Times 06 May 2022, 01:05 pm

In 2017, messaging platform WhatsApp increased the number of participants in a group chat to 256. However, a lot of organizations that use the platform to talk to their colleagues found the number frustrating.

The limit has forced management with thousands of members to spread the resources thin. It made them create and manage multiple groups.

Now, that setting will change as the Meta-owned platform gets an update that will double the number of participants in each group.

WhatsApp Upgrades Participant Numbers in Group Chats

On May 5, the WhatsApp blog announced a series of features rolling out on the service. This includes expanding the group chat sizes.

WhatsApp users will be able to add up to 512 people to a group. Although the feature is not widely available yet, it is slowly trickling to users, according to Android Police.

It is still far from the 200,000 participant limit available to Telegram users through supergroups, but it is a welcome improvement.

Also Read: WhatsApp iOS New Features Include Reactions and Group Polls for Beta Users

WhatsApp is also currently working on another way to manage several group chats efficiently, and that is through Communities. A community will appear as a new tab within the app, just like Calls and Status.

It will also contain several groups, allowing admins to send announcements and updates to all participants at once.

Since 2021, WhatsApp Communities has been in the rumor mill, but the official announcement only came in April.

The latest blog post reiterated Meta's commitment to ensuring the feature begins arriving for users soon, following a positive reception after April's announcement, according to iMore.

WhatsApp also added two new features already available worldwide: the reactions and increased file sharing size limit.

For the increased file sharing size limit, users will now be able to send files up to 2GB in size at once on WhatsApp, which is a massive jump from the previous limit of 100MB.

Since April, the feature has been in beta, and it is finally rolling out to users. Meanwhile, reactions allow users to respond directly to messages on the platform with six emojis, although that number may increase in the future without crowding the chat with individual replies.

WhatsApp Reactions

According to 9to5Mac, users will be able to react with six different emojis on the platform: laughing face, red heart, surprised face, thumbs up, teary face, and hands together.

WhatsApp also posted how to use the feature in its FAQ on the website.

To use the feature, just long-press on a message and choose one of the displayed emojis. Just like Instagram, users can change their reactions to a different one by long-pressing the same messages and changing the emoji or just clicking on the same one to remove it.

WhatsApp also notes a few things about the Reaction feature. Users can only add one reaction per message, and it disappears when the messages disappear.

Also, users will not be able to hide the reactions or the reaction counts. The recipients might see the reaction before you remove it or if removing it was not successful.