About a month ago, XDA discovered clues within the WhatsApp APK for Android that revealed a mysterious function called communities. Now WaBetaInfo has published the first images of what these WhatsApp communities will be like.
According to WaBetaInfo, WhatsApp communities are still very green, but their current status suggests that they will be a way to group groups, in a similar way to how the sub-forums of a forum or the channels of an IRC server, Discord, Slack and the like work.
The groups, grouped
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Until now, what we knew about the WhasApp communities was limited to a string of text strings included in the latest versions of the Android application, as they could find out on XDA. This first approximation indicated that the communities seemed to be closely related to groups.
We speculated then that the communities could include groups within them or that the groups could integrate communities, and now WaBetaInfo has spoken, confirming the first: a community can contain different groups within it. Visually, in their current state of development, the communities are practically identical to the groups, except for their name and their icon, square.
A community in its current state, on WhatsApp for iOS
The idea of these communities is that they can include different groups within them. For example, an Engadget Android community could have a group to discuss Android mobiles and another to talk about applications. Same user community, different topics of conversation.
The logical thing would be that in the future WhatsApp would integrate more tools to facilitate this grouping of groups, such as the fact that users of the same community can access all the groups that comprise it. According to WaBetaInfo, at the moment there is not much news in this regard, although it could always come later.
At the moment, this first version in development of the communities appears to be a “copy and paste” of the groups changing the name to community. In other words, each community supposes a end-to-end encrypted group chat and you can invite someone to join via a link or QR Code. As in groups.
It is the first time that we can see the interface of these communities in a very early version, so there are still several unknowns, including how they will be displayed to users.groups within a community. We will know more about it in the coming weeks almost certainly.
Via | WaBetaInfo
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The news
More details of WhatsApp communities: they will be groups of groups, according to WaBetaInfo
was originally published in
Engadget Android
by
Ivan Ramirez
.
