You ever looked at your WhatsApp and thought, “It’s nice but I just wish it was a little more… me”. If you have then you’ve no doubt already experimented with WhatsApp’s very limited range of wallpaper options. Sure, you can set a custom wallpaper for your chat screen but you can’t do much else. It sort of awkwardly fits into a chat window, remains the same for every chat and just doesn’t look all that great most of the time. While it’s certainly not a necessary improvement, it’s nice to know that WhatsApp is in the process of overhauling the wallpaper options with a much wider range of customisation options. Clearly the company is doubling down on its user experience as this comes just a few weeks after an overhauled storage menu was revealed.
According to information pulled from WABetaInfo (because who else are you gonna turn to when it comes to upcoming WhatsApp features?) the Facebook owned instant messaging app is looking at rolling out an update to iOS beta users that would fundamentally improve the wallpaper settings options. The feature itself is just named Advanced Wallpaper Feature and is currently enabled for all beta users… if you’re on iOS that is.
Wallpaper or plastic?
So what can users expect from the Advanced Wallpaper Feature? Well, perhaps the biggest addition that most people will enjoy is the capability to set different wallpapers for different contacts and chat groups. So the group you share with all your… drinking buddies, I guess, could have the picture of a beer. Or the group with your golf friends could have a putting green! I don’t know, what do people with several groups of friends do with such little time?
Once you enter your settings and select “Wallpaper and Sound” you can set the wallpaper and then tweak aspects like it’s opacity. If you don’t fancy using a picture from your gallery you can choose from 32 bright wallpapers, 30 dark wallpapers and a range of solid colours if you’re really that boring of an individual. There’s also a wallpaper archive with all the old wallpapers if you prefer to keep things old school.
If you’re incredibly passionate about WhatsApp’s doodle that it uses as the default pattern on chats, you can choose to apply it to one of the solid colour settings so you’ll at least have something interesting the back of all your chats.
In terms of a release date for the Advanced Wallpaper Feature, we don’t have a clue yet. It’s been released for folks involved in the beta build of the app on iOS today so I think it’s safe to bet that the final update can be expected in roughly a week on the App Store. When it hits Android devices is anyone’s guess.
(Source: WABetaInfo)