We are nine days into the new year and apart from CES that took place in Las Vagas last week, not a whole lot has happened. That could be a boon or a curse depending on your outlook. We’d like to think that’s because everyone is saving the good stuff for later in the year.

WhatsApp is generally one of the companies that pump out updates fairly regularly. Whether the updates are any good kinda depends on what’s being updated. But since over two billion people use the app every day, we thought we’d take a look at the notable features with an intended 2023 release with some help from the folks at WABetaInfo.

Just keep in mind that the updates released to WhatsApp’s beta channel are subject to change without much notice. So, until you see the update on your device, nothing is guaranteed.

Good luck, I’m behind seven proxies

Of the roughly two billion WhatsApp users in the world, we’re sure many have at one point had their connection to the service shut down by their government. This is usually not due to scheduled maintenance but rather because their government take the idea of ‘democracy’ with a pinch of salt.

To that effect, WhatsApp has already launched proxy support to help people in those countries circumvent a government-imposed internet outage. You can read more about this one as well as how to set it up here.

Wait. That’s illegal

The WhatsApp update team has already made it possible for some users to view their contacts’ status updates from your chat tab instead of having to go to the ‘status’ tab and view them there.

But as an internet user you will probably already know that when there is a new feature, there are people out there who will abuse it. Sometimes for no reason other than they are bored.

To combat that, WhatsApp is working on a way to report offenders who violate its terms of service. It isn’t possible to do so yet as the feature is still in development but hopefully this one is in the priority queue and we won’t have to wait for something bad to happen before it rolls out later this year.

Altogether now…

Desktop users shouldn’t feel left out. Work continues on the desktop app with the next update aiming to make it possible to select several chats at once and perform a single action that applies to all chats selected.

Maybe you’ve been added to one too many new group chats and need to mute three of them. When this update rolls out – hopefully later this year – you’ll only need to do that once instead of selecting and muting each chat individually. For now, the feature is still in development so you’ll have to sit tight.

Moving the sacred texts

If you’ve ever had to switch between smartphones more than the usual once every two or three years, you’ll know that keeping your WhatsApp chat history up to date isn’t as pain-free as you’d think. Back in 2021, Google released its Data Migration Tool to make switching from iOS to Android a breeze. This included your WhatsApp chat history and any media therein.

Then about a year later, in June last year, WhatsApp took matters into its own hands and provided users with the ability to move their WhatsApp data (including chat history and media) between Android and iOS more freely while still adhering to its end-to-end encryption.

The next procedural step in this story is allowing users to move their WhatsApp data to a different device on the same platform. We would think that should be slightly easier than between devices on different platforms but apparently not.

The proposed update, which is currently under development and not available for testing yet, will supposedly allow Android WhatsApp users the ability to transfer their chat history to another Android device without the need to run a manual backup to Google Drive first.

It’s only the second week of the year but we at Stuff are already looking forward to the day when transferring chat history between Android devices without the prerequisite Google Drive backup is possible.

If any major updates happen between now and then, we guess that’s also okay.