WhatsApp, the widely used messaging and calling app with billions of users, has announced the addition of a new feature. It now allows users to share their phone screen during video calls. Screen-sharing will let a host share the content displayed on their screen with others, making it a useful tool for office meetings, etc.
“We’re adding the ability to share your screen during video calls to WhatsApp,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new update via his Facebook account. The latest move by WhatsApp can give a tough competition to popular video calling apps like Google Meet and Zoom as it is one of the important features for group meetings.
With screen-sharing capabilities, WhatsApp is making it easier for users to collaborate on documents, display presentations, and more. Moreover, now anyone will be able to provide technical support to their family and friends easily. For example, if your parents need to update something in their phone’s settings, you can help them do so using WhatsApp’s video call screen-sharing feature. Users will have full control over the screen-sharing feature, which is typical with any other video conferencing app. This means that users can stop sharing content on the screen whenever they want.
To use this feature, users can simply click on the ‘Share’ icon during a video call and then choose between sharing a specific application or the entire screen. Currently, WhatsApp supports video calls with up to 32 participants, which means that small meetings can be easily organized on this messaging app.
The screen-sharing option was earlier available to beta testers and now, it is being made available to all users. The update is being rolled out gradually, so it may take a few days to reach everyone. It is worth mentioning that WhatsApp has recently added big features like chat lock, edit button, HD photo quality update.
The chat lock feature of WhatsApp is quite self-explanatory. People will be able to lock their super personal chats, so that even if you hand over your phone to someone else, no one can access them. The good news is that the new feature automatically hides the content of that chat in notifications as well, thus protecting your privacy.
The edit button feature of the app gives users 15 minutes to edit the wrong message sent to someone. This is a very useful feature as now one will not need to delete entire messages as the edit button will let you correct those sentences or words which you feel were not correct initially.