Newsletters coming to WhatsApp

WABetaInfo Enthusiasts discovered in the beta version of WhatsApp for Android, a mention of the upcoming support for newsletters. Along with earlier running communities, this will expand the capabilities of the application and take it further away from classic messengers.

In beta, the feature is called "Newsletter", but that may well be a temporary or code name. There is a chance that the function will be called something else on release.

Such mailings will allow you to share information with a large number of users, but due to the one-way nature of the sending, they will not support end-to-end encryption. To protect the identity of writers and subscribers of newsletters, their phone numbers and profile information will be hidden by default.

Judging by the hints that the authors of WABetaInfo noticed in the code, mailing list management will be available in the "Status" tab. The function will be optional: if desired, it can be disabled. Support for mailing lists does not affect the end-to-end encryption of ordinary private chats, so you won’t have to sacrifice the protection of correspondence for the sake of news.

It does not seem that the mailings will be in the format of social networks: there are no hints of a comment system or the ability to see what a person is subscribed to in the code. There is also no ad block support. Also, the user will have full control over what content and from which authors he receives.

It is not yet known when the newsletters will become available to users of the stable version of WhatsApp: for now, they cannot be tested even in beta.