WhatsApp rolls out emoji reactions, bigger groups

San Francisco: With an aim to make the messaging platform more user friendly, Meta-owned WhatsApp has announced that it is rolling out new features, including emoji reactions, bigger files and groups.

The company said that it is slowly rolling out the ability to add up to 512 people to a group, which, till now, allowed to add only up to 256.

"We are excited to share that emoji reactions are now available on the latest version of the app. Reactions are fun, fast, and they reduce overload in groups too. We will continue improving them by adding an even broader range of expressions in the future," the company said in a blogpost.

"In addition, you can now send files within WhatsApp up to 2GB in size at a time, protected by end-to-end encryption. This is an increase from the previous limit of 100MB and we think will be helpful for collaboration among small businesses and school groups," it added.

WhatsApp said it recommends using WiFi for larger files and it will display a counter while uploading or downloading to let users know how long your transfer will take.

A recent report said that WhatsApp is likely working on the ability to view status updates right within the chats list in a future update of the app.

This feature is under development so it has not been rolled out to beta testers yet.