Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has personally announced an important improvement for WhatsApp, the messenger belonging to Meta, on his Facebook profile: You can now filter your chats.
The new WhatsApp filters are located above the chat view so you can’t miss them (see the image accompanying this report, which we created on an Android smartphone). There are now three tabs there: “All”, “Unread” and “Groups” and it makes using WhatsApp more akin to the different folders you likely have in your email inbox.
Under “All” you will find all your chat messages as usual, this is the default view for all your messages. “Unread” only shows the messages that have not yet been opened or that you have marked as unread, so you won’t miss any messages.
And under “Groups” you will only find your group chats, so they are now all summarised in one place.
The purpose of the new filter function is obvious. It should make it easier for you to find messages. WhatsApp has already provided a filter function for unread messages. However, this was relatively inconspicuous and there was no filter for displaying only group chats.
The news portal WABetainfo, which specialises in innovations in WhatsApp, describes the new feature as follows:
‘In reality, users could already filter their chats by showing those that contained unread messages, but WhatsApp is now improving this feature with a special filter at the top of the list of our conversations. The ability to filter group chats is probably the best filter that users have been eagerly waiting for. It allows them to quickly access their group chats and manage them more efficiently. These filters were initially available to beta testers and have now been released to all users so that everyone can take advantage of this feature.
WABetainfo
According to WABetainfo, WhatsApp users have been asking for this filter function for years.
Who can use the new filter function?
WhatsApp is now rolling out the new filter function to all users of WhatsApp for Android and iOS.
The prerequisite is that you have the latest WhatsApp version installed. However, the new filters are not yet available on some of our smartphones. WhatsApp says that it will gradually roll out the new feature over the next few weeks. So if you don’t see the new chat filters yet, just be patient.
This story originally appeared on PCWelt.