For many years, Whatsapp has being the go-to app private messages, for groups, almost replacing MMS messaging, but Meta is planning to introduce two major new features which makes me feel that Mark is at it again.
One of the two new features to be introduced to Whatsapp is called communities which is a coming-together of different groups to become one.
Each community member will be able to see updates from admins. its basically a way to form a bigger group.
The second one is the ability to send large files. The size limit of files that can shared via Whatsapp will be increased to 2GB.
But wait, I’ve seen these two features on a certain app, yes, its called Telegram, which has become a go-to app for pirated apps, music, and movies (why did i admit that!).
This isn’t the first time Whatsapp (or Meta) is copying a feature from another app, as they did so in 2017, with the status update which disappears after 24 hours. In case you didn’t know, that feature was copied from Snapchat.
Or take YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, or Snapchat Spotlight for another example, these features which are basically a clone of the short video app, Tiktok.
Most times companies do this due to insecurities, for example Google probably thought that Tiktok would over throw YouTube as the most popular video app in the nearest future.
In most cases, implementations like this end up in the dark i.e it doesn’t over throw an existing competitor.
Remember when signal was created as a Whatsapp clone when the former Whatsapp owners were kicked out of the company. The Signal app never took off.
