Popular Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp received a handful of new feature additions today, along with the global rollout of its new Communities feature.
Communities is designed to allow people to bring together separate groups under a single umbrella, providing users with a way to receive updates that are sent to an entire community, and then organize smaller discussion groups on important topics.
An example use case could be school parents creating an overarching "School" community, which breaks out into smaller groups based on grade and other factors. WhatsApp first started testing Communities in April, and now they're gradually rolling out worldwide.
The encrypted chat platform has also gained in-chat polls, something that has been in beta testing since March. Users are now able to ask a poll question and group members can choose from pre-defined answers. Like chats, polls are end-to-end encrypted, meaning only people in the group can see the poll and the results.
In addition, video calls can now have up to 32 participants, and the maximum group size has been doubled from 512 to 1024 users.
WhatsApp has worked to improve the group chat experience over the last few years in an effort to keep up with competing platforms, introducing group descriptions, a catch-up feature, a one-way messaging option, and protection for users who are being added repeatedly to groups they've left.
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Last year, Apple launched CarPlay Ultra, the long-awaited next-generation version of its CarPlay software system for vehicles. Nearly nine months later, CarPlay Ultra is still limited to Aston Martin's latest luxury vehicles, but that should change fairly soon.
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In his Powe...
Thursday January 29, 2026 10:07 am PST by Joe Rossignol
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Q.ai has...
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Apple is planning to launch new MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips alongside macOS 26.3, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
"Apple's faster MacBook Pros are planned for the macOS 26.3 release cycle," wrote Gurman, in his Power On newsletter today.
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Don't touch Metaverse products with a barge pole if you value any kind of privacy.
Are iCloud Messages even encrypted? I thought Apple has a key for iCloud backup.
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I still need WhatsApp since it’s simply more feature rich then iMessage and the storage management of iMessage drives me up the wall but I still continue to give it a chance. iMessage still has a long way to go and I don’t care about Memoji. First think I turned off
