Chat applications are very popular. There’s no denying that fact. It’s one of the reasons why everyone is positioning themselves for a share of the pie. Be it some startup in mainland China or another one in the heart of Silicon Valley with a seemingly endless pool of funds from investors who see the future, they are everywhere and they are making traditional players like mobile operators uneasy. Family Whatsapp groups, office Whatsapp groups, a funeral committee Whatsapp group, a college class Whatsapp group… these things are happening. So much that leaving a Whatsapp group is everyone’s nightmare since all members of the group are notified and you risk being singled out as a snob. Who knew it would be such a big headache after the blue ticks debacle last year?
Anyway, if you’re stuck in one of those annoying groups, Whatsapp is not anywhere near helping you. That feature you’re interested in isn’t part of the new features being rolled out at the moment. The big one is app-wide search. To enable you to get to specific chats faster.
Hitting the search button in the application usually means one of two things, searching for specific contacts or groups. Inside a particular chat/conversation, searching for any specific term has been possible all along but with the new update, that expands to include all your conversations.
App-wide search is just one of the many features that Whatsapp has been introducing over the last couple of months. We’ve seen Whatsapp unexpectedly release a Material Design interface on Android as well as the ability to make voice calls on various platforms starting with Android then iOS and lately, Windows Phone. App-wide search has already been available on the iOS version of Whatsapp. Whatsapp’s distant rival, Telegram, has universal search across all platforms but it is not any better than what you’ll get on something like say Slack.
