WhatsApp is one of the largest chatting platforms in the world with over a billion monthly active users and yet it lacks some features that are present in other chatting platforms like video calling, large file sharing and the likes. Its popularity and the glaring lack of some features has made people compare it with its sister app, Facebook Messenger and its rival Telegram Messenger.
It seems the company has enabled a rather basic function on chat apps thanks to its latest update where you can now send documents to each other. However, it is not as advanced as you as you can only send PDFs which is rather disappointing.
When you type on the attachment icon, it reveals the document icon which when tapped allows you to attach documents. Oddly, there is no file manager which will allow you to look for the specific PDF to send but there is a menu button on the top right to sort the documents by date or time. In the WhatsApp version that I have pre-installed (ver. 2.12.491), I was not able to attach and send a PDF directly to a contact via the feature but I was able to share a PDF thanks to a file manager. However in some slightly earlier versions (v2.12.453), you are able to see the documents on your phone in the documents tab for easy sharing. I tried sending a Word or Excel file and clearly the document files were not supported.
WhatsApp usually has a file limit of 16 MB and it could apply to PDFs and although this is a step in the right direction for the company, it is still disappointing document sharing is not as advanced as the one we have on Telegram Messenger
