WhatsApp is undoubtedly the largest chatting platform but lags behind other chatting platforms in terms of functionality. It has tried to keep up with the dynamic chat apps industry by releasing a slew of updates and it is good they are not slacking.
Chat apps usually don’t have basic formatting tools that we have on Microsoft Word or on a WordPress backend. These simple formatting tools are bold, italics, underline, bullets and strikethrough.
It seems that will change thanks to what Android Police‘s discovery in a specific release of WhatsApp for Android. In version 2.12.535 which you can download on APK Mirror, it is possible to bold or italicize texts when chatting.
There is no formatting tool like what you see on word processors but there is a hack to that. In this particular WhatsApp version, you only need to add the word you need to bold in between asterisks and in between underscores to italicize it. AP tried other text formatting options like strikethrough where you add the word in between hyphens but that didn’t work. I downloaded the apk and installed on my phone but it crashed so maybe it was only optimised for certain Android devices.
The other update is on document sharing where it is now possible to attach documents from Google Drive. When you tap on the attach button, then documents, it now opens the Android file manager where a swipe on the left reveals the option to attach documents (still PDF) on Google Drive.
This is not the first time we see WhatsApp trying out a feature in beta releases before releasing the update to the general public. We saw that with the Google Drive integration to save chats to the cloud which was released way much later to everyone. Also, this update comes after the latest update to WhatsApp where you can send documents to other people but only PDFs for now. It is a rather cool update to add emphasis to certain words and we hope it rolls out soon.
