Features hidden in WhatsApp

WhatsApp is one of the most popular communication services on the market and will most likely continue to thrive, despite the recent scandal about its end-to-end encryption system. Even though many of you have been using the app for a while, there may still be quite a few useful feature that you haven't found just yet. This is why, I've decided to write a short article and show you some interesting features hidden in the Android version of WhatsApp.

Personalized notifications

Let's start things off with something very simple: custom notifications. Instead of having your phone play the same WhatsApp notification sound for all of your contacts, you can choose custom ones and be able to tell who's trying to reach you without actually looking at your phone. Simply go to a chat thread with the person who should have a custom notification, then open the menu and select Contact Info --> Custom Notifications. Choosing personalized sounds for all your contacts sounds like a waste time, but using them for those few special people in your life could be quite useful.

Read receipt

While the read receipt that appears as soon as you open a message can be quite useful, it also takes away your plausible deniability. If you don't want others to see when you read their messages, open WhatsApp's settings, then go to Account --> Privacy and make sure that the box named Read Receipts doesn't have a check mark next to it. Warning: this setting won't work for group chats and it will also take away your ability to see when other read the messages that you sent.

Message details

Another thing that could come in very handy is getting additional details about a specific message that you received like the time when it was sent or the time when it was read. All you have to do is to long tap the message that you're interested in, then press the info icon from the upper side of the screen and you'll see the additional details.

Quick formatting

In case you didn't know, you can easily add formatting option to the text that you're writing. Writing something between asterisks like *enter your text here* will bold it. Additionally, using underscores (_) before and after will italicize your text, while placing the tilde (~) symbol at the beginning and at the end will let you strikethrough the text.

Silence please

Lastly, you can very easily mute a specific conversation or a group chat, so in case you're at a movie or in church, you don't get bothered by your chatty friends. All you have to do is to go to the chat that you want to mute, long press it, then tap the crossed-out speaker icon and select the desired amount of time. WhatsApp lets you choose a period between 8 hours and 1 year, but you can manually unmute at any time.

Now that you've seen some of the features hidden in WhatsApp, you may also want to read some of our stories related to this topic like: "Learn to take control of your privacy when using WhatsApp" or "6 WhatsApp features you probably didn't know about".