WhatsApp rolling out animated avatar feature on iOS beta

Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp is rolling out an animated avatar feature on iOS beta

San Francisco: Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp is rolling out an animated avatar feature on iOS beta.

Users have to open the keyboard and select the avatar tab to check whether the feature is enabled for their account, reports WABetainfo. Beta users will then see some animations for certain avatars.

---

Users can share the animated avatars with anyone as it is not required to use the beta version to be able to receive them. “In addition, only a limited number of stickers are animated, but we expect that WhatsApp may offer an animated version of the entire avatar pack over time,” the report said.

The animated avatars are expected to bring more life and personality to stickers, allowing for a better communication experience. The animated avatar feature is currently available to some beta testers that install the latest update of WhatsApp beta for iOS from the TestFlight app, and will roll out to more users over the coming days.

Last month, the messaging platform had widely rolled out landscape mode support for video calls and silence unknown callers option, on iOS. The platform also released the ability to natively transfer full account history when switching to a new device.

Redesigned sticker tray with improved navigation and a larger set of stickers including more Avatars were also rolled out. It was also reported that the company released a feature on iOS beta, which allows users to send high-quality videos.

While this feature preserves video dimensions, minor compression will still be applied to the video, thus sending videos in their original quality is not possible. The default option will always be ‘Standard quality’ for all videos, therefore, users have to select the high-quality option every time they want to send a video with better quality.