How to make the most of WhatsApp

Twenty years ago, text messaging resembled a brave new frontier in terms of digital communications.

Yet it didn’t take long for mobile phones to become smart, at which point messaging quickly evolved into more sophisticated variants than the humble SMS was capable of.

In a crowded messaging app market, WhatsApp reigns supreme, having long since outgrown its iOS-only origins to become the world’s most popular mobile messaging service.

More than three billion people use WhatsApp every month, with 100 billion messages sent each and every day.

Yet there’s far more to this Facebook-owned communications tool than one-to-one messaging.

Here’s how to make the most of WhatsApp.

Putting the fun into functions

The vast majority of users will never venture far beyond sending direct messages to individuals, or the occasional group chat with family, friends and colleagues.

WhatsApp is highly proficient as a basic messaging utility, with its two-blue-tick message status having been copied by many other platforms – including text messaging utilities.

However, WhatsApp can go further – such as turning off those blue ticks in the interests of maximising personal privacy.

It’s possible to send someone a WhatsApp message without adding them to your phone’s contacts simply by pasting a particular web address into a browser bar.

(In the interests of discouraging spam communications, we won’t publish the address in question here, but it’s helpful to know non-contacts are reachable in an emergency).

Continuing the theme of reaching people in an emergency, the Share Live Location option displays your current location for anywhere between 15 minutes or eight hours.

If you’ve ever felt the panic rising when your child wasn’t at a designated collection point, or your friends suddenly disappeared on a night out, the appeal of this What3Words-style service will be obvious.

Being unable to find a message is a far less terrifying prospect, but it’s possible to eliminate that risk as well by saving messages with a star icon, to be viewed at any point in the future.

Make the most of WhatsApp messages

WhatsApp messages can self-delete after seven days courtesy of the Disappearing Messages function in both direct and group chats (though in the latter case, the Group Admin has to engage them).

They can also be deleted as soon as they’ve been read, or within one hour of being sent, irrespective of whether they’ve been viewed by that point.

Although there’s very little word processing functionality, it’s possible to bold, italicise or strikethrough text by respectively placing the * _ or ~ symbols before and after selected text.

And while WhatsApp automatically compresses images to save space (and expedite delivery), you can send full-size originals by using the Document function instead of Gallery.

Another visual tweak involves deploying Dark Mode, which is a theme many apps and utilities offer. It creates a more soothing visual colour palette, especially at night.

And few things are more visual than videos, which may be shared from your device’s storage or recorded live through the app in full HD.

Similarly, in-app voice messages represent a time-saving tool if there’s a lot to say, while listeners have the option to slow down or speed up the rate of playback.

Finally, you can customise outgoing messages with animated emojis, cartoonish stickers or almost 3,800 static emojis.

We’ve come a long way from the days when :-) was viewed as an advanced form of communicating…