With more than 1.4 billion monthly active users, WhatsApp is by far the most versatile messaging app in the world. However, with rivals such as Signal, Telegram, Snapchat increasing their market share, it has become necessary for the Facebook-owned company to bring new features to improve the user experience.
In early 2015, WhatsApp launched the web app, which offered a seamless transition from mobile to PC for chatting. But, it had one pain point and that is the phone's cellular connectivity has to be active or else, it won't function. But, this will be a thing of the past.
Now, community forum WABetaInfo, which has a pretty good track record of predicting new features, has claimed WhatsApp is testing a new UWP (Universal Web Platform) app that can work independently without active cellular connectivity on phone.
This will greatly help professional users to communicate with their colleagues on the workgroup chat session.
There is no word when this new UWP WhatsApp app goes live, but will likely to happen in coming months.
In a related development, WhatsApp has confirmed that it is all set to bring Payments feature to debut in India.
Recently, Facebook-owned company completed the localisation of the data center to store user transactions details in India, as per the orders of Reserve Bank of India.
WhatsApp has been beta testing payments feature with select public testers for a little over a year and now, it is being tested with a select group of enterprises.
If all things go as planned, WhatsApp payments may go live before the end of 2019 in India. It will compete with PayTM, Google Pay, Phone Pe, Samsung Pay, among others.
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