WhatsApp is the most widely used cross platform instant messaging service in the world. Recently it has been in the news a lot, primarily due to the fact that Facebook decided to acquire it for an eye watering $19 billion. The acquisition doesn’t mean that WhatsApp brand will cease to exist, in fact there are a lot of exciting things planned for the future. For now, a new WhatsApp Android update has been released, it brings a host of new privacy features and also allows people to pay for their friends’ WhatsApp subscriptions.
Bumping the version number up to 2.11.186, the new WhatsApp Android update contains additional privacy settings for profile photo, status and last seen. It adds a camera shortcut to send photos quickly, adds large video thumbnails in chat and also comes with the ability on show unread messages on a home screen widget though the feature requires Android 3.0 or higher.
An interesting new feature in this update is the ability to pay for someone else’s WhatsApp subscription. The service is free for the first year then users are required to pay $0.99 per year. People using WhatsApp on Android can pay for anyone’s subscription, it doesn’t matter if they’re using WhatsApp on iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone or Android. The updated app is live now, and as always, is a free download from Google Play Store.