WhatsApp announces new chat themes and enhanced group features

WhatsApp is rolling out a series of updates aimed at enhancing user personalization, group coordination, and platform transparency.

For Android users, the company is testing new chat themes categorized into ‘Featured’ (slow-moving animated wallpapers), ‘Doodle’ (classic patterns), and ‘Minimal’ (clean designs). These themes include chat bubbles that automatically adjust their colors to match the selected aesthetic. Additionally, WhatsApp is introducing mandatory AI labeling for channel content to increase transparency regarding artificial intelligence-generated media.

Group chat functionality is also being expanded with new tools to improve communication. These include enhanced polling capabilities—such as setting expiration times, hiding voter identities, and editing questions—as well as an ‘@all’ mention feature to notify all members of urgent updates. Users can also now create new groups directly from existing ones to facilitate specific sub-discussions.

For the WhatsApp Web version, several major features are becoming available, including the ability to start audio and video calls directly from a browser. Other technical improvements include a ‘call transfer’ feature to move active calls between devices, a virtual waiting room for call hosts to manage participants, ‘QuickHD’ for improved video quality, and background noise suppression.