WhatsApp, in the past couple of weeks has rolled out a bunch of new features to help people amid the lockdown enforced in countries across the globe in light of the COVID-19 outbreak. The company, among other things, has also imposed strict limitations on forwarded messages in a bid to contain the spread of misinformation about the virus outbreak. Now, WhatsApp has increased the limit of participants in group video calls but now it is all set to roll out the new limit of participants.
The new beta versions support up to eight participants in a group video or voice call, doubling the number of participants from four earlier.
The instant messaging app(WhatsApp) was recently reported to be working on increasing the group calling limit to stay relevant in these times of social distancing.
WhatsApp also looks to take on other popular video conferencing apps like Zoom and Google Duo with this new increased limit as businesses and classrooms deal with lockdowns.
Up to eight participants can now join a WhatsApp group voice or video call, reports WhatsApp feature tracker WABetaInfo. This increased limit is rolling out to users on WhatsApp v2.20.133 beta for Android and WhatsApp v2.20.50.25 beta for iPhone. WhatsApp is enabling this feature for beta users on both the platforms, and it indicates that the feature should roll out soon on the stable version as well.
The WhatsApp features tracker says that users will have to be on the latest beta versions in order to be able to create a call with up to eight participants. If you have already updated you don’t see the feature, you can also try and back up your chat history and reinstall WhatsApp to get the most updated configurations from the server.
However, If there are more than eight participants in a group, WhatsApp will ask users, which participants they want to connect to, whereas if there are fewer than eight participants, the app will connect to all the participants at once. To call people in a group, all users need to do is open the group and tap on the call button. Group participants that aren’t saved in your address book won’t be added in the call.
