A microphone and an ellipsis will appear on your WhatsApp… if they haven’t already.
WhatsApp is changing forever with the arrival of two new icons that join the existing ones such as the flag icon , the lock icon or the waves icon . These new ones come to replace a very useful indicator that has been in the Meta app for many years.
It is important to know when each of them will appear: this pair of icons cannot be pressed, nor do they take us to a WhatsApp function. Therefore, and despite being merely informative, they are more important than they may seem. We show them to you and tell you what their meaning is .
Goodbye to “Writing…”. WhatsApp changes a traditional aspect of its app forever
We say goodbye to a traditional WhatsApp indicator , which has been giving us relevant information for years: the goodbye to “Typing…” is total, this change first arrived in beta and is spreading to the mobile phones of the rest of users.
Until now, when we were exchanging messages with our contacts, we saw a small indicator under the name of said contact. This signal, or whatever we wanted to call it, indicated that the user on the other side of the chat was writing a message.
Conversely, it appeared to our contacts when we were composing a message in the app’s text field. And it behaved great, although WhatsApp has thought that an icon is a better solution to indicate to the user that they will soon receive a message.
It’s not the only one that disappears : when we send or receive voice notes, a note also appears showing that an audio clip is being recorded. Both texts give way to icons, or rather they replace them but now appear elsewhere on our mobile screen.
While the text indicators are present just below the name of the contact we are chatting with, these new icons are less intrusive : you will see them in the chat itself, below the last message and where the next one will appear. And yes, the two icons allow us to anticipate what is coming:
- Ellipsis icon : Your contact is typing a message.
- Microphone icon : You will receive a WhatsApp audio or voice note.
As we mentioned at the beginning, clicking on them does not produce any effect , they are simply informative. That does not mean that they are not useful, as the old textual indicators were, and now in icon form they are more intuitive.