In a clear and obvious attempt to compete with who is becoming a powerful rival, Snapchat, the Facebook-owned instant messaging service that is the most popular and used in the world, WhatsApp, announced a new feature called Status o States which is essentially nothing more than a version of "Snapchat Stories" to which full encryption has been added.
The novelty generated a great stir, to the point that WhatsApp has had to announce that traditional text states will return back to the appYes, they will have to live with the new Snapchat style states.
WhatsApp will have statuses for all tastes
Since the launch of WhatsApp, in February 2009, users had the ability to set a status in text format that by default read "Hey there! I'm using WhatsApp », but it could be personalized with any text, also including emoji characters. However, last month this "traditional state" was replaced by an alternative similar to "Snapchat Stories."
This new feature was deployed as an update both in the version of WhatsApp for Android and in the corresponding versions of the service for iOS devices and Windows Phone. The new "States" add much more functionality than plain text; just like Snapchat stories, WhatsApp's enhanced status feature allows users to share photos and videos with friends, and those images will disappear after a short period of time. However, unlike Snapchat Stories, the WhatsApp team claims that any content shared on the Status tab is "end-to-end encrypted," potentially attracting more security-conscious users.
This is not the first "clone" of Snapchat Stories. Previously, last year, another application owned by Facebook, Instagram, launched Instagram Stories. Apparently, in Mark Zuckerberg's company they have lost the freshness of imagination and originality and, despite having the largest social network in the world and the largest instant messaging service in the world, they have chosen to directly copy what they it works in competition. And the truth is that the play seems that they would be going well because the launch of "Instagram Stories" would have affected the evolution and growth of Snapchat as a whole. According to its latest earnings release, the company showed that its growth rate had gone from 17,2 percent in the second quarter of 2016 to a growth rate of only 3,2 percent during the fourth quarter of the year. , right after the Instagram Stories feature had been launched.
With this experience behind it, now this new feature of WhatsApp Status could also affect the growth of Snapchat in the future, which would obviously not be any good news for the 'ghost' app and its financial performance.
In any case, the suppression of the traditional text states in WhatsApp did not sit well with the users in such a way that, in the face of the allusion of complaints, The company has announced that it will reintroduce the text-based status feature.
In a statement to TechCrunch, WhatsApp stated: “We have heard from our users that people were unable to set a persistent text-only update on their profile, so we have integrated this feature in the“ About ”section of the profile settings. The update will now appear next to the profile names anytime you view your contacts, such as when creating a new chat or viewing group information. »
The update would be being deployed at the moment, so it is only a matter of time before we have it available again on our smartphones.
By the way, are you a WhatsApp user? And also from Snapchat? Do you think the introduction of the new WhatsApp statuses will prevent you from using Snapchat in the future?
