If you live in a region where WhatsApp is the primary messaging app, you’ll realize that the chat list can get crowded pretty quickly. This is particularly true today with businesses joining the platform to touch base with their customers (although it’s largely just spam). Makers of WhatsApp understood way back in 2017 that the ability to pin your favorite conversations to the top of the chat list should be a thing, but restricted users to just three chats. Nearly seven years have passed since, and WhatsApp is finally getting around to letting users pin two additional conversations, according to the app’s latest beta for Android.
As reported by the eagle-eyed WhatsApp sleuths over at WABetaInfo, WhatsApp beta version 2.24.6.13 lets app users pin up to five chats at a time. The publication speculates that WhatsApp could increase the cap on pinned chats even further, but there’s currently no evidence of the Meta-owned app working on this.
Unfortunately, the ability to pin up to five chats is not widely available, even if you’ve installed version 2.24.6.13 of WhatsApp beta for Android. So this feature could still be some distance away from the stable channel. Pinning chats to the top of the list isn’t too dissimilar from the Channel pinning feature, which was also spotted in beta last month. However, channel pinning has yet to make its broader appearance across platforms.
Pinning more than three conversations at a time is a godsend for someone with an unorganized chat list. It gives you instant access to your favorite people or groups as soon as you open the app. In an ideal world, there shouldn’t be a limit on the number of chats that can be pinned, but we don’t see that happening anytime soon.
It’s worth noting that chat pinning is quite different from the message-pinning feature that lets you pin individual messages inside a chat. We first saw this in development back in October 2023, but it has since made it to the stable version across WhatsApp’s Android and iOS versions.
Individual messages can be pinned in both 1-1 and group chats, where the admins have control over who gets to pin a message. This process makes it easier to highlight the most important message in an individual or group chat. The one key limitation with message pinning is that users can only pin one message at a time.
Maybe if we start telling people the brain is an app they will start using it!
