WhatsApp is one of the hottest instant messaging apps around, but we often lament the lack of feature parity across platforms and how it often trails behind rival apps like Telegram and Signal, even in terms of core features. For years now, WhatsApp has allowed pinning up to three conversations in the Chats tab, and one message in each conversation. The Meta-owned platform upped the pinning limit to five conversations, and now, there’s word the in-conversation message pinning limit is going up as well.
WhatsApp introduced conversation pining support way back in 2017, and users have been able to pin only three conversations ever since. Just yesterday, beta testers reported the limit could soon swell to five conversations, giving every user more flexibility and convenience, especially if they use WhatsApp a lot. Message pinning within a conversation is a relatively newer addition, introduced last year.
By design, WhatsApp only allows pinning one message per conversation, ephemerally. When you pin a message, you’re asked to choose a duration — 24 hours, seven days, or 30 days. While permanent pins aren’t on the horizon, the sleuths at WABetaInfo observed that multi-message pinning is now rolling out to a few beta testers. The new limit allows you to pin up to three messages per conversation. More testers should get their hands on the feature soon.
Support for pinning multiple messages, even ephemerally, would be a big step up for WhatsApp, because rivals like Discord already allow multiple pins, indefinitely. That’s a great way to define rules for interactions in a channel, and with WhatsApp fostering Communities and Channels now, multi-message pinning is the need of the hour. It would be even better if WhatsApp introduced indefinite pinning, too. There’s no word on availability in the stable channel, though. So, you’ll have to replace the existing pinned message every time you want to append another message to the conversation for quick access.
While pinned messages are visible to all the participants in a conversation, there’s a neat little workaround if you only want to earmark messages for your convenience. Long-pressing any message also presents the option of starring it, which isn’t limited, like message pinning. What’s more, you can view starred messages for each conversation separately, or just see all your starred messages (from all chats) in one place.
Maybe if we start telling people the brain is an app they will start using it!
