The family group, the class group, the diwaniya group, the work group. Most of us sit in at least ten, and half of them are silent because nobody reads. WhatsApp has added three tools aimed at exactly that, announced on 4 August.
1. Mentioning everyone
Type @all in a message and every member of the group gets a notification — including anyone who has muted it.
This is a tool for the cases nobody can afford to miss: work suspended, a last-minute change of time, a school closure, a deadline. It is not a tool for every message.
An important limit: in groups larger than 32 people, the feature is available to admins only. That is a deliberate decision by WhatsApp — the bigger the group, the narrower the right to interrupt everyone in it.
And if you are on the receiving end and someone abuses it, you can mute @all notifications in settings and stay in the group as you are.
2. Polls got smarter
Polls already existed, but they were missing three things that are now available:
- A closing time. Set an hour at which voting ends and the poll locks itself. Useful when you are asking about tonight’s restaurant and don’t want votes arriving after the booking.
- Hiding who voted. The result is visible, but who chose what is not. That changes the answers you get in groups holding both elders and youngsters.
- Editing the question within 15 minutes. If you worded it badly or forgot an option, you fix it instead of deleting the poll and starting again.
3. A new group out of an existing one
One tap creates a new chat with selected members of a group you are already in, instead of adding every number by hand.
The obvious use: arranging a gift or a surprise without the person knowing, or splitting a side conversation off the main group so it does not drown everyone else. In practice it also means groups will now multiply faster, because the thing that used to stop you — the tedium of adding people manually — is gone.
When it reaches you
WhatsApp has not announced a fixed schedule. The features arrive gradually by version and region rather than all at once. If you do not have them yet, update the app from the store and wait a few days.
Photo: a hand holding a phone with a blank screen — by Santeri Viinamäki via Wikimedia Commons, licence CC BY-SA 4.0
Source: Meta’s official announcement, 4 August 2026.
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