Soon, WhatsApp will let you update your status with an audio message

Before Instagram and other apps followed suit, Snapchat was the first to popularise the idea of publishing momentary “stories”—photo, video, and text uploads that instantly vanish after a day. Particularly Meta made a point of including Stories on WhatsApp in addition to Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms where we already receive comparable content under the pretence of “status” updates. You may currently upload pictures, movies, GIFs, and texts to your status, but voice messages may soon become an altogether new option as well.

Evidence discovered by WABetaInfo suggests that WhatsApp is developing a feature that would let users record and upload audio messages to their WhatsApp status. Once the feature is ready, the app should allow users to make an audio message just like you can today inside a chat. Although we haven’t seen any evidence of it, this may involve uploading already-existing audio files (as they may be shared as messages in WhatsApp chats). Voice recordings in status update would be end-to-end encrypted and shared with your WhatsApp connections using the same privacy settings as photos and videos.

Not just WhatsApp is experimenting with voice postings. For a while now, Twitter has been testing the option to send voice tweets on iOS, but it hasn’t yet made the feature available to everyone. WhatsApp, on the other hand, seems to be a natural extension of the status option because the programme already supports audio messages and has done so for a number of years. So why not permit users to publish audio messages in their status as well?

Unfortunately, this capability is currently under development and not yet available – not even for beta testers – if you want to record a 4-minute rant and upload it to your status. When it happens, it will probably only be accessible to app beta testers before being made generally accessible.