It’s happening (insert itshappening.gif here). For a while we’ve been waiting for WhatsApp to work from the web. We’ve had some solutions like AirDroid and WhatsApp Cloud, but finally we have official support from the company itself. Up until now, you could only use WhatsApp from your smartphone, not even your tablet. And it had to be tied to a number. So if you switch phones like I do, you’d have to reverify your number again. It was really annoying and confusing.
WhatsApp founder Jan Koum announced this morning on Facebook, that WhatsApp’s Chrome Extension is now live. So you can now send messages through a Chrome extension on your desktop. We’re hearing reports that it’s not playing well with iOS though. But at an Android site, do we really care? All of your conversations still live on your mobile device, and the extension will basically be using your smartphone to send these messages.
As Koum stated, WhatsApp is still a mobile first platform and company. But being able to use WhatsApp from your browser is probably going to bring in more users, and get more usage out of it. We’ll likely start using it here as WhatsApp isn’t blocked in China, and Hangouts is. And we frequently fly to China for events from Meizu, Xiaomi and others. So it’s a big deal to us.
WhatsApp is a really popular messaging app. They are sending and receiving over 700 billion messages a day. That’s a whole lot. It’s mostly popular over in Europe and Asia, but it’s starting to get more popular here in the US. Aside from Hangouts, it’s the messaging app I use the most. It’s a great app, even though it could use a nice redesign, but for messaging the only real feature I’d like to see added is gif support. How many of you out there use WhatsApp to message your friends and family? Let us know in the comments below.