WhatsApp, one of the most popular messenger apps around, has had a pretty abismal experience for taking pictures within the app. It worked, but it wasn’t all that feature rich. You basically would open it, take a picture and send it. That’s essentially all it was there for, and with it being built into the app, that made plenty of sense. Today, WhatsApp opted to change up the UI a bit for the built-in camera, and it looks much better than it did before. Although it is still pretty much the same, function wise.
Here in the updated version of WhatsApp you still have your flash and camera toggle with a big white button for taking the picture in the center at the bottom. You can also now switch between recording video and taking a picture to send to a contact. Once you take the picture you want to send, the caption screen appears. Which has also gotten a bit of a facelift. Now the picture is full screen (well depending on if you took the picture in landscape or portrait) and additionally the buttons and caption area are more transparent now. It doesn’t actually change the way that you add a caption to the picture or video, but it does make it a bit of a nicer experience.
It appears that this new update is available in version 2.16.4 or newer. Which isn’t actually available on the Google Play Store yet (don’t worry, we have the download link below), but it should be soon. If you want to sideload the update, you can hit up the download link at the bottom of this post and install it. Remember it will overwrite your current version of WhatsApp. Additionally, if you’d rather wait for it to hit Google Play, it should be there in a few days. This is likely part of a beta for now and will hit Google Play once it becomes a stable version. It’s nice to see WhatsApp making the experience within the app a bit better, as it’s been pretty mediocre for quite a while.
Download: WhatsApp v2.16.4