Viber, the popular free cross-platform instant messaging and VoIP app has announced an upgrade to its application that includes an improvement to their Pinned Chats feature on Android. This feature allows users of the app to access their favorite and most popular chats more easily and conveniently by “pinning” them to the top of the screen. “Pinning” a chat to the top of the list for quick access within the Viber app couldn’t be easier. Android users can simply navigate to the screen which displays all their Viber chats, then long-tap the chat they want to pin to the top of their screen. This will bring up a list of various available options. When “Pin to Top” is selected, the chat will now appear at the top of the list, giving the user quick and convenient access. To unpin the chat and stop it appearing at the top of the list, users can simply long-tap the chat again, and select “Unpin Chat.”
The Viber app was created by a company in Israel called Viber Media before a multi-national company from Japan called Rakuten acquired the company in 2014 in a deal worth $900 million. Viber for Android was originally released in 2012, although an earlier version was released on iOS in December 2010, which was meant as direct competition to Skype. In the past, the company has faced criticism from outside agencies including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) over their perceived lack of commitment to user security. Many said the company’s security was insufficient due to the fact that end-to-end encryption was not used, among other problems. Support for end-to-end encryption was eventually added in 2016, but the data is only encrypted if all users participating in a chat are running the latest version of the app.
Since the start of this year, the company behind Viber have introduced several new features which they hope will help the messaging service become even more popular. In early February this year, Viber added support for Ephemeral Messaging to the app. This was soon followed towards the end of February with another update which added a feature called Public Accounts, which allows consumers to connect more easily with their retailers and brands.