In these last weeks, WhatsApp was working on a lot of features to implement in the new update.
The changelog of the new update is available here and it includes some UI improvements, support for consecutive voice messages autoplay, more status replies options and info about the Dark Mode.
If you believed that this was already enough, you’re wrong. WhatsApp is working on another important feature, highly required in the last years..
ATTENTION:
- The Touch ID support is a feature under development.
- WhatsApp is working on this feature in these weeks and unfortunately it’s not available yet for development reasons: the feature needs to get some improvements before to be enabled for everyone. It’s still in a high alpha stage.
For this reason, it’s ok if you have updated your WhatsApp version and it’s not working for you seen that the feature is under development.
TOUCH ID/FACE ID SUPPORT
Finally the day has come and we can exclusively give the good news: WhatsApp is really working to add the Touch ID support in the application!
Let’s give a short description about how it will work.
In your Privacy Settings, you will find in future a new option called Touch ID.
If your device has Face ID support, obviously you will find Face ID as option:
When Touch ID (or Face ID) is enabled, WhatsApp adds a major protection level to the app: in order to use it, everytime you open WhatsApp, the authentication is required:
If Touch ID (or Face ID) isn’t momentarily working (for too many wrong attempts), WhatsApp will ask to the user to insert the iPhone Passcode:
Note that no data about your fingerprint and passcode are sent to WhatsApp, due to the very restricted iOS APIs, because it’s something managed by the system itself.
We don’t know when the feature will be publicly available for everyone, seen that this is still in an alpha stage.
The feature works without issues but WhatsApp should improve the response time to the authentication, that are currently a bit slow.
- “Touch ID” is available in future for any iPhone having the fingerprint sensor on iOS 8+.
- “Face ID” is available in future for iPhone X, iPhone Xr, iPhone Xs and Xs Max as well.
WhatsApp Business for iOS (that will be available in future) will support app authentication as well.
Unfortunately we have no news about Android actually, but we will let you know if there is something in the next Android development related to app protection. Note that WhatsApp is really used to implement on Android any feature already developed on IOS, so let’s wait for it!
Let us know on Twitter if you like this feature and read our next announcements on our Telegram Channel!
WABetaInfo has a Discord Server about WhatsApp, where you can chat, give advice, ask help to other participants and read my announcements!
