WhatsApp May Soon Add Mentions and Group Invite Links

WhatsApp has lately been adding plenty of features to its messaging service, with the most recent being message quotes and replies. The most popular instant messaging app now appears to be working to add another important feature that will make it easy to get the attention of someone in the group by "mention" and will also provide an easy way to add someone to a group by sending group invite links.

Both new features were reportedly spotted in a beta build of WhatsApp for iOS. The new mention feature has been rumoured to be in testing for a while and will be mostly used in the group conversation where there are plenty of friends and it's sometime hard to get the attention of an individual. Similar to how mention works on Facebook, the feature will show the name with a different coloured text. The group invite feature on the other hand will allow a WhatsApp user to send group invite link for any user to join. The new mention and group invite feature in the latest beta release was reported by @WABetaInfo, which claims to track beta releases of WhatsApp for iOS.

The screenshot of the group invite feature shows text, "Anyone with WhatsApp can follow this link to join this group. Only share it with people you trust." Apart from the link to the group, the screenshot shows three options for copy link, share link, and revoke link. Considering that the new features have just entered beta release, we can expect it to take some time before being available to all users worldwide.

Another feature that was rumoured to rollout to iOS users was gif image support, once again via @WABetaInfo. However, WhatsApp for iOS users haven't received the gif image support so far.

Earlier this month, WhatsApp received a feature that allowed users to quote messages when replying. The message quotes and replies feature is self-explanatory and the user needs to long press a message in any conversation to see a reply option pop up alongside star, delete, forward, and copy.