WhatsApp launches screen sharing mode in video calls

WhatsApp, the widely used messaging and calling app with billions of users, has announced the addition of a new feature. It now allows users to share their phone's screen during video calls. Screen-sharing will let a host share the content displayed on their screen with others, making it a useful tool for office meetings and other things.

Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced the new update via his Facebook account stating, "We're adding the ability to share your screen during a video call on WhatsApp." The latest move of WhatsApp could give tough competition to popular video calling apps like Google Meet and Zoom as this is one of the important features for group meetings.

With screen-sharing capabilities, WhatsApp is making it easier for users to collaborate on documents, showcase presentations, and more. Moreover, one will also now be able to offer tech support to family and friends with ease. For instance, if your parents need to update something in their phone's settings, then you can help them do that by using WhatsApp's video call screen-sharing feature. Users will have full control over the screen-sharing feature, which is typical with any other video conferencing app. It means users can stop sharing content on the screen any time they want.

To utilize this feature, users can simply click on the 'Share' icon during a video call and then choose between sharing a specific application or the entire screen. Presently, WhatsApp supports video calls with up to 32 participants, which means that small meetings could easily be held on this messaging app.

The screen-sharing option was previously available for beta testers and now, it is being rolled out to all users. The update is being rolled out in a gradual manner, so it will likely take a few days to reach everyone. It is worth mentioning that WhatsApp just recently added big features like Chat Lock, Edit button, HD photo quality update, and more.

WhatsAp's Chat Lock feature is pretty self-explanatory. People will be able to add a lock to their super personal chats, so that no one is able to access them even if you hand over your phone to anyone else. The good thing is the new feature automatically hides the contents of that chat in notifications as well and so, your privacy is protected.

The app's Edit button feature gives users a 15-minute window to make any changes to the wrong messages that they might have sent to anyone. This is a very useful feature as one now won’t be required to delete full messages as the edit button will let you correct sentences or words that you think were not correct initially.