Meta is one of thebiggest social mediacompanies in business, and all its properties, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, share several features and design elements to express Meta’s brand homogeneously. Despite the steady trickle of new features and updates, WhatsApp has preserved its individuality well in recent years. Now, its developers are finally gravitating towards features from other Meta platforms like Instagram. To this effect, beta testers report sighting a new tooltip pushing for deeper integration between the two apps.
Instagram already allows cross-posting content to Facebook, and WhatsApp was working onsharing updates directly to Facebookin April. Earlier this month, we spotted WhatsApp working on a similarintegration with Instagram. Located deep in the privacy settings for ephemeral status updates, beta testers found a new option which allowed linking your Instagram account to WhatsApp, so sharing updates from the latter to the former becomes a one-tap affair.
The option isn’t immediately visible until you link accounts in WhatsApp settings, and that’s even if you post status updates regularly. Beta testers for the app toldWABetaInfothat version 2.23.26.17 of the app on Android includes a change which could make this integration more visible. The UI is still a work-in-progress, but WhatsApp could prompt users to cross-post status updates to Instagram and Facebook using a new banner under theMy statusoption.
A newShare statusbanner could come to theUpdatestab in WhatsApp
WABetaInfo reiterates that sharing updates to Instagram should remain entirely optional for WhatsApp users once the feature goes live. Moreover, users would have to tap the options in the new banner after posting a status update to share it to Instagram. To avoid accidental oopsies, it appears Meta isn’t automating the cross-posting process. That’s particularly useful because not everyone who follows you on Instagram has your phone number, and people tend to use WhatsApp and Instagram for different purposes. That’s perhaps why Instagram and WhatsApp privacy settings for Stories and status updates would remain independent of each other.
The banner’s prominence should make the new feature instantly visible to users after the official launch, but we still have no clue when that might be. For now, this banner isn’t even visible to beta testers, but the developments suggest WhatsApp is certainly working on integration with Instagram.
