WhatsApp Gets a Handy @all Feature for Group Chats

The group chat is the last truly heavyweight institution of modern life. It’s one of the most reliable means of daily communication, used for just about anything from planning to catching up.

WhatsApp is counting over 3 billion users , and it’s a fair bet most of them are in at least one group chat; the platform has supported groups of up to 1,024 members since 2022.

An update that began rolling out on August 4 follows a run of group-focused releases earlier this year, including group message history, member tags, and event reminders. Taken together, it’s a clear signal of WhatsApp’s reliance on group chats as one of its defining features.

The platform’s latest update is designed to improve its usage, and it’s rolling out gradually. Here’s everything you need to know.

Typing @all allows every member of the group to be notified, even the ones who muted the chat years ago. @all is designed to punch through and override the mute settings and notification preferences you set at chat level.

WhatsApp pitches this as a tool for the urgent stuff, like updates, changes, and last-minute cancellations. It has, however, also clearly anticipated the feature’s spam potential.

The spam safeguards thus work on two levels. In groups larger than 32 people, only admins can trigger @all, and the override itself has an off switch. You can also manually mute @all alerts entirely in your notification settings, a separate control from muting the chat itself. The 32-person threshold is the same cap WhatsApp applies to group calls. It’s the platform’s rough dividing line between a chat and a broadcast channel.

WhatsApp’s polling feature has been around since 2022 and is end-to-end encrypted like everything else on the platform. It is also, though, where many a group chat goes to stall. The poll fixes in the latest update are pragmatic.

You can now set an end time that automatically locks voting when it expires, giving the group a hard deadline to vote. Interestingly, you also have the option to hide voter names. Until now, WhatsApp polls were transparent by design, and everyone could see exactly who voted for what. Anonymizing votes now also exist inside an end-to-end encrypted system, where the whole architecture is built around verifying who sent what.