WhatsApp is one of the most used apps in the UK thanks to its simple interface and the fact it’s available for both iPhone and Android. The Meta-owned service has proven incredibly popular on these shores, but it seems as though its loyal users don’t always love it when WhatsApp rolls out any changes to how the app looks.
That’s true of the latest update that WhatsApp fans have started to see in the app in the last week. The firm has sent out an upgrade that takes away the text that says ‘typing’ when one of your contacts is currently typing out a message to one of your chats.
Instead, that familiar indicator is being replaced by a chat bubble that appears in the chat itself rather than at the top of the screen next to the chat’s name. The speech bubble is animated with three little dots jumping up and down, much like how Apple’s iMessage chats look when someone is tapping away to you.
WhatsApp users took to social media this week as the change was starting to be noticed
“The new Whatsapp typing animation seems purposely designed to give me anxiety”, said X user @RichyCraven.
Fellow user @Avii_007 agreed, saying “WhatsApp now has the three dots typing thing like iMessage and I Hateeeee it”.
“Hello @WhatsApp can we just go back to so and so is typing? This dot dot dot bouncing up and down is getting to be annoying”, posted @farahharith.
But some people disagreed and praised the update.
“Love the new typing indication in WhatsApp . But it would be more fun to see the number of characters being typed”, said @anarchyco.
“WhatsApp’s got a new typing indicator and I like it,” posted @Cartidise. This user said this back in October, but now it seems most UK WhatsApp users have received the update. This is often automatic, so if you don’t have it yet you could well do soon.
Scores of WhatsApp faithful threw their toys out of the pram when the app briefly changed the ‘typing’ and ‘online’ tags to the capitalised ‘Typing’ and ‘Online’ earlier this year, which led to WhatsApp quickly reverting back to lower case.
That tiny change was quickly reverted due to the outrage, which was surprising. This time, it seems the new bubbles could be permanent.
