WhatsApp Gets Bold, Italics and Strikethrough Formatting Options Along With Other Exciting Updates

WhatsApp users, from today, will be able to use multiple formatting options like bold, italics and strikethrough in their conversations. This comes just a couple of months after the Facebook owned messaging client reported that it has crossed the milestone of more than 1 billion monthly active users.

The company has always tried to deviate from the norm and kept its messaging client as simple as possible. Since its launch, the only major additions to the app have been voice calling nine months ago and the recent update which brought document sharing. Though interestingly, dociment sharing was never officially announced by Whatsapp.

The current update, which has started rolling out today for Android and iOS brings common formatting options which are rare in most messaging apps. These include the general bold, italics and strikethrough options. These stylizations were previously available on WhatsApp’s Web client. Here’s how you can use the:

• For bold: add an asterisk (*) before and after the specifics words : e.g. *hello*
• For italics: add an underscore (_) before and after the specifics words: e.g. _hello_
• For strikethrough: add a tilde (~) before and after the specifics words: e.g. ~hello~

Until its Facebook acquisition two years ago, WhatsApp was just a very primitive messaging app. One can quite easily conclude, that most of the exciting updates came to the cross platform chat service after Zuck got hold of it.

Today’s update also brings in other simple yet extremely convenient interface changers including the ability to select a group chat thread or multiple contacts and hold for more options, such as muting, archiving, marking as unread or leaving the group. These options were a chore before and you had to navigate to specific menus inside a chat to access them.

Another exciting addition is the quick reply feature which lets to respond to messages straight from the notification. The new toolbar also supports emoji or a voice message as well. Lastly, we get new custom wallpapers including solid colours etc.