WhatsApp releases in the Beta channel the ability to automatically silence large groups to reduce the volume of notifications: the novelty was observed in the latest build of the official client for Android, version 2.22.24.15, in distribution for a few hours through the Play Store test program. Not all registered users will see the news: apparently WhatsApp has made it available to a small subset of accounts – a classic indicator of the willingness to conduct some A / B tests.

In practice, the novelty is very simple: if the user joins a group with more than 256 participants, notifications are automatically disabled by the client. A small popup at the bottom notifies the user of the fact, with the possibility to cancel (thus reactivating the notifications) or confirm.

WhatsApp had started testing this small (but useful, in terms of digital well-being) functionality a few weeks ago: it had been spotted rummaging through the source code of previous builds but it wasn’t actually working. As usual, it is not known when it will arrive in the stable channel, and of course the fact that it has been spotted on Android does not mean that it will be exclusive to this platform – indeed, there is no reason to doubt that it will also arrive on iOS and the web. desktop. It is worth mentioning that just a few days ago Meta’s messaging client announced the expansion of the groups: previously the limit was 512 users, now it has risen to 1024.