If you happen to be a bit chatty with your contacts on WhatsApp then you will appreciate its upcoming feature: pinned conversations.
With the feature enabled, chats are never re-arranged according to their recency. Instead, any pinned chats will always be displayed at the top of all other chats. It’s what I have done on Telegram, where it has been possible to do so for over a year now, to drown the noise that is the many groups, super groups, and channels that I am a member of.
This is how my Telegram looks like:
WhatsApp users will soon be able to have something similar since WhatsApp is already testing the feature with beta users of the app.
Here is how my WhatsApp beta looks like after updating to version 2.17.163:
This is something @WABetaInfo noted first nearly a month and a half ago.
In order to pin a conversation, one needs to long press the conversation and then click the “pin” that appears on the context menu as a result. Doing the vice versa reverses the process i.e. unpins the chat.
The number of conversations that can be pinned is limited to just 3 at the moment. By contrast, Telegram allows up to 5 chats to be pinned.
The feature will work for both group and individual chats. What many who have gotten used to the feature on Telegram (super groups) or even Facebook (groups) will miss, however, is the lack of ability to pin chats inside a group so that they are sticky at the top of the group – like group rules, for instance – no matter what is posted. Hopefully, the WhatsApp team is also working on the same.
