You can share a lot of things on WhatsApp: images, videos, audio, locations, and documents. But for some reason, the company has long limited you to just a few specific file types, like PDFs, Word documents, speadsheets, and slides. If you tried to share anything else, the files would be greyed out.
Now, you can finally share whatever the heck you want, a spotted by WABetaInfo. That is, so long as its under 128 MB on iOS and 100MB on Android.
Some users showed off the ability on Twitter:
Yeah it's working in Sri Lanka pic.twitter.com/0r1IkrODxp
— ☠இடியட்⛔ (@izabith) June 22, 2017
in Kuwait ?? pic.twitter.com/oG5o0xhEKJ
— أسامة الضاوي (@Osama11) June 22, 2017
One neat benefit to this is that it allows you to send images and video without the usual WhatsApp compression, although 100MB is quite a small limit for modern high-resolution video. We imagine that limitation is there to not overwhelm WhatsApp’s servers with people sharing things like 4K movies.
It’ll come in handy for sure. There have been plenty of times I’ve wanted to share different file types through WhatsApp, such as APKs. In those cases I’d usually just upload things to a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive, but this should allow you to share files in fewer steps.
All that being said feature appears to be limited to a small number of users for now, but we imagine it will roll out to everyone soon enough. We’ve contacted WhatsApp for more information and will update this post if we hear back.
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