tech2 News Staff

WhatsApp’s testing another update for its Android app, and as per the beta version, it’s going bring a useful new feature.

According to a report by WABetaInfo, WhatsApp has recently rolled out the beta for Android 2.18.214, which comes with a ‘Mark as Read’ shortcut directly in the notification centre.

Basically, as of now when you receive those short, conversation-ending messages, which you read in your notification and have nothing to add to, you can clear them from your notifications. When you open the app, they're still marked as unread within WhatsApp, unless you go to the app and then mark them as read.

However, with the update that WhatsApp is reportedly bringing, when you get a message, within the notification itself, you will have the option to reply to the sender or mark the message as read.

In addition to that, the report also mentions that WhatsApp is apparently also working on a feature, which will allow users to quickly mute a chat right from within the notification centre. This feature, however, is not part of the 2.18.214 version for Android, and “is not available yet for development reasons”.

Earlier this week, WhatsApp also rolled out ‘forward label’ into the app, which is primarily a tool in the app’s fight against fake news. With the feature, any message that is forwarded will have a label on it so that recipients are aware that it could be part of a bulk-forward message. To see this new forward label, the users need to have the latest supported version of WhatsApp on their phones.