Messaging apps like WhatsApp have always been important and they became all the more indispensable over the last year as the Covid-19 pandemic kept us in our homes. It is important to have a quick, reliable messaging service that you can use every day.

As Android Police points out, that’s one of the main reasons why Google “continues to boost its RCS capabilities”. WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging services globally and is super convenient, but it does come with certain limitations.

For example, high-resolution video files on WhatsApp always get compressed and get sent as documents on the chat. But this might change soon, a future update might finally bring in quality options for users to pick from.

Spotted by WABetaInfo, WhatsApp beta 2.21.14.6 on Android hints at a feature that brings in the ability to swap the default quality of the video when you are sending it. Currently, as you will see under the “Storage and data” menu, WhatsApp does not allow you to customise the video preferences. This is what is expected to change soon.

The latest beta version shows three options to pick from to decide the upload compression of the video you are sending - “Auto”, “Best quality”, and “Data saver”.

The “Auto” option comes “recommended” and possibly will just continue to send the videos as compressed files over slow data connections. The “Data saver” option is perfect for people who want/need to send videos to others but do not want to eat up all of their monthly data in the process.

The “Best quality” option is something that we should look forward to. For now, the only way high-res videos get sent over WhatsApp is in the attached document format. With the new “Best quality” option, users may finally be able to send a video, right from the gallery, without a drop in its quality, even if it takes longer than the other options.

Now, while these new options, particularly the “Best quality” one, are exciting and something many WhatsApp users will look forward to, there is no knowing when this is going to roll out in the stable version on WhatsApp. Since it is currently in beta, WhatsApp is working on it, and it might come soon, but there is no timetable for this yet. WhatsApp’s Android users will have to wait and watch.

There is no information about this feature rolling out or being under development for WhatsApp on iOS yet, so we’ll have to wait to find out about that too.

 - TNS