Quick Summary
WhatsApp is rolling out a new Lists feature that enables you to organise your chats into multiple custom lists.
The feature is rolling out worldwide now.
It's time for another WhatsApp upgrade, and if like many of us you use the app to keep track of multiple types of communications – family chats, work stuff, social groups, school clubs and all the other kinds of communications that modern life entails – then you're going to like this one. The new Lists feature takes the previously introduced Chat Filters and makes them more useful.
With Chat Filters, WhatsApp enabled you to sort chats into three different categories: All, Unread and Groups. That was a big time saver, but it was still a pretty blunt instrument – especially if you're a member of multiple chat groups, which would all end up under the same Groups tab. With the new Lists, you can make your own categories.
What's so great about WhatsApp lists?
For many of us, WhatsApp connects us to a wide range of people for a wide range of reasons. It's not always as black and white as having one lot of chats for friends and another for work.
In my own case my WhatsApp messages include work and personal messages but also messages from my kids' schoolmates' parents, from after-school clubs, from groups I'm in and from various businesses too. So being able to separate those different things more easily is a big plus – and separating them is just a matter of clicking on a big plus.
To use the new feature, all you need to do is tap on the plus icon in the filter bar at the top of your Chats list. And you can edit existing Lists by long-pressing on them.
As ever with WhatsApp upgrades this is rolling out globally so it might not appear on your phone immediately but it's worth ensuring you have the most recent version from your phone platform's app store.
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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).