WhatsApp has unveiled a fresh native app for Mac, facilitating video calls with up to eight participants and audio calls with up to 32 individuals.
The launch was endorsed by Mark Zuckerberg through a post on his Facebook account. The app can be downloaded from WhatsApp’s official website, and it’s anticipated to become available on the Apple App Store soon.
In their blog post, the Meta-owned app elaborated, “The app is designed with Mac users in mind, enhancing productivity and efficiency when using WhatsApp on a larger screen. Now, sharing files is as simple as dragging and dropping them into a chat, and users can access more of their chat history.”
WhatsApp has been in the testing phase for its Mac native client, a beta version of which was rolled out earlier this year. This allowed users with Apple Silicon systems and macOS 11 Big Sur or later versions to try out the app.
In March, WhatsApp introduced a comparable group-calling feature in its Windows client.
The original release of WhatsApp’s desktop applications dates back to 2016, but updates have been implemented to align with evolving desktop machine architectures. In 2021, WhatsApp began experimenting with linking multiple devices to a single account, enabling message receipt on any of the four devices even when the phone is offline.
