WhatsApp is launching today the Communities feature that was previously announced back in April. Communities will let WhatsApp users connect multiple groups in one place with admin controls and end-to-end encryption for all messages.

According to WhatsApp, the new Communities feature company should be useful to connect people in the same neighborhood, parents at a school, and workplaces. WhatsApp users will be able to add existing groups to new communities or start a new one from scratch.

Welcome to Communities 👋

Now admins can bring related groups together in one place to keep conversations organized.

Organized. Private. Connected 🤝 pic.twitter.com/u7ZSmrs7Ys

— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) November 3, 2022

Each community will have an announcement group where admins can send important messages to all members. Each group in a community can welcome up to 1024 users, with support for 32-person video calls, in-chat polls, message reactions, and larger file sharing (up to 2GB). All these new group features will also be available for WhatsApp groups that don’t belong to a community.

“With Communities, we’re aiming to raise the bar for how organizations communicate with a level of privacy and security not found anywhere else,” the company said today. “The alternatives available today require trusting apps or software companies with a copy of their messages – and we think they deserve the higher level of security provided by end-to-end encryption.”

WhatsApp Communities will roll out to all users over the next few months. They will live in a dedicated tab at the top of your chats on Android and at the bottom on iOS.

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