WhatsApp is testing a revamped media sharing experience

Key Takeaways

• WhatsApp beta for Android version 2.24.24.16 brings back the camera shortcut inside the chat's text field.
• With this update, WhatsApp's text field contains both the camera and gallery shortcuts alongside the attachments option.
• It may take a few days or weeks to find these changes on WhatsApp, even if you have the latest beta installed.

WhatsApp is one of our favorite texting apps, and that's saying a lot, given the sheer number of alternatives one can find today. While media sharing is a big part of the WhatsApp experience, it still needs some work. For instance, accessing your phone's gallery from the chat is not as easy as it can be. We recently learned that WhatsApp might be trying to fix this by providing a dedicated shortcut inside the text field for instant access to your stored photos. However, this came at the expense of the existing camera option. Now, a beta release of the app has just landed over the weekend, carrying a possible solution in tow.

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As per the ever-reliable WABetaInfo, WhatsApp beta v2.24.24.16 for Android reintroduces the camera shortcut within the chat's text field, sitting alongside the recently added gallery shortcut. With the attachment option included as well, the text field looks a little crowded.

This certainly makes it easier to access both the device's camera and the gallery from inside a chat, but some may not appreciate three shortcuts being positioned so close to each other. I'm not seeing the new camera shortcut on my device yet, despite running a newer beta release (v2.24.24.17). This makes sense, given that the feature will only be widely available to beta testers in the coming weeks, per WABetaInfo.

This may not be the final design

Text field with gallery shortcut (left); Text field with both camera and gallery shortcuts (right)

It's important to remember that none of these changes are confirmed to make it to the stable version of WhatsApp anytime soon. Since there have been multiple revisions of these text field shortcuts already, it's safe to say that the Meta-owned app may not be finished experimenting here.

The attachment menu already includes shortcuts for the gallery and camera, in addition to polls, documents, audio, and others. If WhatsApp keeps these new shortcuts in the text field, we may see the camera and gallery shortcuts disappear from the attachment menu to avoid redundancy. All of this is speculative at the moment, and we may have to wait a few weeks or months before any of these changes are more widely rolled out.