Whatsapp’s CEO has stated that the company is considering releasing an iPad app.
During an interview with The Verge this week, Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp at its parent firm Meta, said, “People have wanted an iPad app for a long time.”
Cathcart added, “We’d love to do it.”
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A version of WhatsApp for the iPad, like Instagram for the iPad, has long eluded consumers despite being a much sought feature.
While Cathcart wouldn’t go so far as to say that an iPad version will be released in the near future, his comments suggest that it’s a possibility, especially now that WhatsApp has established the underlying technology required for such a client to work.
“We did a lot of work on the technology for supporting multiple devices,” Cathcart added, referring to WhatsApp’s opt-in multi-device functionality that was introduced last year.
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“Our web and our desktop apps now have that. If I have multi-device on, I can turn my phone off or lose my network connection and still get messages on my desktop. That would be really important for a tablet app, to be able to use the app even if your phone isn’t on. So the underlying technology is there,” he shared.
Because of the way WhatsApp encrypts messages, it hasn’t been able to sync talks between devices via the internet in the same way that most other messaging apps can. As a result, if your phone didn’t have internet access, the desktop client wouldn’t work.
Multi-device functionality in beta enables you sync your WhatsApp account on up to four devices at once, a process that requires mapping device IDs to an account key on WhatsApp’s servers in a secure manner.
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There’s a decent probability that WhatsApp for iPad is finally on the way now that such synchronisation technology exists.