WhatsApp’s contact-adding QR codes and animated stickers officially announced

WhatsApp has announced a collection of new features that are coming to the Facebook-owned messaging service in the coming weeks. We’ve already heard about a few of them, like QR codes, that can be used to quickly add new contacts or animated stickers, thanks to their appearance in beta versions of WhatsApp. But now their existence is official, and we know they’ll be out of beta soon.

Being able to add contacts via QR code is one of the more interesting features on the list since it means you can quickly add a new contact by quickly scanning the code rather than having to enter their full phone number. Group video calls are also being tweaked to allow you to quickly maximize the video feed of any one of a call’s maximum of eight participants, and there’s also going to be a new video icon added to group chats of up to eight people to allow you to quickly start a group video call in the first place.

Meanwhile, animated stickers are a lot like the service’s current stickers, only with simple animations added, and there’s also a new dark mode for the service’s desktop and web clients to match the dark mode that launched in its mobile apps earlier this year. Finally, if you’re using WhatsApp on a KaiOS smartphone like the Nokia 2720 Flip, you’re now able to use WhatsApp’s stories-style Status feature.

WhatsApp says that dark mode for web and the Status feature for KaiOS are live now and that the video maximization feature will be coming out in this week’s update. QR codes, animated stickers, and the new group calling button will be arriving in the coming weeks.