If you're a WhatsApp veteran you'll know that until recently the service used the passive and often unwieldy (but extremely popular) status update to give friends and family an idea of what its users were up to. That changed with the proliferating Snapchatification of all of Facebook's properties when WhatsApp added a new Status, lifting Stories straight from the popular ephemeral messaging platform.
But after considerable pushback, WhatsApp has announced that it is adding the original status update back, calling it 'About', since Status is already taken. Beta users can access the new About feature through Settings —> Profile, which will then show in the chat window just as it did before. The feature is meant to live alongside Stories Status, and only happened because thousands of people submitted complaints to the company.
Despite the complaints, WhatsApp continues to be one of the most popular messaging apps in the world, with over 1.2 billion people using it every month.
