WhatsApp has always been a bit stingy when it comes to group chat size, but now there are other moves in that direction.
In May, the company increased the group size to 512 people and added the ability to share documents up to 2GB in size, and now the group size has doubled again.
In the latest beta version of WhatsApp for Android and iOS, users can add up to 1023 more participants in a group.
The feature is currently only available to a limited number of beta testers, but it’s safe to assume it will roll out more widely soon.
With this seemingly small change, WhatsApp comes a step closer to Telegram, which allows mass groups of several hundred thousand people.
Of course, such large groups are of little use if you cannot manage them properly, but there is good news in this part as well.
WhatsApp is working on new tools that should give administrators more ways to handle large groups.
These include a membership approval system as well as a waiting list of group participants, which allows group administrators to see all the people asking to join the group and approve them all at once.