WhatsApp Channel’s polling feature is making its way to beta channels

WhatsApp’s feature set has grown significantly in the last several years. Whether it’s with features like Communities and Channels, or the ability to share high-resolution photographs and videos in a Status update, the chat app is always striving to improve. Channels, on the other hand, lacks several essential features, such as polls which it’s now finding its way to the beta channel.

According to WABetaInfo, some beta testers have been able to locate the polls option inside Channels beginning with WhatsApp beta for Android version 2.24.2.11. The option appears inside the chat attachment page (paper clip icon), as it did in the early iteration of Channel polls. The polling symbol, however, looks to be a different hue this time around, green rather than yellow.

The only difference between the two Channel poll implementations appears to be the color change. As reported during the early phases of its development, the functionality should function similarly to polls discussed in a one-on-one or group chat. Furthermore, all votes are ostensibly anonymized, so the poll’s designer will never know how an individual voted. As an added precaution, the designers will not know who voted in the poll.

Polls on the WhatsApp beta Channel

The feature’s presence in the beta channel after going through the development phases is encouraging. Even with this experimental new version of WhatsApp for Android, there’s no assurance that you’ll discover it. But it shouldn’t be long until Channel polls appear on the Meta-owned chat app’s stable channel.

Meanwhile, another WhatsApp beta version (v2.24.2.12) is now available on the Play Store, according to a second WABetaInfo source. However, this does not appear to be a substantial upgrade, as it just addresses an issue. Users should now be able to view thumbnails of Status updates next to the contact’s name, a long-supported functionality that was broken after a beta update last week.

Even though WhatsApp engineers have already pushed out a number of beta versions to testers. After being available on iOS for some time, Android beta users were finally allowed to test out sophisticated text formatting options on the app this week. Based on the last several weeks, this year might be busier than ever for one of the world’s most popular messaging applications.