WhatsApp now lets you mark messages as favorites

New and interesting features have come to version 2.12.367 of WhatsApp, now available on Uptodown, with the three main ones being the option to mark phrases that your contacts send you as favorites, show cards with enriched content and previews for the links you receive, and quickly share content with your recent contacts, with the latter reserved to users of Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

The favorites system is nothing mysterious. If you do a long click on the chat bubble in question you’ll get a new star icon in your top bar, and when you tick it the message will be stored in an independent list you can access from the context menu at the top right part of the main menu in the Starred Messages section. A tremendously useful feature that can serve as a reminder book. In addition, by tapping a starred message you’ll go back to that chat and the part of the conversation where it appeared.

The other main feature was high on WhatsApp’s to-do list, as enriched links appeared on other services like Telegram ages ago. From now on you can view a small preview of the links you receive with an associated thumbnail or other metadata depending on what kind of link it is. For instance, we’ve sent below a URL for one of the software pages on Uptodown and an icon appears alongside its name and the number of the installed version.

Finally, and only available for Android Marshmallow users, an option has been added to the Direct Share system to share content with your recent contacts, which at minimum will save you a couple taps to the screen for that task.