WhatsApp for iOS Now Supports Focus and Pause While Recording Messages

WhatsApp has been slowly evolving these years, making the user experience better by introducing minor things one by one. The recent update brought two important features: now you can take a breath while recording a message and focus to take as much breath as you need when working, sleeping, or driving.

It used to be hard to take a pause while recording a message before. You had to split your message into several or make it too long with unnecessary periods of silence, or let unwanted noises interrupt it. With the new mode introduced in WhatsApp 2.22.5.75, you need to swipe up when recording a message. In the menu that appears, you can pause or resume the recording whenever you want. Of course, later you can listen to the recorded message and decide whether to send or to rerecord it. It’s the latest voice message-related updates; previous ones included waveforms and playback speed to make using voice messages more comfortable.

Another small but important update is better integration with the Focus feature that appeared in iOS 15. In Focus mode, you can turn off any notifications completely, with an exception of, say, the alarm clock if you choose Sleep mode. The convenience of it includes an option to set a number of contacts that can break through the silence: if they message you, you’ll still be notified. Now, you can set these VIP contacts in WhatsApp as well, so the app will let these through and keep the rest silenced.

Voice message-related features may one day appear in WhatsApp for Android as well. As for Focus, it’s the prerogative of iOS. While Android has its own DND features, they are not the same, so hardly will WhatsApp introduce anything similar on Android.

Have you already tried recording voice messages with pauses? Was the method comfortable for you? And did your audios get better with it? As for Focus integration, does it always work as supposed? Let’s share our stories in the comments!