One of the Apple SharePlay’s best abilities is allowing two (or more) iPhone users to listen to music, or watch video calls together over a FaceTime call. However, as you probably guessed, this feature is limited to iOS users only. Now, WhatsApp seems to be working on a new feature which replicates this and may just be available to Android smartphones in the future.
As per WABetaInfo, WhatsApp Beta for iOS version 23.25.10.72 will bring music and video support to WhatsApp video calls for iOS users. Currently on beta, the feature may not entirely work as expected right away, but is a good start towards making shared media experiences more widely available.
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The report suggests that users will simply be able to video call a WhatsApp contact who also has the feature enabled, and then play music or a video to automatically share it with the other user. If the feature is going to work like Apple’s SharePlay, users on either side of the video call will also be able to collectively control playback, allowing all parties to do things like play/pause the music or skip to the next track.
Will WhatsApp’s shared media playback come to Android?
While the beta suggests the feature will come to iPhones first, the real perk of this implementation will be on Android. This is because while shared audio and video playback is already available on iOS (quite seamlessly) thanks to SharePlay over FaceTime, Android is yet to come up with its own take on the feature.
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The closest Android users can get to shared media playback right now is Spotify’s ‘Group Session’ feature, which only works for music, not videos. It remains to be seen if the feature will come to WhatsApp beta for Android in the future, but given that this is the first appearance of the new addition, we can cut WhatsApp some slack. A lot of upcoming features for WhatsApp first pop up on either Android or iOS, and are then carried over to the other platform. iOS users, meanwhile, can continue enjoying SharePlay for shared playback.
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Chetan Nayak
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