The head of Whatsapp recently revealed that they are in favor of launching an iPad app.
“People have wanted an iPad app for a long time,” said Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp at its parent company Meta, said The Verge during an interview this week.
“We’d love to do that,” added Cathcart.
Like Instagram for the iPad, a version of WhatsApp for the Apple tablet has long eluded users despite being a much-requested feature.
While Cathcart won’t go so far as to commit to releasing an iPad version, his comments suggest it’s possible that one will be built in the near future, especially now that WhatsApp has built in the underlying technology needed for this client to work. . .
“We worked hard on the technology to support multiple devices,” Cathcart said, referring to the launch of optional multi-device support for WhatsApp last year.
“Our web and desktop apps now have it. If I have multiple devices turned on, I might turn off my phone or lose my network connection and still get messages on my desktop. This would be very important for a tablet app, to be able to use the app even if your phone is not on. So the underlying technology is there,” he shared.
Because of the way WhatsApp encrypts messages, it has historically been unable to sync chats between devices over the Internet like most other messaging apps do. So if your phone’s WhatsApp doesn’t have internet access then the desktop client didn’t work.
The beta version of multi-device support allows you to sync your WhatsApp account on up to four devices at the same time, a process that involves mapping device identifiers to an account key on WhatsApp servers in an even encrypted way.
Now that this syncing technology exists, there’s a good chance that WhatsApp for iPad is finally on the horizon.