On the official website of WhatsApp you can already find version 2.12.194 (which was already released as a beta version). This new update introduced a lot of interesting features. First of all, it allows you to customize notifications for single contacts and group chats. But let’s see what happened step by step.

On Google Play Store you can still find available version 2.12.176, but WhatsApp in the last week has released 10 updates, of which 5 only in the last 24 hours. Obviously the last one of these updates is the one containing more changes. In fact WhatsApp version 2.12.194 for Android, which you can already find on the official site of the service, introduces some new useful and much welcomed features.

Downloading this last version, Android users will be able to choose a particular kind of notification for each of their friends. Furthermore, if you don’t want to be disturbed by the notification ringtones, you can now mute your chat for a specific time period (8 hour, one week or one year). With the “mute” option, even if the app does not emit any sound, notifications will be displayed as usual.

Version 2.12.194 adds also another important feature already anticipated during the last few weeks: the “mark as unread“. To use this function you just have to long press a conversation and its status will switch to green (unread). This simple function will only serve as a reminder and will absolutly not affect the chronological order and the status of the other messages in the conversation.

Another interesting feature introduced with version 2.12.194 is the low data usage option for voice calls, which will allow you to consume less data (for the moment we don’t know in which measure this will affect the quality of the calls). Finally this last update also mentions again the possibility to have a backup on Google Drive, so we think that probably this function will be restored during the next few weeks.