WhatsApp confirms major chat app shake-up - here's how it will affect your phone

WhatsApp is rolling out a major redesign for iPhone and Android for the first time in years that is coming to your phone any day now. The Meta-owned company is touting a fresh lick of paint, new icons, better navigation, and even a subtle change to a long-standing feature.

In the first big visual change to the incredibly popular app since 2021, WhatsApp is losing the big block of green at the top of the main chats page, opting now for a cleaner white look with ‘WhatsApp’ written in what the chat app calls “a new, consistent green palette within the app for a unified experience” that it wants to keep “fresh”, “approachable” and “simple”.

“We considered over 35 different colour iterations, ultimately aligning with WhatsApp’s iconic green and opting for a palette that allows for harmonious colour pairings throughout the app,” WhatsApp head of design Idit Yaniv said.

You won’t see all these whites and greens if you prefer to use your iOS or Android phone in dark mode though, so WhatsApp has also introduced an even higher contrast tone for dark mode to reduce eye strain and improve legibility.

You may no longer notice it, but if you haven’t ever changed the chat background on WhatsApp, the default is a light-toned peachy colour covered in subtle doodles of people and objects. WhatsApp said it noticed that most of its users never change it, so it has mixed it up with a new design.

“Our team reviewed every piece of artwork in the doodle and explored new options that were simple in style and better represented a diverse set of people and objects,” Yaniv said.

If you have an Android phone, you now have navigation icons at the bottom of the screen, bringing the design closer to your iPhone-toting friends’ version. That’s now where you’ll find chats, updates, communities, and your calls. The icons down there on all smartphones have also been redesigned to be more rounded, with illustrations in the app getting new animations to make them more playful.

Express.co.uk has already received most of these updates to our phone and we like the look and feel. With an iPhone, there’s a new attachment layout that pops up when you go to share photos, videos and other things with your loved ones to make it easier to do.

These extensive changes to WhatsApp follow the recent addition of chat filters to the top of the app that the company said was a “highly requested” feature.