WhatsApp CEO hints at iPad app release

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WhatsApp CEO Will Cathcart lent some hopeful words to fans of the messaging platform during an interview this week, when he announced that the company is looking into creating a native iPad WhatsApp app.

WhatsApp users have long been nagging the Facebook-owned company to make a viable app for Apple’s iPad, but WhatsApp has been holding off—just like Instagram still lacks a native iPad app as well.

The reason for this is that until now, the way that data was encrypted on the WhatsApp platform didn’t allow for the company to safely sync it across multiple devices while maintaining the same level of encryption. However, according to Will Cathcart, the underlying technology has been evolving, and WhatsApp has been hard at work to make this possible in the future.

“We did a lot of work on the technology for supporting multiple devices,” Cathcart said in the interview.

“Our web and our desktop apps now have that. If I have a multi-device on, I can turn my phone off or lose my network connection and still get messages on my desktop. That would be really important for a tablet app, to be able to use the app even if your phone isn’t on. So the underlying technology is there.”

WhatsApp’s beta version of multi-device support, created last year, allowed users to link up to four devices at a time to their account. However, the downside was that you needed your phone to be connected to the internet the whole time for it to work—and even the beta version didn’t include any iPad support.

With the new technology allowing for data to remain encrypted while syncing, and Cathcart’s positive outlook, it seems that a native WhatsApp app may just be looming on the horizon after all.

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