WhatsApp is widely being used by the Indians. It is an important source of communication and almost 400 million people use WhatsApp in India.
Bandwidth Control
Recently, WhatsApp has reduced the maximum duration of WhatsApp status from 30 seconds to 15 seconds for Indian users.
The decision has been taken for the savior of the bandwidth of the internet because of the time of quarantine amidst the recent crisis due to the novel pandemic.
Nowadays, most of the people are handling their businesses and working from home. For this purpose, they directly or indirectly depend upon the internet.
It is, therefore, important to reduce the burden on the internet servers so that the internet may be available for more users.
Netflix, Facebook, and YouTube have already reduced the video quality to save the bandwidth of the internet so that more people may be able to use the internet smoothly.
As these websites consume a major portion of the bandwidth of the whole Internet, therefore, these steps will be very effective for the overall speed of the internet.
Similarly, WhatsApp might have taken the same step to save the bandwidth of the internet. This update was revealed the twitter account WABetaInfo posting that
You can no longer send videos to WhatsApp Status if they are longer than 16 seconds: only videos having a duration of 15 seconds will be allowed.
This is happening in India and it’s probably an initiative to reduce the traffic on the server infrastructures.
It doesn’t matter whether you are using a beta version of WhatsApp or the other one, this change will be equally applicable to all the versions.
It is probably being tested on Indian users only but it is also expected that, later on, it will be equally used for all the users. But hopefully, these changes might revert after the recent crisis.