More than two weeks ago, we reported that Facebook-owned WhatsApp was working on a new shortcut button called ‘Mark as Read‘ that would allow users to quickly mark the messages as read from the notification. At that time, this feature wasn’t available to the users as it was still under development, but now, with a beta update for Android, WhatsApp has started rolling out the ‘Mark as Read’ button to the users.
According to WABetaInfo, WhatsApp has started rolling out the ‘Mark as Read’ shortcut button with beta update 2.18.232 for Android. This new shortcut button appears in the WhatsApp message notifications, sitting right next to the ‘Reply To’ button.
Like we already said, this ‘Mark as Read’ button allows the users to quickly mark messages as read right from the notification, eliminating the need to open the app to do so. While WhatsApp has started rolling out this shortcut button for Android users with beta update 2.18.232, it’s still not available to all the users who are using this version of the app, which indicates that this is a server-side roll-out. If you too are using beta version 2.18.232 of WhatsApp for Android and don’t see this button yet, you will have to wait it out.
Well, in addition to the ‘Mark as Read’ button, WhatsApp is also working on a ‘Mute’ button that would allow users to mute WhatsApp chats straight from the notification panel. However, this button will only show up when you have received more than 51 messages from a chat – either private or group.
Now that WhatsApp has started rolling out the ‘Mark as Read’ button to beta users on Android, we can expect it to roll out to all users on stable version soon. Perhaps the company will roll-out both the ‘Mark as Read’ and ‘Mute’ buttons together on the stable channel.
