Remembering the anniversaries of friends, relatives and colleagues every year could become easier thanks to a new function for WhatsApp. The messaging platform is in fact working on a system capable of showing upcoming birthdays and alerting the user when one of their contacts has a birthday. The goal is to integrate this type of reminder directly into the app, considering that it is also often used above all to send greetings. In this way, the transition from reporting to sending a message to the person concerned would become more immediate.
How birthday notifications will work on WhatsApp
The new feature was spotted in beta version 2.26.27.3 of WhatsApp for Android. It is still in development and cannot be used even by those participating in the testing program.
The app is preparing a screen called “Birthdays”, which can be translated into Italian as “Birthdays”, in which the contacts who will celebrate in the following days should appear. The new area would offer an overview of the closest anniversaries, allowing you to consult them in advance.
When the date recorded in a person’s card arrives, the service should show an internal notification to remind you of the birthday. The screen and the alert would therefore have two distinct roles: the first would allow you to check future recurrences, while the second would draw attention at the right time.
This would not be a stand-alone calendar to be compiled within the platform. WhatsApp would instead organize the information already stored on the phone, making it accessible in the same environment in which messages are exchanged.
The dates of birth will be taken from the smartphone address book
To determine which people to include in the list, WhatsApp should use the date of birth associated with the contact in the smartphone’s address book. If this field has not been filled in, the platform will not be able to know the day of the anniversary and will not show any warning for that name. Saving only the name and telephone number, therefore, will not be enough: to take advantage of the new tool you will also need to have added the date through the app used to manage contacts on the device.
However, it should not be necessary to communicate this information again in the WhatsApp settings. Cards already present on the phone would be used to automatically create the list and determine when to generate the report. The latter could therefore appear on one smartphone but not on another, so two people who have stored the same contact, but with different data, would not necessarily see the same recurrence.
The operation would be different from that adopted by Facebook, where each user can indicate their birthday and choose who can view it. In the case of WhatsApp, however, the information would depend on what the smartphone owner wrote down in his address book. Specific settings would therefore not be necessary to manage the visibility of anniversaries and to prevent their appearance it would be sufficient to not save the relevant date of birth or remove it from the card.
When will you turn on birthday reminders on Android
At the moment, a release date has not been communicated and there are no official indications on the time required for the new feature to reach the stable version of the app. Before deployment, the appearance of the screen, the behavior of the reports and any options available to manage them could be refined. The elements that have emerged so far therefore allow us to understand the general approach, but do not guarantee that the definitive interface will be identical to the one observed.
For now, adding birth dates to the address book will not automatically make the dedicated section appear, but you will need to wait for WhatsApp to enable it with a future update.
The feature should not be confused with age verification on WhatsApp
The birthday system is distinct from the process through which WhatsApp can ask some users to indicate their year of birth to verify their age. In some US states, the relevant laws require digital platforms to check that subscribers meet the requirements. In this case the data is provided by the account holder, is not visible to other people and is used exclusively to fulfill regulatory obligations.
Furthermore, once communicated, the year cannot be changed and should not be included in the appropriate screen. The new tool will instead depend on the dates stored on your phone. The two procedures therefore have different purposes and origins of the data, because one concerns the verification of the requirements for access to the service, while the other serves to remember a personal anniversary.
