Like on any otherpopular messaging app, WhatsApp users exchange hundreds and thousands of messages with each other regularly. While people can quickly go back to older texts using chat search, not knowing the keywords of the text or other details leaves them with the option of manually scrolling up to find the text. There was some hope of this finally changing as developers started experimenting with a calendar search optionlast month on WhatsApp Web beta. This nifty search function now appears to have made its way to the beta version of the Android app as well.
Thanks to a tip from one of our readers, we discovered that individual and group chat search now offers a small calendar icon in the search field, opening up a full-sized calendar. This appears to be a server-side change, though, as not everybody on the beta channel is finding this calendar option just yet, including one of our colleagues here at Android Police.
I found this feature enabled with WhatsApp beta for Android version2.23.26.16, which was the latest release until version2.23.26.17dropped some hours ago.
This addition is certainly welcome and one that would take the pain out of going way back into your chat history. If available, the calendar icon should appear when you tap the Search option from the three-dot menu or go to the user or group profile and access the Search option there.
It works just as you would expect, though it’s not entirely in line with Android’s default date picker. There’s currently no way to switch between the months of the year without manually swiping or tapping the left/right pointers as shown in the screenshots above. However, we found that the year can be changed with a single tap, which is convenient.
Considering how helpful the search-by-date option would be, we expect it to be widely available across more devices in the future. WhatsApp also hasa couple of other exciting feature additionsin the offing, per recent beta versions, so the coming months could be quite interesting.
It’s worth pointing out that WhatsApp has been working on calendar search for iPhones since at least June 2020, with the first iOS beta coming earlier this year, as documented byWABetaInfo. So its arrival on Android was always on the cards. It is somewhat surprising, though, that WhatsApp Web beta picked up the update first and not its Android counterpart, given that it’s usually the other way around.
We must also note that the mainChattab on WhatsApp already has a search functionality, albeit without the Calendar option. Instead, users get to choose from filters like read/unread, images, videos, links, GIFs, audio, documents, and polls.
