WhatsApp users around the world know that one of the service’s biggest limitations is its lack of an iPad application. In a new interview with The Verge today, however, the head of WhatsApp, Will Cathcart, addressed this limitation, saying that the company “would love” to launch an iPad app at some point.
While Cathcart didn’t dive into specifics, he did acknowledge that people have long been calling on WhatsApp to make an iPad app:
“People have wanted an iPad app for a long time.” Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp at its parent company Meta, told The Verge during an interview this week tied to a new US marketing push for the messaging app. “We’d love to do it.”
As we’ve covered multiple times at 9to5Mac, WhatsApp has been working on the underlying multi-device support required for an iPad app for a while now. In this week’s interview, Cathcart refers to this work and hints that it was the first step in the process towards bringing WhatsApp to the iPad.
“We did a lot of work on the technology for supporting multiple devices,” Cathcart said, referencing the rollout of opt-in, multi-device support for WhatsApp last year. “Our web and our desktop apps now have that. If I have 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.”
While we would have liked to see Cathcart offer some more specifics on when WhatsApp might release an iPad app, this is nonetheless a step in the right direction. On the flip side, Instagram head Adam Mosseri continues to resist the idea of ever launching an iPad app for the service.
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