WhatsApp users are getting another great free upgrade

Useful improvements are coming to polls, photo captions and document sharing too

WhatsApp upgrade may 2023
(Image credit: WhatsApp)

If the day ends in a "y", that means there's a new WhatsApp update on the way – and today is no exception. The popular messaging service with a constant upgrade cycle has three improvements that'll be rolling out to your phone in the next few days or weeks.

This time the upgrade brings improvements to three areas: polls and voting; sharing photos; and sharing documents.

WHAT'S NEW IN THE MAY 2023 WHATSAPP UPDATE?

The polls feature is getting three new updates to make it easier to gather information and make decisions in groups. The first is the ability to create single-vote polls by unticking the "allow multiple answers"; this ensures that each person only gets to vote for one option. 

The chat filters have been updated too, so you can now filter your saved chats by polls as well as photos, videos or links. That's handy as it means you can find polls you weren't able to deal with when they first appeared in chat.

And thirdly, you can now receive notifications when people vote on your polls and see how many people have responded so far.

The other two improvements are about sharing photos and documents respectively. There's a new captions feature for photos that enables you to add, rewrite or delete photo captions when you're forwarding the photo to others, and you can now also add a caption to a document you're sharing to give the recipient context.

As ever, these updates are rolling out rather than just appearing overnight; your app should have them within the next few days or weeks.

Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).