Popular Instant Messaging Application, WhatsApp, yesterday launched a desktop application that mirrors conversations and messages from a user’s smartphone device.
This was revealed via a blog post on the WhatsApp website and it was disclosed that “Because the app runs natively on your desktop, you’ll have support for native desktop notifications, better keyboard shortcuts and more.”
WhatsApp has made itself available on desktop before, through a web client called WhatsApp Web. The company launched that service in January 2015, initially for Android and Windows Phone users, before adding support for iOS users as well.
But its new desktop apps offer more native support, the ability to use keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to have messages open in a separate window as opposed to being in a browser or lost in a sea of tabs.
The new desktop application is no different from it’s mobile counterpart and is available for users running Windows 8 or Mac OS 10.9 and above, and can be synched with WhatsApp on a user’s mobile device.
There have been several desktop apps in the past that have acted as wrappers for the browser plugins, such as ChitChat for Mac OS X, but this is the first time that Facebook-owned WhatsApp is providing its own native desktop solution.
