You know the drill. You add somebody—or you get added—to a group chat on WhatsApp, and there’s an immediate need to get the addition up to speed. What was recently discussed? What’s the group chat participants talking about right now?
What follows is an annoying task that somebody gets saddled with. What if you could just hit a button to automatically catch them up? WhatsApp just added such a button. It’s called Group Message History.
a game of catch-up
“When you add someone new to a group chat, you’ll see an option to send recent messages to them—from 25 up to 100 maximum,” wrote Meta (which owns WhatsApp) in a February 19, 2026 announcement.
“This keeps things simple, ensuring new members only need to read the most relevant, recent context, and the whole group can easily see the messages that have been shared.”
Like with WhatsApp’s regular messages, Group Message History exchanges are also end-to-end encrypted for privacy. Somebody in the group chat has to manually send out the message history; it isn’t automatic when somebody new joins the group.
The group chat’s admin(s) can choose to enable or disable the ability for anyone in the group to send the message history, although even if they disable it the admins will always have the option to share it.
“For transparency, when message history is sent, everyone in the group is notified, with clear timestamps and sender information, and message history is visually distinct from regular messages,” WhatsApp writes in its product announcement.
The feature is rolling out “gradually,” according to Meta. It doesn’t say what “gradually” means, though. When everyone will get it or whether it’s coming to certain countries before others, we don’t know, thanks to Meta’s coy vagueness.
But maybe once it does roll out to everyone, those who got it last can use Group Message History to catch up on everything they missed.
The post WhatsApp Now Lets New Group Members Catch Up on Old Messages appeared first on VICE.
