What's new in WACompanion

• New The loading screen is now a steam engine. The locomotive holds its position while clouds, hills and trees slide past behind it, so it keeps going for as long as the wait lasts instead of restarting every few seconds.
• Improved Steam chuffs from the funnel once every half turn of the wheels, and the wheels turn at the speed the track is actually passing — so nothing skids or drifts out of time.
• Improved It follows WhatsApp's light and dark themes, and holds still if your system is set to reduce motion.

• New A loading screen worth looking at. While WhatsApp starts up, the desktop app now shows a carrier pigeon flying a letter between two towers, with eight rotating tips for features most people never stumble across — the right-click menu especially.
• Improved It gets out of the way the moment WhatsApp is ready, and it never covers the QR code when you are signing in or linking a device. Click anywhere, or press Esc, to skip it.
• Improved Everything on it is drawn by your graphics card rather than the processor, so it cannot slow down the loading it is covering. Desktop app only — the browser extension is unchanged.

• Fixed Privacy Mode no longer collapses into a sliver. Turning it on and then letting WhatsApp redraw — opening Settings, switching chats — could shrink the "Chat list hidden" panel into a one-character-wide column of jumbled text down the left edge of the window. It now keeps its proper size and position however many times WhatsApp re-renders underneath it.

• New Move everything in one file instead of dozens of messages. Multi-Device Sync now has Export file and Import file buttons side by side. Export on one device, move the file however suits you — send it in WhatsApp and download it on the other side, email it, use a USB stick — then Import there. Two clicks instead of pressing Send on part after part.
• New The file is compressed and encrypted with your sync passphrase. In testing, 2,000 messages came to a 32 KB file — about 93% smaller than the raw data. If the passphrase does not match, the import says exactly that instead of failing cryptically.
• Improved On the desktop app, exporting asks you where to save and then tells you the exact path, so there is no hunting for the file afterwards.
• Improved Sending as chat messages is still there under "Or send as messages", for topping up between devices without a file to carry.

• Fixed Multi-Device Sync stalled after the first message. Between parts, WACompanion re-opened the sync chat even when you were already in it — which makes WhatsApp rebuild the conversation, so the next part was typed into a message box that was being replaced. It went nowhere, the box looked empty, and Send turned back into the microphone. It no longer re-opens a chat you are already viewing, and it now checks that each part actually landed instead of assuming.
• Improved Every Multi-Device Sync prompt is now drawn inside the page. The system pop-ups it used before could leave the window unable to accept typing at all.
• New If a sync part cannot be filled in, it now says so and tells you what to do, instead of leaving you waiting for something that is never coming.

• Fixed Setting a sync passphrase appeared to freeze the app. It used to open a second window on top of the sync panel — which sometimes landed behind it, invisible, while the panel in front absorbed every click. The passphrase box is now part of the sync panel itself, so there is no second window to get lost. (Dialogs that genuinely do need to stack now always open in front, too.)
• New Show your passphrase while typing it. The passphrase box now has an eye button, like a password field. A sync passphrase has to match exactly on every device and is never shown again afterwards, so typing it blind was an easy way to get locked out by a typo.
• Improved Sidebar icons you can tell apart. Multi-Device Sync was circular arrows, too close to the new Resync button beside it — it is now a devices glyph. Sticky Notes and Message Templates were both a rectangle with two lines; they are now a folded note and a speech bubble.

• New Desktop A Resync button in the sidebar. If WhatsApp ever stops receiving new messages, this reloads it — one click, instead of hunting through the app menu. It asks for confirmation first, since reloading clears anything you have typed but not sent.
• Fixed Desktop WhatsApp no longer reloads every time you come back to the window. The app used to treat "you looked at something else for 20 minutes" as a dropped connection and reload the page — which, for an app you check a few times a day, meant a blank screen on nearly every return. It now reloads only after your computer wakes from sleep, or when you ask it to.
• Improved Desktop When an automatic reload does happen it is quicker and quieter — no cleared cache to re-download, and no desktop notification for something you did not ask for.

• New Sticky Notes now have real formatting buttons — bold, italic, bulleted and numbered lists, checklists, and quotes. Click a button and the text changes immediately. Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I work too.
• Fixed Notes used to expect Markdown typed by hand, with the formatted version hidden behind an icon almost nobody found — so typing **bold** appeared to do nothing. That is gone. Your existing notes are converted automatically and keep their formatting, including checklists and quoted messages.

• New Desktop Search your chats in plain language. Describe what you are looking for — "the invoice Sarah promised" — instead of guessing the exact words someone used. It runs entirely on your own machine.
• Improved Desktop No more 200 MB download on first run. The language model ships inside the app. If it ever goes missing it is fetched again quietly in the background.
• New Colour the sidebar. Seven presets plus your own colours. The icons follow along, and every shade is derived so nothing ends up unreadable.
• Fixed Settings opened as a narrow strip down the left-hand side of the tab. It now lays out properly at any width. Sidebar icons no longer clip at the edges.

• Improved Lists moved into a panel that uses the full height of your screen and shows full list names with their colours, instead of a cramped column of single letters that had to be scrolled.
• Fixed Deleting a list works again. WACompanion had been hiding WhatsApp's own list bar — the only place rename and delete live. "Manage Lists" now brings it back whenever you need it.
• Improved Sidebar icons redrawn as line art, so they look identical on Windows, macOS and Linux and follow dark mode properly. They used to be emoji, which every operating system draws differently.

• Fixed Desktop The white screen on WhatsApp's Settings → Chats. The desktop app was built on a browser engine that had fallen about two years behind what WhatsApp Web now expects. Upgrading it fixed the crash. You may be asked to scan the QR code once after updating.
• Improved Desktop If WhatsApp's page ever crashes, the app now reloads it by itself instead of leaving a blank window.
• Fixed The tag button on a message no longer hides underneath the sidebar, and disappears once you move away instead of piling up on every message you scroll past.

• New Desktop A proper right-click menu — spelling suggestions, cut, copy and paste, plus tag this message, copy just the message text, add it to your notes, and insert a saved template.
• New Multi-device sync, carried over WhatsApp itself. Point two of your own devices at a chat you control and they exchange records directly — encrypted first, with no third-party server and no account to create.

The foundations: coloured Lists, message tagging with custom categories, per-chat sticky notes, message templates, chat reminders, privacy mode for screen sharing, and search across every conversation. All of it stored on your own device.

• Fixed Deleting a WhatsApp List was unreachable. WACompanion was hiding the very pills WhatsApp hangs rename and delete off — there is now a toggle in the Lists flyout to show WhatsApp's own list bar again.

• Fixed Opening Settings → Chats in the desktop app turned the whole window white and needed a restart. The bundled browser engine was two years old and WhatsApp Web had moved past it; upgrading the engine fixed it. You may need to scan the QR code once after updating.
• New If the app's display ever crashes, it now reloads itself and records why, instead of leaving a blank window.

• New The desktop app finally has a right-click menu — spell-check suggestions, copy and paste, plus insert and create template in the compose box. Electron ships none by default, so there had been no menu at all.