Some of the most popular apps in the world are notorious for refusing to provide a dedicated version for iPad owners. Instagram is one – search for that on your iPad’s App Store and you’ll see only the iPhone version (which you can run on an iPad, but will provide a substandard experience). But an even more famous and disappointing example is WhatsApp, which doesn’t even appear in App Store search on an iPad. What’s Meta got against iPadOS?
We don’t have any good news for Instagram users, but the lack of an iPad app for WhatsApp could change soon, based on a seemingly revealing new interview. Speaking to The Verge, WhatsApp boss Will Cathcart acknowledged that people had been asking for an iPad app for a long time – which is demonstrably true; our tutorial explaining how to get WhatsApp on iPad is one of the most widely read we’ve ever had – and said the company would “love to do it”.
Cathcart says much of the infrastructure to develop an iPad app is already in place, although he makes no immediate promises.
“We did a lot of work on the technology for supporting multiple devices,” Cathcart said. “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.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard rumours about an upcoming WhatsApp app for iPad. But this is at least the first time we’ve heard it directly from an official source.
This article originally appeared on Macworld Sweden. Translation (using DeepL) and additional reporting by David Price.
Author: Samuel Nyberg, Contributing Editor
Samuel is an editor for Macworld Sweden, writing about a wide variety of Apple products.