WhatsApp has added an @all mention that notifies every member of a group chat at once, catching up to a notification feature long available in Discord, Slack, and Microsoft Teams Engadget.

The workflow is familiar to anyone who has used those platforms: type @all in the message field, tap the suggestion that appears, compose your message, and send it. Everyone in the group gets a notification. WhatsApp's help center documents the process here. In groups with more than 32 members, only admins can use the @all ping Engadget. That cutoff likely reflects concern about notification spam in large groups, where a mass mention could flood a lot of phones at once.

One important detail: @all pings deliver notifications even in chats you have muted. But users can separately mute just the @all pings in their notification settings, independent of the broader group mute Engadget. This two-layer approach gives recipients a way to silence mass pings without missing other group activity, while still letting admins push through genuinely urgent messages.

Alongside the @all ping, WhatsApp shipped several other group-focused improvements. Polls now support an end time for voting and an option for anonymous responses. Poll creators have a 15-minute window to edit a poll question after posting it. The platform also added a quick-split function: users can spin up a new sub-group from an existing chat with a single tap, making it easier to pull a side conversation out of a larger group Engadget.

These additions build on a steady stream of group-chat feature work. In April 2025, WhatsApp introduced a "Notify for" setting that lets users restrict group notifications to @mentions, replies, and messages from saved contacts, or choose "All" for full notifications WhatsApp Blog. In January 2026, the platform added customizable member tags that describe a member's role within a group, configurable per group WhatsApp Blog. A dedicated @ button for catching up on mentions and replies was also introduced at an unspecified date WhatsApp Blog. A status-update feature allowing users to mention a group, thereby notifying all members who can then reshare the status, rounds out the broader set WhatsApp Blog.

The @all ping follows a notification convention that predates WhatsApp's adoption by nearly a decade. Facebook Messenger introduced @ mentions in March 2017, letting users notify someone by typing the @ symbol or the first few letters of a name Meta Newsroom. Slack, Discord, and Teams have long offered their own equivalents, with Discord and Slack using @here and @everyone variants that distinguish between active members and all members. WhatsApp's implementation does not make that active-versus-all distinction.

The broader context here is WhatsApp's gradual convergence with the feature sets of dedicated collaboration tools. The platform has historically prioritized simplicity and speed over the rich notification and moderation controls found in Slack or Teams. The admin restriction above 32 members, the granular mute for @all pings, and the "Notify for" setting all point to an effort to give group administrators more control without alienating casual users who make up the bulk of WhatsApp's base. Whether that balance holds as groups grow larger and noisier is the open question.

Meta has also been extending the @-mention convention beyond group chats. In July 2026, the company announced "Muse Image," which lets users generate images in Meta AI by @-mentioning public Instagram accounts Meta Newsroom. The mention syntax is becoming a cross-platform interaction pattern within Meta's ecosystem, linking WhatsApp groups, Instagram, and Meta AI through a shared convention.

The poll improvements address practical friction that has existed since polls launched. Anonymous voting removes social pressure in sensitive group decisions. An end time for votes gives moderators a tool to enforce participation deadlines rather than leaving polls open indefinitely. The 15-minute edit window is a narrow correction mechanism, tight enough to prevent a creator from changing a question after meaningful responses have accumulated, but long enough to fix typos or clarify wording.

The group-split feature is the smallest of the additions but arguably the most useful for daily workflow. Anyone who has participated in a large WhatsApp group knows the pattern: a thread of side conversation develops that is relevant to only two or three members but clutters the main chat. One-tap subgroup creation reduces the friction of moving that conversation elsewhere.

Taken together, these updates signal WhatsApp's continued investment in making group chats more governable and productive. The platform is not transforming into a Slack competitor, but it is steadily borrowing the notification and moderation tools that make group communication at scale manageable. For the many organizations, community groups, and families that run on WhatsApp, that incremental borrowing has real utility.