WhatsApp will soon let you limit who joins your group chats

The messaging app is also introducing gender-neutral emoji

If you've got an invite link for a group chat on WhatsApp, you'll find you can immediately join it without any other trouble. A new feature the messaging app is working on may soon change that, though, as it is introducing a way that admins can limit who can join a group chat from these links. In an upcoming update, spotted by WABetaInfo, WhatsApp will be introducing admin approval as an optional extra to help them marshal group chats.

Admins will need to manually turn the feature on, allowing all other admins to choose who can enter a particular chat from a group invite link. This will likely become useful for more extensive group chats rather than small groups of your friends and family. The feature is referred to as "group membership approval" in the app, and it'll appear in the group settings so you can toggle it on and off. If you do toggle it, WhatsApp will send a notification to the group chat to confirm the change in settings to everyone.

If you're an admin and have the feature turned on, you'll get a notification when someone wants to join a group chat. These requests will also appear in a new section within the group's info to see all your outstanding requests in one location.

As part of this update, WhatsApp will also introduce six new gender-neutral emojis that show characters with various skin tones and hair colors. Each has a beard to match their hair color.

We've yet to hear when this update will arrive on WhatsApp, and it'll likely be a while until we see this feature roll out to the official app. Recently, we've seen changes to WhatsApp, such as group chats that can include 512 members, plus there's the relatively recent message reactions feature.