WhatsApp Is Finally Bringing Mentions to Text Status Updates. Here Is How It Works

WhatsApp’s status feature has quietly become one of the more personal corners of the app, a space for thoughts, announcements, quotes, and moments that sit somewhere between a direct message and a public broadcast. For the past two years, one part of that experience has been incomplete: mentions worked for photo and video statuses, but text-only updates were left out entirely. That is about to change.

What Is Rolling Out

WhatsApp is rolling out the ability to mention contacts in text status updates, discovered in the WhatsApp beta for Android version 2.26.25.2, available on the Google Play Store. The feature is currently available to a limited number of beta testers and is being gradually expanded to more users over the coming weeks.

The mechanics are straightforward and consistent with how mentions already work for media statuses. While typing a text status, users will see a new button appear above the send button. Tapping it opens the contact picker, where the user selects who to mention. Once a contact is chosen, WhatsApp automatically sends them a private notification, no additional steps required.

The Privacy Logic Is Worth Understanding

The mention never appears as visible text inside the status itself. Anyone else who views the update has no way of knowing a mention was included. Only the tagged contact receives a notification and a message in their chat letting them know they were mentioned, keeping the interaction private between the user and the person they tagged.

There is one additional detail that makes the feature particularly useful: a mentioned contact will always be able to view the status they were tagged in, even if that contact would normally be excluded based on the user’s existing privacy settings. If someone has configured their status to be visible only to selected contacts and the mentioned person is not on that list, the mention overrides that restriction, functioning as a personal invitation for that specific status update only. The privacy setting is not permanently altered, and no other contacts are affected. It simply ensures the person you specifically tagged can always see what you wanted them to see.

Why This Took Two Years

WhatsApp introduced mentions for photo and video status updates back in 2024. At the time, the option was available through the drawing editor when sharing media, a natural fit given the visual nature of the content. Text statuses, by contrast, have a simpler composition interface, and extending the mention feature to them required a different implementation approach.

The result is a clean addition: a dedicated mention button in the text status composer rather than a drawing-tool integration. The underlying behaviour, private notification, contact picker, and privacy override, is identical to the media version, which means the experience is consistent across all status types rather than working differently depending on what someone is sharing.

Availability

The feature is currently live for some Android beta testers on version 2.26.25.2. WhatsApp is gradually expanding access, and users who update but do not immediately see the mention button should expect it to appear in the coming weeks. No official timeline has been announced for the stable release, but given the gradual rollout pattern WhatsApp typically follows with beta features, a broader release is expected in the near term.

There is no word yet on an iOS beta equivalent, though features that roll out on Android beta typically follow on iPhone within a similar timeframe.

The Bottom Line

WhatsApp mentions for text status updates is not a headline feature, it is a completion. The gap between what photo and video statuses could do and what text statuses could do has existed for two years, and closing it makes the platform more consistent and more useful for the people who prefer to share in words rather than images.