WhatsApp is building a completely new Contacts Hub that instantly shows exactly who is online. The feature gets rid of the annoyance of opening individual chat windows just to guess if a friend is currently active on their phone. It centralizes your connections into a single, quickly accessible interface to encourage real-time conversations. It is a brilliant way to speed up how we talk to each other.
Inside the hub, you can organize your friends either alphabetically by name or chronologically by their active status. The underlying sorting algorithms are incredibly clever. They automatically pin active users at the very top of the list, while offline users are ranked sequentially by their last seen timestamps. Finding an available contact is now an instantaneous process.
The feature remains entirely within the internal testing phase and does not have a formal public release date for stable iOS users. Developers recently spotted the tool tucked away inside the iOS beta build number 26.20.10.70, giving us our first look at how it runs on Apple hardware. This iPhone development actually follows a parallel track on Android, where a nearly identical hub surfaced back in March 2026.
How the Hub Respects Your Existing Privacy Settings
With any new tracking interface, data visibility becomes an immediate concern. But the new Contacts Hub is strictly governed by WhatsApp’s existing privacy architecture. The hub will not override your current visibility preferences. If a user configures their privacy settings to hide their online status or last seen timestamp, they simply will not appear in the active hub list at all.