WhatsApp is testing a Snapchat Stories-like feature in new “Status” tab, available to any beta tester with a jailbroken iPhone or rooted Android smartphone
The feature is similar to Snapchat ‘Snaps’ and Instagram ‘Stories’ and only available for public beta users with jailbroken iPhones and rooted Android smartphones.
Context & Ripple Effects
The beta build circulating in November 2016 is the first sighting of what became one of Facebook's most consequential feature clones: within months, WhatsApp shipped Status publicly as an encrypted Snapchat Stories copy, per the February 2017 launch coverage from TechCrunch. The rollout had an immediate casualty — WhatsApp's original text-based Status disappeared when the Stories tab replaced it, prompting the company to promise its return in March 2017.
The clone also knitted Facebook's properties together: by January 2018 Instagram confirmed it was testing cross-posting of Stories into WhatsApp as a Status, turning three separate apps into one distribution surface for ephemeral sharing.
First-order effects
- Beta testers running jailbroken iPhones or rooted Android smartphones get early access to the Status tab, while ordinary users still see the classic text Status it will displace.
- Snapchat now faces imitation not just from Instagram but from WhatsApp, whose larger messaging base puts the Stories format in front of hundreds of millions more users.
Second-order effects
- Facebook turns its app portfolio into a cloning pipeline — a format proven on Snapchat gets replicated across Instagram and WhatsApp, compressing the window in which any rival feature stays differentiating.
- Instagram's later cross-posting experiment makes Stories content portable between apps, shifting competition toward whoever owns the underlying identity graph rather than who invented the format.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, ephemeral sharing stops being any single company's product and becomes a commodity layer every messaging app ships — with platform owners like Facebook winning on distribution and encryption claims rather than invention.
- Feature parity through cloning raises the stakes for originators like Snapchat to keep innovating ahead of imitators, since first-mover advantages in social formats prove short-lived.
The trend: Social features are converging into shared formats cloned across platform owners' entire app portfolios, with WhatsApp's Status showing how quickly an inventor's advantage erodes once a giant replicates it.