WhatsApp puts emoji front and centre of app and makes text formatting slicker

WhatsApp has built new features that are designed to make conversations look more visually appealing. The first of these improves on WhatsApp's existing text formatting functionality. While you've long been able to change the appearance of your messages to emphasise certain words or phrases, until now, you've had to remember a range of straightforward but fiddly commands to do so. To make text bold, you've needed to place it between two asterisks, like *this*. To italicise it, you've had to sandwich it between two underscores, like _this_, and to strikethrough a message, you've needed to use tildes, like this .