After our friends from AndroidTR found out some resources in the new update of WhatsApp for Android I wanted to go deeper and analyze the iOS version to see if it was prepared to handle GIFs as well.

In the last update of WhatsApp for iOS (version 2.16.7) there are the same three new GIF glyphs found in Android and two more for what it seems to be Live Photos support.

Then in the proper binary executable there are a lot of new methods designed to handle GIFs. They even have created a new Class WAGIFCreator which seems to allow to create GIFs from scratch with various images or a video.

It seems this feature is complete, but the WhatsApp team has to enable it remotely as they have previously done with other capabilities like E2E Encryption.