There is something that is increasingly noticeable in the development of WhatsApp and that is that the Meta application seems to be constantly inspired by what Telegram has been doing for a long time. According to new reports from WABetaInfo, WhatsApp would be working on a function that will send notifications to remind you of your contacts' birthdays, something that has already been part of the daily life of Telegram users for a couple of years.

How the new WhatsApp reminder will work

The idea behind this feature is quite simple and gets straight to the point. WhatsApp will enable a section within the app where you can check the upcoming birthdays of your contacts without having to write them down on a separate calendar. When the indicated day arrives, the application will send an internal notification that will notify you so that you don't miss congratulating that person.

The interesting thing is where WhatsApp gets this information from. The function will rely on the data that Meta began requesting for age verification reasons, a legal requirement that until now only served to comply with regulations and was not visible to anyone. Now that same database will be reused for something much more social and less bureaucratic.

It is worth clarifying that the function is still in a very early stage of development and not even beta users can access it for now. There is also no official release date, so for now we just have to wait for Meta to decide to give the green light to this feature in future updates.

Telegram has had this for a while

This is where the obligatory comparison comes in. Telegram implemented birthday reminders in April 2024, as part of a complete revamp of user profiles. Since then, users of that platform can see the birthday of each of their contacts without depending on third parties or external social networks.

This WhatsApp movement joins another trend that has been growing strongly and is the displacement of Facebook as the place where people found out about their friends' birthdays. For years, that social network was the obligatory reference for knowing when to congratulate someone, but fewer and fewer people actively use it, so WhatsApp seeks to fill that gap by taking advantage of the fact that it is already the most used messaging app on the planet.

Furthermore, this feature comes just days after WhatsApp began implementing usernames, another feature that Telegram normalized much earlier. It seems that Meta is carefully reviewing its competitor's catalog of functions to gradually add them to its own platform.

Privacy and details that still need to be resolved

Before you get too excited, there are several outstanding issues that the company has not yet clarified. For now, there is no privacy setting that allows you to choose whether you want to share your date of birth with your contacts or keep it hidden. This raises legitimate questions, especially since the data was originally collected for purely regulatory purposes and not for social use.

Another important detail is that if a contact has never shared their date of birth, no reminder will simply appear for that person. This makes sense because WhatsApp does not request this information in all regions yet, which means that the feature will start with incomplete information in several countries.

For now, the development remains exclusive for Android within beta testing, although it is very likely that it will also eventually reach iOS once the WhatsApp team considers that the function is sufficiently polished. Meanwhile, the comparison with Telegram remains inevitable, because each new function that WhatsApp adds seems like another chapter in that silent race between both messaging apps.