WhatsApp recently launched a new feature to its Android base, the Picture-in-Picture (PiP) mode it brought to iOS a while ago.
They've been testing it for months, and now you can finally make use of it, following an update from the Google Play Store of course.
Pre-update, when you clicked a video link in WhatsApp, it would open it up in corresponding app and start playing. Clicking the link will still do that, but clicking the video thumbnail will instead open up the video in a half-window within WhatsApp itself.
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You can shift this box around, play/pause, and maximize the video by tapping or turning your phone sideways. And since this is in a ?box at one end, you can continue typing your chat message at the same time.
Right now the feature works with major third-party apps that support video, like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and a couple of others. If PiP is supported, you'll just see a link in your chat. If the feature is available though, the link appears along with a blurred out thumbnail of the video that you tap to activate.