WhatsApp iPad app review: Exactly what you'd expect

WhatsApp wasn't kidding with that teaser yesterday — a dedicated iPad app for Meta's social networking platform followed just hours later.

This has been a long time coming — WhatsApp has been around for 15 years, and it's never had a standalone iPad app. So now that it's here, is it any good? We investigate.

WhatsApp iPad app: Who's this thing for?

I never really understood Meta's timidness about making the app for the world's most popular tablet. My logic is simple: If you're an iPad user, and you're a WhatsApp user, sometimes you'll be doing things on your iPad and you'll want to open up WhatsApp and do things there, and you'll want the experience to be as smooth as possible. Given how huge Meta and WhatsApp are, a lot of people expect an iPad app to exist, and they expect it to be good.

In this particular case, it means you'll want the WhatsApp iPad app to be pretty much the same as on your iPhone, only nicer to look at, and perhaps with some added features that take advantage of the iPad's large display.

Yes, you can always fire up a browser window on your iPad and log into WhatsApp's web version, but it just isn't as good as the standalone app.

WhatsApp iPad app: Better than messaging on your phone

The WhatsApp app on the iPad has a very similar layout as on my phone, with the bottom menu consisting of Updates, Calls, Communities, Chats, and Settings being exactly the same.

I've tried WhatsApp out on a 13-inch iPad Air, and the big display does make a difference. These days, my family, friends, and the communities I follow send a lot of photos and videos on WhatsApp, and seeing them on a crisp, 13-inch display is pretty great — though the bigger canvas does reveal how small and pixelated some of the shared memes really are.

Perhaps the best feature is the two-column view, which lets you see your chats on the left, and the content of a selected chat on the right. On the phone, you have to choose between one or the other, even when you flip the phone into landscape mode.

WhatsApp iPad app: Anything else?

Not in the way of any specific new features within the app. But the iPad itself allows for some cool ways to use WhatsApp. For example, the WhatsApp app supports Stage Manager, Slide Over, and Split View, and having both WhatsApp and Slack (my two main messaging apps) open side-by-side is pretty great. Apple's Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil are also supported.

It's also worth noting that on the WhatsApp app for iPad, you can join audio and video calls (with up to 32 people), which isn't possible on the web version of WhatsApp. And when it comes to video calls with lots of participants, your eyes will thank you if you're doing it on your iPad instead of the phone.

Finally, all of your chats will be synced between all of your devices, including the iPad, the iPhone, and Mac.

WhatsApp iPad app: Availability

The WhatsApp iPad app is a free download on Apple's App Store, but you do need to have iPadOS 15.1 or later installed to run it.