It is useful to have more than one way to identify someone in a chat, and it is common for usernames to be accompanied by a photo. This is true of WhatsApp, but not everyone uses a profile photo.
It used to be the case that for anyone who had chosen not to use a profile photo, WhatsApp would fall back on using the photo you had manually configured from your address book. But this feature was removed some years ago – and now it is coming back for Android users.
It was never really clear why Meta removed the address book photo fallback option from WhatsApp as it really only served to make things more complicated for users. With no profile picture set, contacts were reduced to an avatar of their initials – something which can be hard to make sense of at a glance.
But, as WABetaInfo reports, this is changing back to the old method users being able to see a saved contact photo even when someone has not set a profile picture on WhatsApp:
This feature is available to a certain number of users for the iOS app. But now, WhatsApp is finally bringing the same functionality to the Android app as well. With the WhatsApp beta for Android 2.26.21.9 update, we discovered that the feature is finally available. When enabled, the contact’s address book photo appears automatically in the chat list and inside the conversation, and there is no additional setup required. This means that Android users no longer have to rely on the generic blank photo to identify contacts who haven’t set a profile picture on WhatsApp.
The site goes on to explain:
WhatsApp is now bringing this feature back in the latest update for Android. This means the app can show photos saved in the user’s address book when a contact does not have a profile picture on WhatsApp. This also applies when the contact’s profile photo is not available due to their privacy settings. The feature helps users quickly recognize people without seeing a blank default image in the chat list. Now, just like iOS users, Android users will also see address book photos when the profile picture on WhatsApp is not available.
The images are not shared beyond the device, and as well as making it significantly easier to identify contacts, it provides a degree of personalization that has been missing for a number of years.
At the moment, this feature is only available in the latest beta version of WhatsApp for Android, but it should not be long before it becomes more widely available.