WhatsApp is dusting off a piece of its origin story: the plain old “About” line that launched the app is back, but rethought for 2025’s messaging habits. The company has rebuilt that tiny presence field into a short, text-first update that sits where people already look — on your profile and at the top of one-on-one chats — so a quick note can explain why you’re slow to reply without a flurry of “you there?” messages.

The return is a little historical tidy-up. WhatsApp began life not as a threaded chat app but as a presence tool: you told your contacts a short line about your status and they could read it. Over time, the app layered on full messaging, photo-heavy Statuses and channels, and that original “what I’m doing” text faded into the background. The refreshed About is explicitly pitched as a modern take on that early idea — the platform’s minimalist away message, upgraded to sit alongside a billion-plus users and far more expectations about privacy and context than in 2009.

How you actually see — and use — About is intentionally low-friction. It appears on your contact card and it shows at the top of individual chats, so your friend or coworker sees your short line as soon as they open a conversation. You can tap the About itself to react or respond, so it’s less a permanent biography and more a lightweight prompt that can spark a natural follow-up. That placement is meant to make availability clearer without cluttering the main inbox.

Crucially, About is ephemeral by default. The new implementation treats updates like a temporary note: the default expiry is 24 hours, but WhatsApp is giving people control over the timer — options range from just a few hours up to longer windows if you want something to stick around. Think of it as a way to set expectations — “in meetings until 5” — that vanishes so profiles don’t become a graveyard of stale statuses. Designers seem to have copied the best part of short-lived social features: useful context that won’t mislead later.

Privacy and audience controls are built into the feature, not bolted on. About follows WhatsApp’s existing visibility and privacy model: you can limit who sees your update to saved contacts, choose a custom list, or open it more broadly to anyone who can view your profile. The company is positioning those knobs as essential to make About work both for family chats and for semi-professional situations where you don’t want a client to see the exact same note your college roommate gets.

If the feature looks familiar, that’s because it borrows some design notes from Meta’s other apps. Instagram’s Notes and Facebook’s lightweight text updates have already proven that short, ephemeral text nudges can sit alongside heavier content — WhatsApp’s spin is to frame About as a return to the app’s roots, not just a copy of what works elsewhere. Meta’s broader product strategy — adding lightweight social touches inside private apps while also experimenting with monetization across features — provides the backdrop for why WhatsApp is reintroducing this sort of status now.

The rollout has started: WhatsApp says the revamped About is reaching mobile users this week and will appear gradually across iOS and Android builds. That staggered approach means you may not see it immediately, but the changes should land via a normal app update or a server-side switch in the coming days. For users who missed the simpler status from WhatsApp’s early years, the update is a tidy, practical way to add a little context back into the noise of modern messaging.

There’s a small trade-off to watch. Lightweight, visible updates are helpful when they’re honest and controlled, but they also create one more surface to manage — and one more place where signals about availability could be misread. WhatsApp’s emphasis on timers and audience controls looks aimed at preventing stale or overly public updates, but how people use About will determine whether it unclutters conversation or simply becomes another tiny performance to keep up with. Either way, the change is a neat reminder: sometimes the simplest ideas from an app’s origin story still have work left to do.