WeChat's folded image sending gray test is here—are chats finally cleaner?

Speaking of a ubiquitous app like WeChat, people of my generation all have somewhat mixed feelings about it. It’s not like a standalone wuxia game that can stay in your memory for years because of a single ending, but it has accompanied us all the way through the mobile internet era after the age of feature phones, and has long since become an inescapable “basic move” in daily life. Precisely because we’ve used it for so long, every time it adds a small detail that should have been there, I can’t help but feel, “This move is finally mastered.”

What has drawn attention this time is that WeChat is reportedly conducting a limited rollout test of a “collapsed image sending” feature. Based on the information currently circulating, in WeChat version 8.0.69 on the iOS platform, if a user selects more than three photos or videos at once, a “Merge and Send” option will appear at the bottom. In other words, the long stream of images flooding the chat window may in the future be compressed into a neater display format.

The news was first relayed on March 17 by IT之家, citing a post by Xiaohongshu user @爱吃香菜饭, who shared the discovery and said the feature had only appeared that afternoon, which means it is most likely still in internal testing. Other users added some important details as well: the collapsed preview supports left-right swiping for adjustment, and tapping “Expand” on the left restores the original viewing mode; once expanded, it can also be “collapsed” again.

So this is not just a matter of crudely stuffing images into a single bundle, but rather an attempt to strike a balance between neatness and readability. In terms of the product experience itself, this kind of change may look minor, but it is genuinely practical. Especially in work groups, family groups, or travel-sharing groups, three or five images are fine, but when a dozen or more are dumped into the chat all at once, the chat history feels like a barrage of hidden weapons, and it becomes hard for others to find even a single text message. If they can now be automatically collapsed, the overall visual experience will at least feel much cleaner.

Beyond sentimentality, what has most often made users feel frustrated with WeChat in recent years is actually not the lack of features, but how slowly many overdue details get added. Fortunately, although the official changelog for 8.0.69 still uses the same old line—“fixed some known issues”—it had already been discovered earlier that features such as locking video calls and “Play from Current” support for chat messages had been added. Now, with collapsed image sending included as well, it at least shows that WeChat is still continuing to patch and improve things, rather than completely lying flat.

That said, looking at it calmly, this feature is still only in limited testing for now and has appeared only for some iOS users; as for when it will roll out to Android and on a broader scale, there is still no definite word. Feedback from the user community—or simply the general user base—has overall been welcoming, because it solves a very specific everyday pain point rather than being some flashy but superficial new feature.

If it officially launches later on, I think it will be the kind of change that “you never mention in daily life, but once you have it, you can’t go back.” It’s a bit like an old domestic game finally adding the hotkeys it should have had all along—not necessarily amazing, but undeniably sincere. I just hope WeChat will stop hiding useful updates behind a vague one-line changelog. Features that deserve to be clearly explained should be communicated to users openly and directly. After all, this kind of experience optimization is the real internal skill that truly makes an app feel smooth to use.