After our friends from AndroidTR found some resources in the new update of WhatsApp for Android, I wanted to go deeper and analyze the iOS version to see if it was prepared to handle GIFs as well.

In the last update of WhatsApp for iOS (version 2.16.7), there are the same three new GIF glyphs found in Android and two more, apparently for Live Photos support.

Then, in the app binary, there are a lot of new methods designed to handle GIFs. They have even created a new class, WAGIFCreator, which seems to allow users to create GIFs from scratch with various images or a video.

It seems this feature is complete, but the WhatsApp team has to enable it remotely, as they have previously done with other capabilities like end-to-end encryption.