WhatsApp is building a camera called Instants for quick, unedited photos and short videos that disappear once the recipient has looked at them. It exists only as unfinished code in the Android beta for now.
A small lightning symbol at the top of your chat list would open it. You shoot a photo or a clip of up to 30 seconds, type a short caption and send it to a contact.
Instagram has offered the same tool since 13 May 2026. The gallery is closed to it, so whatever you send was taken moments earlier and could not be touched up in a third-party editor. The code sits in WhatsApp’s Android beta 2.26.45.13, as the beta’s strings show.
The strip along the bottom offers ten looks, from a plain Original to warped ones such as Bulge and Fisheye and retro ones such as VHS and Fade. Expect that set to shift, because the screen is not final.
Privacy is the difference from a status update. An Instant is end-to-end encrypted, which leaves WhatsApp unable to open the picture or its caption. Screenshots would also be blocked while the recipient is viewing it, which statuses do not do.
Videos and photos share one flow: the caption box appears before sending, and the filter strip sits along the bottom of the screen, so the layout will feel familiar to anyone who has used Instagram’s version.
Sending is restricted to your address book in both directions: you must hold their number, and they must hold yours.
Nobody outside the beta can try it yet. The next sign to watch for is a beta build where the lightning symbol really opens the camera, which is when a release date starts to look realistic.
