As one of the world's most widely used messaging apps, WhatsApp has its ups and downs. Using the app to keep in touch with our loved ones regardless of distance is one of the benefits. But the barrage of telemarketing or spam calls has been an ugly side effect of the app's popularity. With millions using WhatsApp daily, one would imagine a feature to silence unknown callers would be built in. But that's currently not the case. Fortunately, the folks at WhatsApp are working on a way to silence all unknown callers with a simple toggle within the settings.

Evidence of this feature first appeared a couple of months ago, and it now seems to be making its way to a handful of beta testers with WhatsApp beta for Android version 2.23.10.7, per WABetaInfo. This newly added toggle can be found within Settings -> Privacy if it's live on your device. The screenshot below is from the publication's report on the feature back in March.

Silencing Unknown Callers on WhatsApp
Source: WABetaInfo

Similar to most WhatsApp betas, visibility might be limited to a handful of beta testers. However, this feature is on course to make its way to all beta testers and eventually to the stable channel. While enabling this toggle will silence calls from numbers that aren't in your contacts, they will continue to appear within the Calls tab. This would allow people to single out a person they know but don't have their number saved yet.

As WABetaInfo points out, the ability to silence unknown callers would also be a boon to creators of a WhatsApp Community whose phone number is always visible, leading to a never-ending cycle of spam and scam calls. There's no word on when the toggle will make its way to the stable channel at this point.

Among the recent additions to the beta version of WhatsApp for Android is the hotly anticipated bottom bar, with the Meta-owned chat app also making a small visual adjustment to enhance the visibility of missed calls.