In an era of cutthroat competition, some ofour favorite messaging appschose to pursue new features, even if recent additions come at the cost of their unique brand identity in the space. WhatsApp is guilty as charged, considering how it spent the better part of the lasttwo years chasingdown Telegram’s long list of features. The app even has a major UI design overhaul in the works, but it mostly revolves around giving all the new features a suitable home in the UI. Meanwhile, Telegram offersplenty of UI customizationoptions, but WhatsApp still trails behind by a whopping decade.
WhatsApp and its apathy for UI design innovation
WhatsApp may have caught up to the likes of Discord and Telegram with features like Channels for broadcast messaging, and Communities for group interactions revolving around shared topics. However, the app offers little to no customization options — yes, you can configure notification priority, toggle in-app sounds, and mute chats when needed, but visually, WhatsApp still sticks to the green and white/black color UI we have seen for over a decade.
Telegram offers custom icons, chat themes, and more, even in the free version
At most, you can install the standalone WhatsApp Wallpapers app as a plug-in and pick from ahandful of chat backgrounds. Unfortunately, Play Store records show the WhatsApp Wallpapers app was last updated on August 11, 2025. That’s a little over 12 years ago. It probably survived on the Play Store without an update for so long because the app doesn’t have an icon, and it doesn’t show up in your app drawer either. As a consolation, perhaps, WhatsApp allows setting an image from your gallery as a chat background.
The underground customization scene
Personalization enthusiasts like me are left with no option except turning to the thriving app modding community for a customization fix. WhatsApp’s longtime aversion to UI customization has spawned a thriving segment of modified apps. There are several dozen of them, but popular options include GB WhatsApp, WhatsApp Plus, and FM WhatsApp.
All these alternatives leave WhatsApp’s white and green theme in the dust, allowing you to customize the color of individual UI elements like the app font, icon, top bar, message bubbles, floating action buttons, and search bar. you may also pick from several custom themes made by fellow modders, or set up an image from your gallery as the chat list background. Most importantly, the UI still looks distinctly like a Meta app, even with all the customizations applied.
Besides the UI options, all these apps offer unique features WhatsApp doesn’t officially support. For instance, FM WhatsApp allows choosing who can call you, and setting up chat groups with up to 5,000 members. GB WhatsApp allows setting up auto-replies, viewing the history of edited messages, custom notifications for profile picture changes, and message filtering.
Using unofficial WhatsApp mods could attract a permanent ban from Meta
Customization comes at a cost
Although WhatsApp mods offer a plethora of customization options, they are unauthorized clones. The developers may claim encryption and other security features are retained, but there’s amassive privacy riskbecause your data is passing through third parties. Using such apps can also expose you to malware, phishing scams, spyware, and ransomware. Even if you install the mod from the developer’s own website, every third-party add-on like a theme could pack malware. Using mods also complicates WhatsApp cloud backups. In such apps, even the promise ofend-to-end encryptionmay feel like a hoax.
Moreover, WhatsApp regularlybrings down the ban hammeron people using such unauthorized mods, because they violate the app’s terms of service. Meta starts withhour-long bansandescalates the ban durationto slap repeat offenders with permanent bans. Pretty early in this string of demerits, most WhatsApp users would say that’s a steep price to pay for customization options and a few additional features, and they would be absolutely right. One could argue WhatsApp is proprietary andMetaisno data privacy sainteither, but you might just be uninteresting enough in a pool of billions of WhatsApp users, and rather visible among the few thousand people using malware-infested mods.
However, there’s one massive takeaway for Meta from all these unofficial mods — there’s oodles of room for UI customization on WhatsApp for Android, and it will not dull the brand’s identity or reduce the UI’s simplicity. Even Slack, a corporate communication tool, offers color and theming utilities. Meta deserves credit for bringing WhatsApp up to speed with new features like multi-device support,Communities, andChannels. With such features still developing in the recent beta versions, UI changes are understandably on the back burner for WhatsApp, but Meta might as well put the update-starved WhatsApp Wallpapers app out of its misery, or give us some great personalization options to play around with, for once.
