It’s long been possible to change the background in a WhatsApp conversation, but now, for the first time, you can customise the entire screen. That means changing the colour of your chat bubbles and everything!

So, all we’re going to do is, in a currently open chat, tap on the name of the conversation at the top and then select the new Chat Theme option.

At this point, there are some built-in themes that we can explore, and we can simply tap on one to get a preview of what that would look like in a real message. It’s important to note that all of these changes only apply to the conversation we started in—it’s not going to be system-wide across all of your chats. This means different friends and family members can have different-looking conversations.

I want something a bit more personal than the default preset at the top here, but that’s okay because underneath, you can change the chat colour and the wallpaper separately.

I’ll go on Chat Colour first, and here you can see you’ve got a bunch of different colours. This will recolour those message bubbles from green to whatever you choose. I can tap onto one, and again, I’ll get a preview just like before. I can use the button in the bottom corner to change my colour straight away, and I get that preview updated in real time.

We can even see how this looks in Dark Mode because, obviously, when your phone screen is darker, the colour of those messages will be darker as well. I like this kind of pale pastel pink colour—I think that’s quite nice. So, what I’m going to do is go back, and now I can change the wallpaper itself.

With the wallpapers, we can then choose anything we like. Again, there’s a bunch of photos that WhatsApp has included for you. You can use any of those, access your photo library to pick any picture you’ve got on your phone, or go for what I’m going to use today—a plain-coloured background.

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Okay, this is the pink colour that I like. I think the text bubbles really stand out against it. It’s a little bit paler, and it looks really cool. But at the moment, we’ve still got that default patterned background that WhatsApp likes to give us. You might like to keep this, but personally, I want something a little more minimal, a bit more stripped back, and I just want the pure colour.

So, in the bottom corner, I’m going to tap on this icon here, and now I’ve got a pure-coloured screen. Once you’ve chosen your chat colour and background colour, you can then press Set in the corner and go back to your main conversation.

Here, you’ll see that’s applied to the message thread, and it looks really nice! It definitely stands out from the old WhatsApp style, and when all my friends have different colour chats, it’ll be easy to see who I’m messaging and when.

Of course, if you want to go back to default, that’s possible as well. Just tap back on the name of the conversation, go back onto Chat Themes, and then in the corner, press the three dots and choose Reset Theme.