WAHA 2026.5 - the summer one

This month’s release is mostly fixes — a few things that were quietly broken and finally got the attention they deserved. Two small additions for GOWS snuck in too.

🎞️ Animated Stickers (GOWS)

Lottie stickers (application/was) now convert to animated WebP instead of arriving as a dead static frame. Took a while to get around to it, but here it is. — #2039

📢 Status Broadcast Batch Size (GOWS)

If you send status updates to a lot of contacts and were seeing timeouts, there’s now an env var for that:

WAHA_GOWS_STATUS_PARTICIPANTS_BATCH_SIZE=500

Default is 500. Was higher before, which caused batch timeouts on bigger accounts. — #2080

🛠️ Fixes

GOWS

• Every outbound message returning 400 until you restart the session. — #2084
• Encrypted message edits not handled. — #2062
• MediaRetry only fired on 403, now fires on any ciphertext hash mismatch too. — #2085
• Sticker download was hitting a stale placeholder URL and failing silently.
• gif→mp4 conversion when sending video. — #2077

WEBJS

• Sessions getting stuck in starting / stopped with large RemoteAuth in PostgreSQL. Node.js Buffer limit. — #2090
• Symlinks in remote storages now ignored — PLUS.
• E2E session and disappearing messages settings broken. — #2046

NOWEB

• message.edit event wasn’t firing. — #2072
• gif→mp4 conversion, same as GOWS. — #2077

API

• POST /api/{session}/chats/overview now requires pagination. Was silently hanging for accounts with many chats. — #2070

📊 Dashboard

• E2E and disappearing messages settings now show up in the UI. — #2046

⚙️ Full Changelog

🆕 WAHA 2026.5 Changelog