Viber added support for Western Union to send money from the U.S. to anyone in 200 countries.

Viber is rolling out a pretty big update today for Android and some of those new features are more like playing catch-up with competing messaging platform. The new version introduces a backup and restore mechanism should users have to either factory reset their devices or simply, for some reason, uninstall and reinstall Viber on their phones. However, Viber will only backup your text messages to Google Drive. Should your messages contain, pictures, GIFs etc, you're out of luck as they will be ignored. One more thing, data saved to Google Drive is no longer protected by Viber encryption; Your messages will be plain visible to anyone with access to your Google Drive. Another thing, there is no way to automate or schedule regular backups of your data in Viber. It has to be done manually, but hopefully, Viber will improve on that in a future update.

What's a messaging app without support for animated GIFs? Again, with all popular competing platforms already offering this feature, it's great for Viber users to finally be able to add animated GIFs to their messages.

Viber also added support for Western Union to allow users to send money from the U.S. to anyone "in more than 200 countries and territories." Cash can even be sent to bank accounts directly, but this service is available "in nearly 50 countries" only.

These are some great features with some that Viber needs to do some work to improve. In the mean time, download the update in Google Play Store.