Friday, March 29, 2024
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How to use two WhatsApp accounts on one phone



WhatsApp has been a stalwart messaging service for years, but the last 12 months have brought many new features as its parent company, Meta, upgrades it for the future.


The latest addition is the ability to use more than one WhatsApp account on your phone – making it easy for people to switch between accounts without lengthy logins and verification processes. Here’s everything you need to know about the feature.


How to use two WhatsApp accounts on one phone

Meta published a short blog in mid-October 2023 that announced the addition of multi-account usage in the WhatsApp app, a massive change for many users.

You’ll now be able to stay logged in to two different WhatsApp accounts in the app at once and swap between them and their inboxes at will.

There are some prerequisites, though – you’ll need a different phone number and SIM active in your phone for each account. This might mean your phone needs to be able to house two SIM cards, or you could use eSIM to do it virtually if applicable.

If you tick those boxes, though, this is how you set it up:

  1. Open WhatsApp.
  2. Tap on the Settings cog at the bottom right.
  3. Tap on the arrow next to your name.
  4. Tap Add account.
  5. Follow the steps to add your second account.

There you go – you should have a second account logged in and working. From the looks of things, those steps will also be how you swap between the two accounts once you have two logged in.

How do notifications work with two WhatsApp accounts?

Because you’re logged in to both accounts, things could get a little messy with notifications if you have two busy inboxes.

Meta says that you can choose notification and privacy settings for each account individually, so if you want only one of them actually to give you sound notifications, for example, that’s very much possible.

Why is having two WhatsApp accounts on one phone useful?

If you’re asking this question, there’s a good chance you only have a single WhatsApp account, which is the case for most of us who use it as a personal messaging and calling service.

However, WhatsApp is also massive in the world of business, where it provides an easy platform for individual business phones and indeed contact numbers for actual shops and services.

This update means that instead of carrying two phones at the same time and being forced to swap between them whenever you want to use a different account, people can start streamlining things and only carrying a single handset, which could be a way easier way to arrange things.

When will I be able to use the feature?

Sometimes, when new features are announced for WhatsApp, they go into testing phases and have slow rollouts that might actually take months to cover every territory the app is used in.

Equally, like this time, we sometimes don’t get much information about the rollout at all. The announcement blog post for this particular change just says that the change is being introduced without a timeline, so we’re under the impression that it should be rolling out worldwide now.

If you keep your WhatsApp app updated to the latest version, you’ll be in with the best possible shot of getting it added to your app soon, and you can always check your Settings section for it every so often as a way of double-checking.

However, as far as we can tell, there’s no way to get early access right now, so it’s a waiting game if you’ve got two phones that you’d really like to unite into just one.

Didn’t this already get added?

The number of new features being added to WhatsApp in 2023 means that things can get a little confusing – and there’s one in particular that sounds very similar to this.

Earlier this year, WhatsApp let you log into the same account on multiple devices, a quite big shift in how its logins worked. That’s also independently very helpful, but it’s not the same as this.

After all, that older change still ties everything into just the single WhatsApp account rather than two, so while they sound similar, they’re actually very different features.



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