WhatsApp will soon let you use two separate accounts on one phone, handy for those who use WhatsApp for work.
Mark Zuckerberg announced the plans on Facebook, posting, “soon you'll be able to have two WhatsApp accounts on one phone within the app,” alongside an image of the feature in action.
This doesn’t change how WhatsApp fundamentally works in the back-end, mind. You still need a phone number to set up a WhatsApp account, and you can only have one of these per phone number.
However, this multi-login perk was been requested for years by people who have dual-SIM phones, and those with a separate work phone who don’t want to have to carry it around all the time.
It’s such an obvious addition, you wonder why it took WhatsApp this long. The reality is no doubt more complicated, although Chinese WhatsApp rival WeChat even tested letting people make two accounts with one phone number back in 2022.
The big question: when is it coming? We’ve been told it’s “rolling out to Android users in the coming weeks,” with no word yet on an iPhone update.
WhatsApp has been busy recently. According to Wabetainfo, the latest beta tester version of the Android and iPhone WhatsApp app introduces “one listen” voice notes.
This is an intuitive extension of the View Once image and video feature WhatsApp introduced in 2021.
It makes your chats that bit more private, particularly if you have an other half who tends to snoop over your message history.
That’s not all. Just yesterday, we wrote about WhatsApp’s new passkeys support, a security feature that lets you login with your fingerprint, face, or screen lock pin rather than a traditional password.
