WhatsApp Change Number Feature: Automatically Notify Your Contacts

WhatsApp Change Number Feature

Just like moving house, changing your phone number can be a laborious and stressful undertaking. You have to let everyone know and update a bunch of accounts with the correct information. And there's always at least one thing you forget about, frustratingly. An update to WhatsApp's 'change number' feature hopes to make the process a little bit more bearable.

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When a user has a new phone number, he can use the Change number feature in WhatsApp Settings, that allows migrating own data to the new number.

See Also: WhatsApp All Latest Updates & News (2018)

The chat history will be preserved when the user uses this feature, and WhatsApp notifies in all current groups that a participant has changed his number on WhatsApp, so the user won’t have to join in his groups again.

WhatsApp Change Number Feature - How to access it?

The feature can be accessed by navigating to Settings > Account > Change number, and it was already pretty useful. It would migrate your account info, settings, groups, and even chats (as long as you use the same phone). Your groups would already be notified automatically, but in an update rolling out to the beta channel currently, you'll now get an option to notify your individual contacts, too.

You can choose to notify all your contacts, just those you have chats with, or choose only specific friends. As before, all your groups are notified regardless of this new setting. It seems the extra functionality comes as part of a server-side update, but you do have to be on beta version 2.18.97 to get it.

You need to update your WhatsApp version to the 2.18.97 Android beta update on Google Play Store, in order to remotely receive the activation of this feature. You should already have the updated 'change number' feature if you are on the beta channel. If not, you can install the latest version manually by downloading it from APK Mirror.
WhatsApp has decided to improve this feature, adding more functionalities and control for the user.

After the migration, in the recipient’s phone all shared messages in the old chat will be transferred in the new one and in the chat will appear a new bubble, indicating that the user has a new number: a very important step!

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