By Holly, Mozillion Team
More and more people are using WhatsApp as their main messaging app for the simple reason that it uses an internet connection rather than your smartphone’s network provider (e.g Vodafone) so it is free. It is also encrypted so other folk can’t spy on your messaging, and a great option for international messaging over wifi, especially if you are a big sender of photos or video which can work out extremely expensive otherwise.
It is also available on Android and Apple phones so fans of either can chat through the platform seamlessly.
One of the main drawbacks however, has been that it has been impossible to use WhatsApp on two phones or devices without having two separate accounts.
This can be frustrating in these days of interconnectivity where we just expect everything to seamlessly flow wherever we are from device to device without interruption.
Thankfully, this drawback has now been ironed out by the folks at Meta and you can run your WhatsApp account on not two, not three, but up to four devices! This includes smartphones, web browsers, laptops, tablets and desktop computers too so there will be pretty much no restriction on where and when you can respond to your hundreds of group chats (yay?). Clearly this isn’t something you have to make use of if you don’t want to either – some of us may feel they have enough message notifications firing off already 😉
If you do want to activate it though, you can rest assured that although linking another device allows you to read and post using the same account, it also copies your history across encrypted so prying eyes can’t have a sneaky butchers.
So how do you actually link another device?
- Install WhatApp on the device that you want to link to
- Open the app
- Agree with user agreement
- Go to More Options
- Then select Link To Existing Account
- You should now get a QR code
- Grab your primary smartphone / device and open the WhatsApp app
- Scan the QR code by either:
- iPhone: Tap Settings – Linked Devices – Link A Device
- Android: Tap the 3 dots (More Options) – Linked Devices – Link A Device
Take heed though as this new feature may take a few weeks to roll out to everybody so do not dismay if you can’t get this up and running immediately – just make sure you have the latest version of WhatsApp installed on your device. Also WhatsApp authentication servers can be busy so don’t worry if you get an error message – just try again in a few minutes or so.
Happy WhatsApp’ing!