From disabling its ‘last seen’ feature to bookmarking messages you don’t want to forget about, there are loads of tricks to make your favourite IM app more useful than ever. You just have to be in the know.
Fortunately for you (and indeed for us), we’ve scoured every inch of WhatsApp to gather up its most useful features. Read these top tips and you’ll be a pro in no time at all.
1) Begone, blue ticks of misery
We know how it is. You're at figure skating practice, your phone buzzes, and you glance down briefly before nailing a spectacular triple axel.
Clearly, you've not got time to respond immediately. But at the same time, you don't want the sender to realise that you've already looked at the message, lest they think you're ignoring them when you fail to reply for two more hours. That's the privilege the blue ticks take away.
Recently though, the chat app has realised the error of its ways and silently come up with a workaround. The liberty of message-mulling is ours again.
How: In the Settings menu, go to Account, then Privacy and turn off Read Receipts. The only snag is you’ll no longer get them for other people either.
2) Figure out your BFFs
In the year 2017, friendships aren’t measured on loyalty or time, it’s all about how much data you’ve shared. WhatsApp has that info - and you can use it to make your own ranked list of your favourite friends. No, there's nothing weird about that at all. What's more, if you click through you can mass delete stuff that’s taking up too much space.
How: Head to Settings > Data and Storage Usage > Storage Usage and you’ll see a list of your most important groups and contacts ranked according to the data you’ve expended on them. Ah, the romance of modern living.
3) See when your messages are read
In group chats, those grey ticks only turn blue when every member of the group has read your message. But there lurks within WhatsApp a handy way to find out who’s neglecting you...
How: Hold down on a message you've sent (or swipe left on iOS) and select Info. It'll show you who it's been delivered to and who's read it. This also works with individual chats.
4) Hide your profile pic
Batman. David Bowie. Pepe the Prawn. All people who have built their much-vaunted careers on an air of mystique and otherness. You can bet they’d have their WhatsApp profile pics set to private, instead of treating the world to a bedraggled photo of them and a bottle of Lambrini. So, as the saying goes, always be yourself unless you can be like Batman.
How: Head to Settings > Privacy > Profile Photo > Nobody.
5) Mute group chats
With WhatsApp groups only capped at 50 participants, they can sometimes get pretty busy. Prevent yourself from being woken up by incessant messages by muting particular groups.
How: Tap on the group chat of your choice, then the name to bring up Group Info where you will find the option to Mute the chat for either eight hours, one week or a year. Although if you're choosing the latter, you might as well leave altogether.
6) Get shortcuts to conversations
If you’re on Android you can create shortcuts to popular chats and let them live on your homescreen: useful if there are certain people you chat to more often.
How: Tap and hold on the chat (group or individual) of your choice and a tab will pop up. Select the Add Conversation Shortcut option and the chat in question will appear as the person's profile photo on your mobile desktop.
7) Find out the truth about where your friend is
If you’re particularly paranoid, when someone shares their location with you you can tell whether it’s the real deal or they’ve just picked somewhere from the map by how it appears in the chat window.
How: The way the location appears is a clue. If they’ve sent you their genuine GPS location it appears as a dropped pin, if it’s been entered manually the full address will appear with it. Game’s up, adulterers.
8) Go incognito
You can’t get away with not replying to messages if people can see when you were last online, so turn off WhatsApp’s ‘last seen’ feature to go incognito. Now you can ignore people at your leisure...
How: It’s in the Privacy menu, under Last Seen, and if you want you can hide from everybody, or only allow your contacts to see your activity.
9) Send messages with your voice
If you’re busy cooking, eating or juggling, replying to messages can be a real faff. But thanks to Siri on iOS and Google Assistant on Android, you can reply without touching your phone.
How: Holler “Hey Siri” or “OK Google”, say “send a WhatsApp to Jonny” and you can dictate your missive about missing Jonny’s wedding because of your juggling practice instead.
10) Send public invites privately
If you’ve got a generic announcement to make - an invite to a weekend BBQ or an intervention about your friend's unhealthy obsession with KFC - and you don’t want to do it on the loudmouth platform that is Facebook, this feature works in pretty much the same way as BCC-ing people in an email.
Your recipients will get the message as if it was a privately composed one, oblivious to the fact that you’ve sent the exact same invite to 342 other people. Sincerity? What's that?
How: On the top-left-hand corner of your WhatsApp Chats window, just below the search bar, you’ll notice a Broadcast Lists. Tap on it for the option to create a new list of contacts you want your message to go out to, and message away like you would normally. Nobody will be any the wiser.
11) Stay selectively notified
If all group chats are created equal, with some filled with little more than white noise. But there is a simple way to avoid reaching for the phone every time you get a new notification. Just assign different tones to different groups or contacts on WhatsApp and you'll know who's posting without even having to pick up your phone.
How: Go to the significant group chats, tap on the name to bring up Group Info and then Custom Notifications. There, you can select a custom message alert for the group chats of your choice. All you have to do now is remember which alert tone you assigned to which group chat. This customisation is only applicable for group chats though.
12) Back everything up
Worried about losing a year’s worth of messages? You needn't be. WhatsApp knows how precious your chat history is to you and secures it all for you in the cloud.
How: iPhone users get the option of backing their chat history to iCloud automatically on a daily/weekly/monthly schedule. If it’s only selected chat histories you desire, click on the chat you want, then the user’s name and finally email conversation to yourself.
Android users can go to 'Settings', 'Chats and calls', and select the 'Chat backup' option, which will let you setup an automatic Google Drive backup. The next time you install WhatsApp from fresh on any device, you can simply select the Google Drive backup option at the setup screen, to have all your up-to-date messages injected into your device, straight from the cloud.
13) Save your media (and data allowance)
When you’re on a 1GB data plan, every byte counts; you don’t want to be slapped with a hefty bill at the end of the month from sending stupid shareable memes and screenshots of every little thing. Handily, there’s a way to make sure that all that heavy-duty image sending won’t eat up what little complimentary data you might have in your plan.
How: Go to Settings, then Chat Settings and then Auto-Download and tweak the settings for how you want your received media to be downloaded. Choose Wi-Fi if you don’t want to overload your data plan. Alternatively, you can trigger downloads manually by switching Auto-Download to Never. You can also save the hassle of having to clean up your camera roll every so often by tweaking Save Incoming Media off.
14) Draw on your pics
If a picture paints a thousand words, scrawling all over the top of them can only add a few more. Especially if the picture is of a load of sausages.
How: Once you’ve picked the picture you want to send from your camera roll, use the icons at the top of the screen to add words, draw pictures, or chuck in an emoji or eight.
15) Star messages for later
When dinner time rolls around, the last thing you want to do is scroll through 352 frivolous messages to find the address of the restaurant you're meeting your friends at. Fortunately, WhatsApp lets you bookmark certain messages for easy access.
How: On iOS, double tap on any message and tap on the star icon to mark it. To find it again, all you have to do is tap on the chat’s name, and tap on Starred Messages to see all the messages you’ve marked out. On Android, just press down on the message then click the star icon at the top of the screen. To find your starred messages, just hit the three dots icon in the top-right and got to Starred Messages.
You can also see conversation context by either tapping on the arrow next to the message (iOS) on tapping on the message itself (Android). This will bring you back to the exact place in the chat. Messages can also be unstarred when you’re done with them.
16) Make calls
WhatsApp is more than just a run-of-the-mill instant messenger: you can use it to make calls too.
How: Hit the Calls tab along the top or bottom of the app (depending on whether you're on iOS or Android), then click on the person you want to call. Alternatively, in Android, you can click on a person's name in a chat and then call them via the pop-up box.
17) Instantly add dates to your calendar
It’s easy to forget appointments when you’re a busy bee. You make vague plans for drinks, settle on a date, then promptly forget about it as the conversation rolls on. This handy little shortcut makes sure you commit to an appointment.
How: This one's currently iOS-only, but you might’ve noticed that whenever anyone mentions a date in a WhatsApp message it automatically gets underlined and highlighted in blue. Just tap it and you’ll be given the option to immediately create an event on that date in your calendar, so there’s no longer any excuse for forgetting. It’ll also recognise words like ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’.
18) Reply to messages on your laptop
You know what’s better than replying to WhatsApp messages on your phone? Doing it on a proper keyboard. And this one also has the added benefit of not using up any data. Well, assuming you're at work, not any data you're paying for.
How: Go to web.whatsapp.com on your computer’s web browser, fire up the app on your phone and scan the QR code that pops up via the WhatsApp Web/Desktop option in Settings. Voila. Then commence chatting on the sly without downloading anything. Handy, and also very, very distracting.
19) Save data on calls
Making calls via WhatsApp is a very convenient feature, but it can also consume a lot of data. Thankfully, there's a new option to help those of us with data shortage problems.
How: In the Data and Storage Usage menu (Data Usage on Android) you can toggle a setting labeled Low Data Usage, which, as you might have guessed, cuts down the amount of data used when making phone calls.
20) Pin popular group chats
If there’s one group chat you use more than any other you can make sure it’s always at the top of the list by pinning it there.
How: On the main Chat menu, find the one you want to pin then, on iOS, swipe to the right; on Android, you do a long press then click the pin icon up top. That way you’ll never have to scroll through a bunch of others looking for it.
21) Save specific chats
WhatsApp automatically backs up all your chats in the cloud but there is a way to save a specific chat history (including all pics, videos and whatnot) should you want to do so.
How: On iOS, you click on the contact’s name then hit Export Chat and you’ll be given the option to save it as a Zip file. There was a time when you could only backup images in your chats, but not videos. Now that’s changed.
On Android it's slightly different (and a little hard to find): you go into the chat in question, then hit the three dots menu, then hit More, then select Email chat. You can choose to include media or not.
22) Mark messages as unread
If you have a habit of reading messages but forgetting to reply, mark them as unread so you remember to come back to them later.
How: In iOS, just swipe any of your chats to the right (like you do to pin them) and a blue dot will appear next to them. It’ll disappear next time you open the message, or you can repeat the process to unmark it. Android users can achieve the same thing by long-pressing on a chat, then selecting Mark as Unread from the top-right menu.
23) Keep messages secret
Theoretically, all messages on WhatsApp are private - but not when you leave your phone on the table, and a new message notification pops up. However there is a way to turn off the preview part of the message, so the notification only reveals who's messaged you but not what they're messaging you about.
How: Go to Settings, then Notifications, and disable Show Preview. Now you can gossip in peace.
24) Reply directly from a popup
On Android, replying to a message involves swiping down the notification bar, selecting the relevant missive and tapping out your reply. But there is a faster way.
How: Go to Settings, Notifications, then Popup Notification, and choose from four different options. You can change this setting for both individual messages and group messages respectively. Unfortunately, this feature isn't yet available in iOS.
25) Send an attachment
Unlike EPMD’s hip-hop classic, WhatsApp’s ethos is by no means Strictly Business. If you do need to quickly send a document to a colleague, and email isn’t an option, it’s easily done. Just select the file you want from Google Drive, Dropbox or iCloud and WhatsApp will fling it onwards as a PDF.
How: Tap the + symbol (on Android you get a paperclip) > Document > select your cloud storage service of choice and then the file itself. Bosh!
