It’s been more than 10 years, WhatsApp has launched, and became this huge success worldwide. In 2009 (the launching year of the app), WhatsApp had been crowned as The Perfect iPhone Messenger App, and since then, it’s been unstoppable.
Facebook Inc. (another giant in the social media and advertising field) acquired this startup for $20 billion in 2014 and introduced WhatsApp voice calls, video calls, end to end encryption, fingerprint unlocking, and desktop as well as web versions of the app.
Despite having everything a messenger can offer, one thing which we waited for a very long time from WhatsApp, was multi-device support of the same WhatsApp account. This update would have made a huge impact on the number of users and definitely in the favor of Faceboook Inc.
The Issue, Users Are Facing:
WhatsApp doesn’t provide multi-device support for the same account to access.
Initially, WhatsApp Messenger had been built as an app dedicated to iPhone, which later had been adopted for other mobile operating systems as well. It registers the account with the user’s mobile number and stores all the messages locally onto the devices, instead of other servers.
WhatsApp Web also allows users to send messages through the desktop version. However, this version will automatically disable a few features such as voice or video calls. So, to successfully implement and achieve multi-device support with the same WhatsApp account, without compromising the security, would have been a big game-changer for Facebook.
With more than 1.5 billion users throughout the world, WhatsApp has been considered as one of the top most-used apps. So it’s quite apparent that the demand is there, however, the app lacks in one place. Wherein, Facebook recently started working on it and it’s definitely going to be huge.
The Solution Users Are Looking For:
Keeping security as the main priority, WhatsApp Messenger users want to access the same account from multiple devices. This should happen in such a way that neither of the platforms gets logged out just because you logged in the same account on a different device.
The users have been struggling with this limitation for too long and it looks like finally, the restriction will be lifted off after a few testing phases. At the end of July’19, the company took it on Twitter that they are working on multi-device support.
The Steps from Facebook Inc.
WhatsApp Messenger (service owned by Facebook, Inc.) has already started working on the new feature that will allow you to use the same account on multiple devices without logging out from the other one.
WABetaInfo (A platform to get the latest WhatsApp news for iOS, Android, and Windows) has stated that “As previously announced, WhatsApp is developing a feature what will allow to use your WhatsApp account on more devices at the same time. Chats will be still end-to-end encrypted because WhatsApp was developing a new method to assign keys to specific devices.”
How This Will Work:
As usual, while logging into your WhatsApp account, the app will ask for a registration code that is linked to your mobile number so while accessing from a second device to the same account, it will need the same registration code.
In all these years while using WhatsApp, if someone requested a registration code for our account, we had no clue about that. Now, WhatsApp releases this feature which is very important when the team will enable the feature that will ultimately support to use the same account from multiple devices.
Wrapping Up
In the current scenario, you can use the same WhatsApp account on multiple desktops but only one mobile device can be used. With multi-platform support, multiple devices can be used with the same account, for example, iOS and Android.
Since the beta versions are almost done with the close release of highly awaited Dark Mode, I suppose we can wait for a bit for multi-device support (which is in the developing phase).
For more reference, few of the other upcoming WhatsApp features are also waiting for you here.