WhatsApp for Windows and Mac are extensions of the WhatsApp account on your phone. The messages you send and receive are synced between your phone and computer, and you can see your messages across all devices.
Can I use WhatsApp on my computer and phone at the same time?
Yes. WhatsApp web and desktop applications are extensions of the WhatsApp account on your phone. The messages you send and receive are synced, and you can see your messages on all devices seamlessly. You can use up to four linked devices and one phone at a time.
Why use WhatsApp on PC/Mac?
Using WhatsApp on a desktop computer is useful for a variety of reasons. The ability to have a larger screen for messaging, the ability to multitask while still being able to message on WhatsApp, and the ability to send and receive messages even when your phone is not nearby are some of the key benefits. Additionally, it can be more convenient to type on a physical keyboard rather than a small touch screen.
What happens if my phone is offline?
You only need your phone to be online when you register WhatsApp for the first time or pair new devices. After signing up, your phone doesn’t need to stay online to use WhatsApp on linked devices, but your linked devices will go offline if you don’t use your phone for more than 14 days.
Can I make video calls using WhatsApp Desktop?
Yes, you can make free voice and video calls on WhatsApp desktop using your laptop/PC webcam.
Is WhatsApp secure?
WhatsApp offers end-to-end encryption as a default for all private communication, this includes messages and calls, group and one-on-one chats as well as any photos or files you send.
However, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook which makes many wonder about privacy. More security-conscious users often prefer to use Signal or Telegram for sharing personal or sensitive information.
You can use up to four linked devices and one phone at a time. Each linked device connects to WhatsApp independently while maintaining the same level of privacy and security through end-to-end encryption.
Your phone doesn’t need to stay online to use WhatsApp on linked devices, but your linked devices will be logged out if you don’t use your phone for over 14 days.
WhatsApp is available for Android and iPhone / iOS.
Features
Keep the Conversation Going
- With WhatsApp Desktop, you can seamlessly sync all of your chats to your computer so that you can chat on whatever device is most convenient for you.
Security by Default
- Some of your most personal moments are shared on WhatsApp, which is why we built end-to-end encryption into the latest versions of our app. When end-to-end encrypted, your messages and calls are secured so only you and the person you’re communicating with can read or listen to them, and nobody in between, not even WhatsApp.
Desktop calling
- You can make free voice and video calls to your contacts on WhatsApp Desktop if you have the app installed on your computer.
What’s New
New Ways to Enjoy WhatsApp Status
Status is a popular way to share ephemeral updates with friends and close contacts on WhatsApp. They disappear in 24 hours and may include photos, videos, GIFs, text, and more. Just like your personal chats and calls, your WhatsApp status is protected by end-to-end encryption so you can share privately and securely.
We’re excited to add a set of new features to status on WhatsApp that make it easier to express yourself and connect with others.
Private Audience Selector
Every status you share may not always be right for all of your contacts. We’re providing you with the flexibility to update your privacy settings per status so you can choose who views your status each time you update it. Your most recent audience selection will be saved and used as the default for your next status.
Voice Status
We’re introducing the ability to record and share voice messages up to 30 seconds on WhatsApp status. Voice status can be used for sending more personal updates, especially if you feel more comfortable expressing yourself by talking rather than typing.
Status Reactions
We’re adding status reactions to provide a quick and easy way to respond to status updates from your friends and close contacts. This was the #1 feature users wanted, following the launch of Reactions last year. You can now quickly reply to any status by swiping up and tapping on one of eight emojis. You can of course still reply to a status with text, voice message, stickers and more.
Status Profile Rings for New Updates
With the new status profile ring you’ll never miss a status from a loved one. This ring will be present around your contact’s profile picture whenever they share a status update. It will be visible in the chat lists, group participant lists, and contact info.
Link Previews on Status
Now when you post a link on your status, you’ll automatically see a visual preview of the link content, just like when you send a message. Visual previews make your statuses look better, and also give your contacts a better idea of what the link is before they click.
These updates have started rolling out to users globally and will be available to everyone in the coming weeks. We look forward to people enjoying these new status features soon.
Previous release notes
WhatsApp launches it native app for macOS (beta)
Advantages of native apps:
- Increased reliability and speed
- Designed and optimized for your desktop operating system
- Continue to receive notifications and messages even when your phone is offline
Previous release notes
To help, today we’re launching proxy support for WhatsApp users all over the world. What this means is we’re putting the power into people’s hands to maintain access to WhatsApp if their connection is blocked or disrupted.
Choosing a proxy enables you to connect to WhatsApp through servers set up by volunteers and organizations around the world dedicated to helping people communicate freely. If you have the ability to help others connect, you can learn how to set up a proxy here.
Connecting via proxy maintains the high level of privacy and security that WhatsApp provides. Your personal messages will still be protected by end-to-end encryption — ensuring they stay between you and the person you’re communicating with and are not visible to anyone in between, not the proxy servers, WhatsApp, or Meta.
Our wish for 2023 is that these internet shutdowns never occur. Disruptions like we’ve seen in Iran for months on end deny people’s human rights and cut people off from receiving urgent help. Though in case these shutdowns continue, we hope this solution helps people wherever there is a need for secure and reliable communication.
This option is now available in the settings menu for everyone running the latest version of our app. More information about how to use this feature is here.
Improved Calling on WhatsApp
While WhatsApp is best known for bringing private and secure messaging to users across the world, more and more people are using WhatsApp as a way to connect with voice and video calls. That’s why over the course of this year we’ve launched several improvements to calling on WhatsApp, for catching up with your loved ones, colleagues and communities securely.
We’ve introduced new features for better connecting as a group on calls:
- 32 person calls: Just like with voice calls, you can now do video calls on your mobile with up to 32 people, four times the number of people than before
- Message or mute call participants: Long pressing on a participant will enlarge the video or audio feed and allow you to either mute or message them separately while keeping the calls going
- Call links: Whether making a last minute call or planning ahead, you can easily invite people to a group call by sharing a call link
We’ve also made design changes for a more seamless calling experience:
- Colorful waveforms: Now you can easily see who is speaking if their camera is off
- In-call banner notifications: See when someone new joins a group call
- Picture in Picture on iOS: Now in beta testing and rolling out in the new year, easily multitask while on a call thanks to a minimized in-call video screen
As always, all calls on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted by default to protect people’s privacy and safety.
We’ll keep making improvements next year as we continue supporting high quality, private calling on WhatsApp wherever you are in the world.
Find, Message, and Buy on WhatsApp
Today we’re sharing an update on what we’re building to help people find, message, and buy something from a business on WhatsApp. Our team is in Brazil today where we’re discussing our vision for bringing the entire shopping experience directly to a WhatsApp chat.
Find a business
People want a convenient way to quickly get assistance from the millions of small businesses and tens of thousands of brands already on WhatsApp. Today we’re launching the ability to find a business right on WhatsApp so people can now browse businesses by category – such as travel or banking – or search by the business name. This will save people from having to find phone numbers off websites or type a number into their contacts.
We’ve built business search in a way that preserves people’s privacy. What you search for is processed in a way that cannot be linked back to your account. To start, we’re bringing the ability to search for a business to Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, and the UK where people can find companies using our WhatsApp Business Platform. In Brazil, search will help people find small businesses as well.
Message
As more businesses use WhatsApp, our first principle remains keeping people in control of their conversations. Getting this right is important for WhatsApp just as much as for the people and businesses that rely on us. Some of the recent businesses that have joined WhatsApp are helping people open a bank account, purchase their metro ticket and order groceries.
Buy
Ultimately we want people to be able to make a secure payment right from a chat with their credit or debit card. We recently launched this experience in India and we’re excited to now be testing this in Brazil with multiple payment partners. This seamless checkout experience will be a game-changer for people and businesses looking to buy and sell on WhatsApp without having to go to a website, open another app or pay in person.
These new experiences are part of making WhatsApp the best way for people to connect with their favorite businesses. We look forward to your feedback.
Previous release notes
Advantages of native apps:
- Increased reliability and speed
- Designed and optimized for your desktop operating system
- Continue to receive notifications and messages even when your phone is offline
Mac users
- WhatsApp desktop app native to Mac operating systems is currently in development.
- For early access and to help us with testing, you can download the beta program here.
- As a Mac user, you can use WhatsApp Web in your browser or download the web-based WhatsApp Desktop app.
Read more about the WhatsApp desktop app for Windows here.
Previous release notes:
WhatsApp has just now extended the time you have to delete your messages from your chats after you hit send to 2 days 12 hours. The have also improved privacy by adding more options to hide your online status, block screenshots for view once messages and now you can quietly leave groups without other participants knowing.
Previous release notes
- Updates to messages reactions including the ability to react with any emoji plus additional improvements and fixes.
- Increased the group participant limit to 512
- Increased max file size limit to 2GB
- On group calls, you can mute others or message them by long pressing on their tile
Reactions, 2GB File Sharing, 512 Groups
As we announced last month with our vision for Communities on WhatsApp, we’re now building for organizations, businesses, and other close-knit groups to communicate securely and get things done on WhatsApp. The feedback we’ve received so far has been very positive and we can’t wait to get many new features into people’s hands.
We’re excited to share that emoji reactions are now available on the latest version of the app. Reactions are fun, fast, and they reduce overload in groups too. We’ll continue improving them by adding an even broader range of expressions in the future.
In addition, you can now send files within WhatsApp up to 2GB in size at a time, protected by end-to-end encryption. This is an increase from the previous limit of 100MB and we think will be helpful for collaboration among small businesses and school groups. We recommend using WiFi for larger files and we’ll display a counter while uploading or downloading to let you know how long your transfer will take.
One of the top requests we’ve consistently received is the option to add more people to a chat, so now we’re slowly rolling out the ability to add up to 512 people to a group. Building private, safe, and secure communities takes work and we think this series of improvements will help people and groups stay close to one another.
We hope people enjoy these updates and look forward to sharing more throughout the year.
WhatsApp desktop app no longer requires your phone to be online
We’re excited to announce that private and secure one-to-one voice and video calls are now available on WhatsApp’s desktop app.
Throughout the last year we’ve seen significant increases in people calling one another on WhatsApp, often for long conversations. Last New Year’s Eve, we broke the record for the most calls ever made in a single day with 1.4 billion voice and video calls. With so many people still apart from their loved ones, and adjusting to new ways of working, we want conversations on WhatsApp to feel as close to in-person as possible, regardless of where you are in the world or the tech you’re using.
Answering on a bigger screen makes it easier to work with colleagues, see your family more clearly on a bigger canvas, or free up your hands to move around a room while talking. To make desktop calling more useful, we made sure it works seamlessly for both portrait and landscape orientation, appears in a resizable standalone window on your computer screen, and is set to be always on top so you never lose your video chats in a browser tab or stack of open windows.
Voice and video calls on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted, so WhatsApp can’t hear or see them, whether you call from your phone or your computer. We’re starting with one-to-one calls on the WhatsApp desktop app so we make sure we can give you a reliable and high-quality experience. We will be expanding this feature to include group voice and video calls in the future.
You can make free voice and video calls to your contacts on WhatsApp Desktop if you have the app installed on your computer.
Desktop calling is supported on:
- Windows 10 64-bit version 1903 and newer
- macOS 10.13 and newer
To make or receive calls on WhatsApp Desktop, you’ll need:
- An audio output device and microphone for voice and video calls.
- A camera for video calls.
- An active internet connection on your computer and phone. The call won’t go through your phone, but it needs to be online to establish the call.
- To grant WhatsApp permission to access your computer’s microphone and camera. WhatsApp needs access to your computer’s microphone for calls and camera for video calls.
Note: Group calls aren’t supported on WhatsApp Desktop at this time.
Previous release notes:
We’ve heard from so many people how much confusion there is around our recent update. There’s been a lot of misinformation causing concern and we want to help everyone understand our principles and the facts.
WhatsApp was built on a simple idea: what you share with your friends and family stays between you. This means we will always protect your personal conversations with end-to-end encryption, so that neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see these private messages. It’s why we don’t keep logs of who everyone’s messaging or calling. We also can’t see your shared location and we don’t share your contacts with Facebook.
With these updates, none of that is changing. Instead, the update includes new options people will have to message a business on WhatsApp, and provides further transparency about how we collect and use data. While not everyone shops with a business on WhatsApp today, we think that more people will choose to do so in the future and it’s important people are aware of these services. This update does not expand our ability to share data with Facebook.
We’re now moving back the date on which people will be asked to review and accept the terms. No one will have their account suspended or deleted on February 8. We’re also going to do a lot more to clear up the misinformation around how privacy and security works on WhatsApp. We’ll then go to people gradually to review the policy at their own pace before new business options are available on May 15.
WhatsApp helped bring end-to-end encryption to people across the world and we are committed to defending this security technology now and in the future. Thank you to everyone who has reached out to us and to so many who have helped spread facts and stop rumors. We will continue to put everything we have into making WhatsApp the best way to communicate privately.
Related Posts:
