WhatsApp Messenger is an application that lets one text with others as long as they have the app, irrespective of the platform.
It comes with great features like the duo chat, group chat, and an extremely easy way to find and customize features. Basically, it is easy to learn and use, can’t take more than a day to get familiar with it.
Wherever you are, you can with ease send a message to whomever you choose, without dropping a sweat.
The best part, for all those of you who are not such big fans about registering accounts, you do not have to. All you need is a phone number to begin.
With there being a number of reasons for WhatsApp’s popularity, the one that stands out the most is its ease of usage, regardless of how bad at the technology you may seem to be. Anyone can use WhatsApp.
So, let’s say you have been using WhatsApp for a while and due to a reason or two, you want to change the phone number registered on WhatsApp, then you would have to do a few things here and there before finally accomplishing your goal.
In the WhatsApp app, there is a “Change Number” feature that allows you to change the number linked to your account.
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What will happen when you change your WhatsApp Phone Number
It will move your account information, groups, and settings from your previous number to your new phone number.
The WhatsApp account associated with your previous phone number will also be moved to the new phone number.
In that way, your contacts ( the people you were chatting with on WhatsApp, or have your contact) will not be seeing your old phone number in their lists of WhatsApp contacts (except if they have your new phone number).
In the event, you use WhatsApp’s Change Number feature, it is important to know that your chat history is going to continue to be available on your device as long as you continue using it. Most WhatsApp users find this useful.
If you’re changing the phone as well and you need to have your chat history, then you will need to do a backup of your data to your Google account. I will walk you through this later in the post.
One thing for you to do before doing what you are about to is to make sure that your WhatsApp contacts (friends or family or counterparts) have your new number.
What you need to do before you change your phone number on WhatsApp
- Ensure your new number can send or receive calls and SMS and obviously a data connection.
- Ensure your old phone number is at present verified by WhatsApp on your phone.
You can know this by navigating to Settings > Profile and then confirm your registered phone number.
- If you do manage to change your WhatsApp phone number, your contacts will not be single-handedly informed of the change.
The only people who will know are the participants that share group chats with you.
So to be ahead of things, you should inform your contacts that your number will be changing before you begin this process.
You can use the WhatsApp broadcast feature to send a single message to all people you what to inform and here’s how to do it:
Click on the WhatsApp options menu at the top right corner, select New broadcast, select all contacts you wish to inform, and finally type and send the message in the chat opened.
- Back up your chat data. This is the final, but very important step for those who need to continue from where they left off in the previous account.
Follow these simple steps to back your WhatsApp chat data:
- Open WhatsApp Settings from the top right corner menu
- Tap on Chats and then scroll down and click Chat backup
- Scroll down to Google Drive settings. Click on Google Account and select the account from which you’ll restore your chat history.
- It’s better to do this back up when you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network because it can use up significant amounts of data depending on your plan. You can see the chat history size at the top of the Chat backup page and decide if you can cover it with cellular data.
- Click on Back up over and select the network you prefer for backup.
- You can also include videos in your backups.
However, you need to note that any data backed up is not protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in Google Drive (But don’t worry data is safe to some extent in Google Drive).
- At this point you have configured your backup well, tap on the green button that says BACK UP to start the backup process.
- This can take a while.
Here’s how to change your phone number in WhatsApp
Insert the new SIM card of the new number into your phone.
Launch WhatsApp.
- Go to WhatsApp Settings, click Account, then tap Change Number.
- Enter your old phone number in the first textbox and the new phone number in the textbox below that.
- On the next page, you will be able to notify your contacts about the phone number change.
- A number of options are available, you can decide to notify all your contacts, only those you have chats with or manually select who you want to notify.
- You will then have to verify your new phone number via an SMS code code to complete the process.
After these simple steps will have successfully changed your phone number.