How to change your WhatsApp number without losing your chats

As everyone knows, WhatsApp is associated with our phone number, which is why we find certain restrictions when using the messaging app on two different devices or wanting to have two accounts on the same terminal. These situations may be somewhat more exceptional, but what is quite common is wanting to change your phone number. Now, installing the messaging app associated with a new number means losing all the chats and messages that we had with the previous number. If you don’t want this to happen, this is how you can change your number on WhatsApp without losing all your chats.

Since it is something that many people have to deal with every day, the application itself decided long ago to incorporate this feature so that users have much easier to change their number without losing their messages. Therefore, we must use this function before verifying the new number on our mobile phone to avoid losing all our chats.

Important before changing number on WhatsApp

What this function does is migrate the settings, groups and information of our account so that we have it available with the account of the new phone number. In addition, it automatically deletes the account associated with our previous phone number, so our contacts will no longer see that number in their phonebook .

Therefore, at the moment that we are going to proceed with the change of number in WhatsApp, it is best that we notify all our contacts of said change. This way, they can save the new number in their phonebook. The only ones who will be notified of this change automatically are the contacts that belong to our groups.

Therefore, to change your WhatsApp number without losing your account information and chats, it is important that we use this function, that we do not verify our account on the phone as if it were a new installation, that we use the same terminal and that we make sure that the phone can receive SMS, make calls, has an Internet connection and that the old phone number is currently linked to the messaging app on our device. We can check the latter if we enter the application, touch the menu button to enter Settings and touch our profile photo . If everything is correct, then we can proceed to change the WhatsApp number.

Steps to follow to change the WhatsApp number

As on other occasions, having a device with an iOS or Android operating system can cause certain options within the messaging app to change, to be called in a different way or to find them organized in a different way. Either way, we are going to show the steps to follow to change the WhatsApp number in both environments so that no one has any problems.

Android

1. We introduce the SIM card with the new number in the phone.
2. We open the messaging app.
3. We verify that the old phone number is still linked to WhatsApp if we have not done so previously.
4. From the main screen we touch on the menu button.
5. We enter Settings> Account .
6. We choose the option Change number and click on Next .
7. Now we will have to indicate the old phone number and then the new one.
8. We touch Next .
9. In the next step we will have the option to indicate if we want to activate the notification to our contacts of the change of WhatsApp number, being able to choose if we want to notify Everyone, those with whom he had a chat or indicate in a personalized way who of all our contacts we want to communicate it to you. If we choose this last option, we will have to search among our contacts for those people we want to notify that we have changed our phone number and who can thus identify us. To do this, we will have to mark these contacts one by one.
10. We tap on OK .
11. We verified our new phone number and completed the process.

From that moment, we will already have the messaging app available to chat with our contacts just as we had it before changing the WhatsApp number, the same account information, recovered chats, groups, etc.

iPhone

The steps to follow to change the number in iOS are very similar to those indicated above for Android devices. All we have to do is:

1. We introduce the SIM card with the new number.
2. We open the app.
3. We verify that the old phone number is still linked to WhatsApp if we have not done so previously.
4. From the main screen we touch on the configuration button .
5. We enter the account option .
6. We touch on Change number and click on Next.
7. Now we will have to indicate the old number linked to WhatsApp and the new number. Both in international format.
8. Click on Next and then we can choose who we want to notify of the change in our phone number, all contacts, only those with whom I had an open chat or customize the list of contacts to whom I want to communicate the change of WhatsApp number .
9. Click on OK .
10. We tap on Yes to confirm that our phone number is correct.
11. We verify the new number and complete the process.

Now, we can continue using the messaging app with our new phone number and we will have all the information of our account associated with the new number, as well as the chats and groups that we had open and their messages associated with the old phone number.

Communicate the change to your contacts

When we decide to change the WhatsApp number, the first thing we will have to do after making the change is notify our contacts of the new number so that they can identify us from that moment. To do this, as we have discussed in the steps to follow to proceed with said change without losing our chats and our account information, it is possible to choose who we want to notify of the change during the process itself .

Now, we may not have chosen the option to notify the phone change in WhatsApp during the process itself and we want to do it later or we have changed our mind and now we want to send the notification to all our contacts, for example.

In this case, we have several options to make this notification, but the best will be to create a broadcast list . In this list, we will be able to include all our contacts or those we did not select during the process of changing the number in the app. To do this, we open the messaging app, touch the menu button and then select the New broadcast option.

We select all the contacts we want to notify of the number change in WhatsApp and the chat screen will appear. We write the message that we want to send where we will identify ourselves and indicate that this is our new phone number and we press send like any other message. Automatically, all the contacts added to the distribution list will receive the notification of the change without them knowing who else we have sent it to , as it happens if we use a group. Also, if someone replies to that message, they will do so individually and no one else will be able to see that message.