14 DAY TRIAL // One of the main drawbacks of WhatsApp right now is that the app only works on one device at a time, so people with multiple phones can’t log in with the same phone number.
I don’t know about others but this is quite a major setback, especially because I typically carry about both an iPhone and an Android and would like to use the same phone number in WhatsApp on both.
We’ve known for a while that the Facebook-owned company has been working on resolving this, and now it looks like the update that everybody was waiting for is almost here.
More specifically, WhatsApp is working on enabling multi-device support for the instant messaging platform, which technically means that you’ll be able to authenticate with the same account on more than just one device.
WABetaInfo reveals that the feature will go live in a beta build rather sooner than later, albeit, for now, the ETA for production devices isn’t available.
First and foremost, let’s see how the whole thing is going to work.
If you log in with the same phone number that you use for WhatsApp on more than one device, you’ll then get new messages on all of them thanks to a sync engine. You’ll be able to use iPhones, Android devices, and WhatsApp on the desktop, and you can reply from pretty much any of them, with the conversation to always be up-to-date when you open WhatsApp on another device.
WhatsApp will originally allow users to log in with 4 different devices at the same time, and this is more than enough because theoretically, you should be able to use the same account on two phones and on the desktop.
One really cool feature is support for offline connections on the primary phone. For example, if the phone that you configured first with WhatsApp doesn’t have an Internet connection, you can still continue chatting with your contacts from a device different, such as WhatsApp desktop on the PC. When the device goes back online, it automatically downloads the entire conversation using the sync engine we told you about and you can continue chatting from where you left off.
Worth knowing is that once the new feature goes live, setting it up would automatically disconnect all your active instances. This is because of the new system that’s being used to power the whole thing, so theoretically, you’ll start from scratch on all your accounts (the logs will continue to be stored in the cloud, only that you’ll be forced to log out and re-authenticate even on the primary account).
It’ll be interesting how the sync process will work, however, especially because many conversations also include media files. It’s believed that messages and group chats would definitely be supported, but it remains to be seen how WhatsApp handles large media files, which obviously eat more data and could have an impact on its server infrastructure if they keep roaming across devices.
For now, it’s pretty clear that we’re getting closer and closer to the moment the new feature is supposed to go live, and truth be told, WhatsApp really needs such a feature.
Long-time rival Telegram comes with this capability already, letting you log in with multiple devices at the same time and then control the active sessions from the settings screen on the primary phone. Most likely, WhatsApp will use a similar approach when its new feature is ready, but for now, everything could change before the go-ahead is given for production devices.