With a doubt Whatsapp is one of the best cross-platform instant messaging app. Recently Whatsapp has been in news due to its giant acquisition by Facebook reported at a whooping 19$ billion. Although Whatsapp was ahead of the pack (it still is), other apps such as WeChat, Line, Viber are giving stiff competition to Whatsapp especially in Asia. With this recent acquisition of Facebook, we can safely assume that the future of Whatsapp is in secure hands and it is here to stay.
With that being said, lets have a look at some of the lesser known WhatsApp tricks which can be very useful to you:
1) You Can Now Recover Deleted Messages on Whatsapp Easily
Touchscreens are great but sometimes they can be annoying with accidental clicks. It isn’t uncommon to see people accidentally deleting their Whatsapp chat history. Thankfully recovering deleted messages is a piece of cake.
- For recovering Whatsapp chats which are very recent i.e. less than seven days old, you could simply uninstall Whatsapp and then reinstall it. Upon reinstalling, you will be prompted with a message which will allow you to recover your recent chat history. Just click on Restore and you will be good.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to uninstall/reinstall, you can just go to Settings > Apps > WhatsApp > Clear Data. Don’t worry Clear Data won’t delete your Whatsapp music, image files etc, it simply resets the app. (Thanks to Vyom from MakeUseof who suggested this)
- For recovering chats which are older than 7 days, we need to use another method. Lets get into that.
First I would like to inform you that Whatsapp stores all your chats/messages and conversations on your smartphone’s memory card which is also known as SD card/Micro SD card. You would need to navigate to SD Card > WhatsApp > Databases.
There you will see a bunch of chat files in this format msgstore-yyyy-mm-dd.1.crypt and the first file will be named msgstore.db.crypt which contains chat history of 7 days. First of all, I would recommend you to change the name of first file. Rename it so you can remember it easily. At the moment, you can rename it to OLDERmsgstore.db.crypt. Why are we doing this? Because we can restore it easily in case something goes wrong.
Now select the msgstore-yyyy-mm-dd.1.db.crypt you want to restore and rename that to msgstore.db.crypt. That’s it for the moment. Onto your smartphone now, uninstall and reinstall Whatsapp, you will be prompted with an option to Restore messages, tap on Restore and you will be able to access your recovered Whatsapp messages.
Note : Kindly keep in mind that upon recovering old chat messages, your recent chat messages will be deleted. Unfortunately there is no way that you can merge your old and new messages so you have to make a choice.
2) Hide Whatsapp Last Seen
Lets be honest, how many times have you sent a Whatsapp message to your girlfriend or a close relative only to check their Last Seen time multiple times during a day just to know have they read your message or not or are they ignoring you. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that this can put one into awkward situations. Read the following guide to hide WhatsApp Last Seen Time Stamp.
3) Save WhatsApp Profile Pic of your Friends
Whatsapp by default doesn’t allow you to save profile pics of people in your contacts list citing privacy reasons but there is a workaround. Actually whenever you open a profile pic of someone in your contacts list, it automatically get stored in SD Card > WhatsApp > Profile Pictures. So whats the proper process.
Start WhatsApp, click on the profile of the most beautiful girl in your contacts list :lol: , click on the small thumbnail beside her name and you will be able to see her profile picture. Now you can close WhatsApp. Then you can go to My Files > WhatsApp > Profile Pictures. There you will be able to see a full proper profile pic which you just viewed. Now you can either share, move, copy or save this pic.
4) Hiding Your Profile Picture on WhatsApp
Lets consider a case where you want your profile pic to be displayed only to your contacts and not to some strangers/stalkers. You can do that by going to Settings > Account > Privacy > Profile photo, set it to My contacts.
hide profile photo whatsapp
5) WhatsApp Notifications on Desktop
Often times, I tend to miss out on an important WhatsApp notifications on my phone because I am so engrossed working in front of my desktop. If you are like me, then this app Desktop Notifications can be really useful for you. Now you can get all Android notifications including Whatsapp messages right there on your desktop. Alternatively, you can also use Pushbullet for the same. Another way is installing WhatsApp for PC using an Android Emulator such as BlueStacks which we have covered here.
6) Installing WhatsApp on a tablet
WhatsApp was built for phones so unfortunately it won’t work if you try to install it on your tablet. It will give you an error: Tablets are currently not supported. But again since we are talking about whatsapp tricks, we have a workaround for this.
whatsapp for ipad
First of all, you need to download the latest .apk from WhatsApp official site. Then you need to download SRT AppGuard. Install both and WhatsApp and AppGuard but run AppGuard first. How AppGuard helps is it controls the permissions of the apps that are always asking your personal information for every small thing. After running AppGuard, select WhatsApp from its dashboard and click Monitor. After AppGuard has done its stuff setting up monitoring, then you need to scroll down. Now you need to disable read phone status and identity which is located under Phone calls.
Now you are almost done and can access WhatsApp on your tablet. As far as phone verification is concerned, you can use your landline and it should work just fine.
7) Stop Those Annoying WhatsApp Images Appearing in Your Gallery
The images shared by you or your friends can be found in your gallery or camera roll and that can be quite annoying as some of the pics can be private and one wouldn’t want them in their Gallery mixed with other pics.
Again if you are an iOS user, then its easy for you, navigate to Settings > Privacy > Photos and switch off the green button adjacent to WhatsApp and you are done.
For Android
Unfortunately no one click button for this on Android, however you just need to follow the below steps which is quite simple.
a) Go to Google PlayStore and install this App – ES File Explorer
b) Now open this app and navigate to WhatsApp > Media > Whatsapp Images
whatsapp images
c) Click on the phone and globe icon on top.
globe icon
d) Now click Settings > Global Settings and tick mark Show Hidden Files
show hidden files
e) Now go back to Whatsapp Images. Now we will create a new file here. Click New > File and name it .nomedia and click OK as shown below.
nomedia
f) Now go check your Gallery and you won’t your Whatsapp Images there
g) Similarly this process can be used to hide WhatsApp Videos from Gallery.
8) Creating Fake WhatsApp Conversation (in a good way)
With the help of app named Whatsaid, you can play a prank on your friend or relative by creating a fake conversation and show your naughty side J
Kindly use it in a good way though, don’t use it to spoil someone’s relationship or life. Whatsaid is not available on Google Play Store but you can download Whatsaid apk from this link.
That’s it for now. I am sure you enjoyed these Whatsapp tricks, if you have some new one, kindly let us know in comments below and we will add it.