It’s also much faster than creating a new contact
Whenever you need to send a WhatsApp message to someone new, you have to add them as a contact first and wait for the messaging app to sync the changes before you can finally start chatting. More often than not, WhatsApp takes its own sweet time to update its in-app contacts list, sometimes taking several minutes or even hours.
That sort of defeats the very purpose of an instant messenger.
Thanks to some workarounds, you can easily bypass this restriction and start messaging your acquaintance without saving their details first. Here are a few ways that will come in handy in such situations.
WhatsApp’s custom wa.me links to the rescue
The “wa.me” short URL allows you to publicly share your custom link, using which people can message you on WhatsApp with a single click. These direct links are often found on blogs and online stores, but you can easily customize them for your personal use.
Here’s how to do it:
- Open a browser on your phone or desktop (any mainstream browser would do the job) and type the link: https://wa.me/cccxxxxxxxxxx in the address bar.
- Replace “ccc” with the country code of the recipient (which is a must) and “xxxxxxxxxx” with their phone number. Do not add the + sign or any other modifier, like dashes or brackets, for this link string to work. For instance, an Indian phone number with the country code +91 will look something like https://wa.me/919876xxxxxx. You can bookmark this short link for quicker access later on.
- After you go to this address, WhatsApp will ask you to press the Continue to chat button, which will direct you to the WhatsApp app installed on your phone or computer.
- A chat window will open, where you can start messaging as usual. In case the phone number isn’t registered on WhatsApp, the app will let you know with a pop-up message.
Some Android skins like MIUI and OxygenOS allow you to run multiple instances of messaging apps like WhatsApp to let you use two accounts simultaneously. If you have set up a second WhatsApp instance, the browser will ask you to pick one of the two after the third step, as shown above. Everything after that remains unchanged.
Use some assistance
Even though WhatsApp’s official solution is pretty straightforward, not everyone is comfortable with tweaking URLs. As an alternative, you can use a third-party app to automate the entire process. You just need to enter the phone number.
Left: WhatsDirect, Center & Right: Click to chat.
WhatsDirect and Click to chat apps offer the most uncomplicated experience. All you need to do is enter the phone number, make sure the country code is correct, and start chatting on WhatsApp. The best part is that both apps are entirely free and don’t show ads or ask for any device permissions.
Installing these single-purpose apps is justifiable only if you often need to send WhatsApp messages to temporary acquaintances. For more infrequent use, you can instead use websites like whats-app-dialer.com and whapp.contact. These save you from fiddling with the URL in the first two steps above.
whats-app-dialer.com
Sometimes you’ll need to drop a WhatsApp message to people you don’t necessarily want to add to your contacts list. The tools mentioned here have often come in handy for this, making the entire process quick and far less cumbersome. But hopefully, WhatsApp will one day add the native ability to start a chat by just punching in a phone number.
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