WhatsApp is Finally Improving its Contact Management

WhatsApp is about to lessen its reliance on its smartphone apps for contact management. Today, the WhatsApp team announced that its WhatsApp web and Windows clients will soon get contact management capabilities, making it possible to add contact across different devices.

“Until now, the only place you were able to add contacts was from your mobile device, by either typing in a phone number or scanning a QR code. Soon, you’ll be able to add and manage contacts from the comfort of your keyboard on WhatsApp Web and Windows – and eventually other linked devices,” the team explained.

As of today, the WhatsApp mobile apps can only save new contacts to smartphones’ address books, which may or may not be synced to a cloud-based email service. As an alternative, WhatsApp will soon offer the ability to save a new contact to WhatsApp directly, which will make these contacts easy to restore when switching to a new device. The team also argued that users managing more than one WhatsApp account on their phones may find these new WhatsApp contacts handy for separating personal and business contacts.

“These updates will also make it possible to eventually manage and save contacts by usernames. Usernames on WhatsApp will add an extra degree of privacy so that you don’t need to share your phone number when messaging someone,” the team also explained today.

Despite having over 2 billion users across the world, WhatsApp has been late to adopt features you probably take for granted on any messaging app these days, including video messages or HD photos. The company also launched an iPad app in beta a year ago, but it has yet to be released to the public.