Almost every month, I meet a user with a much more common problem: switching phones and losing all their WhatsApp contacts. On a technical level this statement is wrong, because “WhatsApp” contacts are not lost, phone contacts are lost and therefore WhatsApp cannot read them.

It’s easy to have multiple devices these days: a tablet, a computer, a second mobile phone, a work mobile phone… These connected devices did not have the option to add contacts to WhatsApp, but that’s about to change.

The company just announced an important innovation Fixing this issue and allowing users to choose whether they want to continue syncing contacts from the phone or save them to WhatsApp from connected devices.

Until now, the only way to add contacts to WhatsApp was to do so via our main mobile phone. Each user’s contacts are located in one place: SIM card, internal phone memory, Google account… This means that when we change phones or devices, there is some risk in preserving our contacts.

We can choose whether the contacts will be saved only in WhatsApp or synced on the device as well.

This is something that is about to change, as WhatsApp has officially announced. Contacts can be added to WhatsApp from connected deviceswithout having to sync them on the host phone.

This opens the door to adding contacts from our WhatsApp app for PC or even WhatsApp Web. It is also stated that we will be able to save contacts on any connected device “later”.

After all we can save contacts to WhatsApp from all our devices. Despite this, at Xataka we always recommend that our contacts are well registered in the email account. This is the best way we can recover them without any problems even if we do not have a SIM card or any device at hand.

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