Mark Zuckerberg announced the feature’s rollout on Facebook and Instagram.
“Starting today, you can log into the same WhatsApp account on up to four phones,” he said.
WhatsApp said that this feature is rolling out to all users within the coming weeks.
Until now, users could only use one WhatsApp account on one phone and multiple companion desktop devices.
With the new rollout, users’ messages will be synced across devices including other phones. So even if one device is switched off, they can access the app on other devices.
WhatsApp is one of the biggest messaging services around with more than 2 billion users. But it lacked multiphone support until now because of full end-to-end encryption support for chats and calls.
The company started testing multi-device compatibility back in 2021 with select beta users. At that time, Meta (known as Facebook at that time) said that it had developed new tech to sync messages across devices while maintaining end-to-end encryption protection.
Other competitors like Telegram and Messenger offered multidevice sync for messages, but they didn’t have support for end-to-end encryption.
In 2022, WhatsApp started making multidevice features available to everyone. But it didn’t support multiple phones.
WhatsApp is also rolling out a new way to link devices using a one-time code.
“You can now get a one-time-use code by entering your mobile number on WhatsApp Web, which you can use to link devices instead of scanning the QR code on your mobile phone. We’ll make this feature available for more linked devices in the future,” the company said in a blog post.
