WhatsApp May Hide Phone Numbers When Reacting to Messages Soon

WhatsApp users may soon add reactions to group messages without it revealing their phone number.

The company behind the popular secure messaging app is reportedly working on a feature that will hide users' phone numbers when they add a reaction to a message.

This new feature is one of the latest WhatsApp is working on to improve user experience and quality of life while using the app.

WhatsApp Phone Number Privacy

WhatsApp group chats are a convenient way to talk to multiple people with WhatsApp accounts in a secure and safe environment. With WhatsApp Communities bringing separate groups together under one "umbrella" community, talking to multiple people has never been this easy.

However, there is one caveat to this: a user can reveal their phone number by adding a reaction to a message and interacting with a community announcement group through message reactions. All of these actions will reveal a user's phone number as of press time.

Thankfully WhatsApp is working on a feature to fix that. According to WABetaInfo, this new feature, called "phone number privacy," will hide users' phones even when reacting to a group message, preventing other people from sending them unwanted messages and protecting their privacy.

The publication managed to grab a screenshot of the feature in action. Users can find it in the community announcement group - switching it on will trigger an alert informing users their phone number is only visible to community admins and other people who already saved them as a contact.

Tapping on "OK" will switch the feature on, preventing anyone other than the admin and their contacts from viewing their number in the conversation, allowing them to react to messages freely. It also makes the community announcement group open for access by anyone in complete anonymity.

While the ability to react to messages within the community announcement group is already available to some users as part of its beta test; WhatsApp will also extend the feature's coverage to other groups in the future.

As this feature is still in beta test, it will not get a public release anytime soon, though whether WhatsApp users may have to wait for a long time or not is still up for debate.

Other Upcoming WhatsApp Features

WhatsApp's phone number privacy feature is one of many features WhatsApp is developing for public release. You may recall it is recently working on a chat list filter, allowing users to see messages by their classification.

The company also released a redesigned sticker and GIF picker for iOS devices - a feature it previously worked on that got a public release in early July. It allows users to search for their favorite stickers and GIF reactions more easily than before.

Apart from that, WhatsApp is also working on adding the ability to upload and download high-quality videos through the app (with minimal compression) and pin and unpin a message automatically after a set period has passed.