How to Send message to Contacts on WhatsApp without saving their number

Looking for a way to send message(s) to a phone number without having it saved as contact in your WhatsApp? Here's how, works for both Android and iOS devices.

From inception till now, WhatsApp has been a peer-to-peer messaging platform, which means that you have to personally know someone, or at least have their primary phone contact before you can message them. In fact, you have to save the contact of the individual you wish to message via WhatsApp on your phone, with or without a name...or do you?

In this article, I'll show you how to send messages to a contact on WhatsApp without saving their number.

Without much ado, there are two ways to send messages to an unsaved phone number on WhatsApp, and one is easier than the other (takes fewer steps). These are explained below:

Method 1

Unsaved number with one or more groups in common

If the contact you want to send a message to without saving is on the same WhatsApp group chat with you, you can message them easily. Simply open the WhatsApp group, find any message sent by that contact to the group, and click on the contact's number displayed on top of the message.

In the menu that appears, select Message [contact's number] and a new chat will be opened for you and that contact. You can then proceed to send messages to the contact without saving their phone number.

Another way you can do this, if you can't readily find a message sent by the contact to the group (or don't want to), is to open the group info page (from the overflow menu or by clicking the group name at the top of the group chat) and scroll through the list of members until you find the particular contact's number.

Then click on the number and select Message [contact's number] and a new chat will be opened for you and the contact.

Method 2

WhatsApp Click to Chat

WhatsApp has a feature called Click to Chat with which you can send messages to numbers not saved in your phone's address book directly. To do this, you'll need to create a special URL with the contact's phone number in international format. When the URL is clicked or visited in a web browser, a new chat will be opened between you and the contact on WhatsApp (on your phone or on WhatsApp Web).

To create the special link, add the contact's phone number at the end of this link https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone=. To get the international format of a phone number, remove the 0 at the beginning and add the country code without the + (and the leading zeros if the country code starts with zeros).

For example,

If the phone number is 08012345678 and the country code is +234, the international format for WhatsApp Click to Chat will be 2348012345678 and the link will be https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone=2348012345678.

Again, if the phone number is +001-(555)1234567, the link will be https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone=15551234567.

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Voicemail finally comes to Whatsapp for Android and iOS. Here is how to use it.

While the new that Whatsapp is ending support for Blackberry, Nokia and old Android/iOS devices come December, the Facebook-owned company is forging ahead with the development of the IM app for the devices still supported.

What I am trying to tell you essentially is that there has been an update for Whatsapp for Android and iOS, and while both have different version numbers (version 2.16.229 for Android and version 2.16.8 for iOS), the new update for both platforms comes with a new feature that is overdue; Voicemail.

When Whatsapp added the Voice Call feature for its app on all mobile platforms in 2015, there was a lot of excitement because the feature wasn't a common one in the mobile app world. Though the feature has been useful, there are times when you feel that it should be improved upon, particularly because the Voice Call feature is only useful when the second party is online.

That is exactly what Voicemail is coming to fix in Whatsapp. Thanks to it, you can now leave a voice message when a Whatsapp call to a user is not picked or answered, as opposed to the norm of leaving a text message in the same situation.

How to use the Whatsapp Voicemail Feature

When your Whatsapp call to a user is not answered, you will be presented with three options: Voice Messages, Call Again and Cancel. You already know what the last two options are used for, it's the first one we're concerned about here.


To utilise the Voicemail feature after a Whatsapp call is not answered;

• Select the Voice Messages option from the three options.
• Tap and hold the Voice Message button to start recording your message (voicemail).
• When you're done recording your message, release the Voice Button button to send it, or swipe to the left to trash it and record another.

The message you record would be sent to the user as a voice note (VN). Considering the series of new features that are being released to Whatsapp almost weekly, the Whatsapp Video Call feature that has been in the rumour mills for some time doesn't seem to be far from us anymore.

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