How to Hide Your Online Status on WhatsApp?

Although WhatsApp is the leading instant messaging service, as it gathered over 2 billion users so far, there are plenty of situations when you don’t need others to see when you’re using the app. You may want to avoid a bothersome person; you may need to not give your boss the opportunity to speculate certain things and many more.

Perhaps the most common reason why people prefer to hide their online status on WhatsApp is simply the need for privacy. Pretty much nobody likes the idea of having their online status exposed – it creates responsibilities, and it offers others the chance to ask inappropriate questions. When you don’t appear online, you can reply anytime you want and how you want, without feeling bad if the person you’re talking to sees that you’ve seen the received message and didn’t bother to respond right away. In the world of 2021, when everyone is busy looking for ways of improving their lives, inter-human connections can become something too difficult and stressful. Therefore, hiding your online status while using WhatsApp is an idea to consider, and you can do it in a few simple steps:

Android Devices and iPhones

1. Grab your smartphone and open WhatsApp.

2. Access the ‘Settings’ menu from the app.

3. Head over to ‘Account’.

4. Locate and select the ‘Privacy’ area.

5. Tap the ‘Last Seen’ option.

6. Hit the ‘Nobody’ option so that nobody will see if you’re online. That’s all!

By default, WhatsApp allows everyone to see your online status, but as you’ve convinced yourself already, it’s extremely easy to change this from the app’s settings.

Laptops and PC Desktops

While the option to hide your online status directly on WhatsApp Web (the WhatsApp version for laptops and desktops) isn’t available yet, you’ll also have to simply follow the steps above. Any changes made in your WhatsApp account from your phone will automatically be synced to the desktop version as well. After all, you always need to keep your smartphone close in order to use WhatsApp on your laptop or desktop PC.

Even so, we can expect the option to hide your online status to arrive for WhatsApp Web in the near future as well. The PC version of the world’s most popular instant messaging service has been through plenty of improvements in the last years, and the developers have all the interest to do their best in satisfying the customers’ desires.

As for now, WhatsApp Web still requires your phone to have an active internet connection for the app to work on the PC. In other words, you won’t be able to check your WhatsApp messages on a PC if the internet is off on your smartphone. But if this condition will be abolished in the near future, and there’s no reason to believe that it won’t be, you’ll also be able to hide your online status directly from the WhatsApp Web app for PC. You will be able to use BlueStacks to run the emulated version of the android app on PC. However, WhatsApp Web allows the users to access the instant messaging service not only from laptops and desktops but also from Macs, iPads, and Android tablets. With a few simple tweaks and having your smartphone nearby, you can get WhatsApp going on a bigger screen in no time.

You should also bear in mind that it doesn’t necessarily mean that someone has seen your last message only if the person shows itself on WhatsApp as ‘online’. Instead, the person could be using the app in those moments for reading other messages or starting a video chat with someone. The only way to know if a person has seen your recent message is if the blue check marks appear beside the message.