Changing your phone number forces you to perform a number of tasks. Here’s what to do on WhatsApp when changing SIM cards
Changing phone number is not a very common thing, but sometimes it is necessary to do it. It’s always been very inconvenient to have to warn all our contacts that we no longer have the old number and, usually, there are many who call us, however, not having any response. Nowadays, then, there is an additional problem: what happens to WhatsApp if you change your phone number? Fortunately, WhatsApp knows that if we change our number we risk losing all our chats, attachments, groups, contacts and all our settings and has taken the appropriate countermeasures by inserting a migration procedure from the old to the new phone number. There is also a feature to send our contacts a notification that we have changed our number. Finally, if we do the right procedure, the new number will be automatically associated with our profile even in older chats.
How to change number on WhatsApp
To associate our WhatsApp profile with a new number we must remember to perform the right procedure while we still have the old number. We open the app and go to Settings > Account > Change Number. There will appear a screen that explains that we will receive a confirmation SMS on the new number (which therefore must already be active) and that if we want to change both the number and the phone we must first change it on the old smartphone. Then we’ll be asked for the previous number and the new one: by entering both we’ll receive the SMS to migrate the profile to the new number and in a few minutes we’ll have done everything.
What happens to your account if you change number
At the end of this procedure the profile associated with the old number will be deleted and replaced by the account connected to the new SIM. So if someone sends a message to that number, from an existing chat, that message will never reach you. However, on each of the single or group chats you participated in with the old account, a message will appear alerting others to the fact that you have changed your number. Tapping on that message will allow others to add your new contact to their address book, and all previous messages will be associated with the new profile. All of your settings, such as ringtones, privacy choices, and themes will be automatically migrated to your new account.
How to notify others that you have changed your number
The easiest way to notify all of your WhatsApp contacts that you have a new phone number is to send a collective notification, as suggested by the app at the end of the migration process. You can choose whether to send a notification to all the contacts in your address book, only those with whom you have chatted, or a small number of contacts you choose. A second method, less recommended because it’s more cumbersome, is to use broadcast lists. In this case, however, you will have to send the collective message from your old number because the new one is not yet in your contacts’ address book.