Hacker News Reader

Comment by gibspaulding | Hacker News Reader

Just a PSA for anyone else who's left WhatsApp in the past few days. Before uninstalling, I went through the settings and actually "deleted" my account, but after letting one of my few WhatsApp contacts know I had done so, he mentioned I still show up in chats. So let people know if you're leaving, because it seems WhatsApp won't prevent them from messaging someone who doesn't exist.

View on HN

As an FYI to you and anyone reading this, you could convert your account to a business account using WhatsApp for Business. It has an auto-reply feature that you can enable with a custom message, to inform people you've moved to whatever platform you've decided to move to.

It would just use SMS wouldn't it? So unless you also changed number, you'd still receive the message?

If you "deleted" your account, then the number associated with that account BETTER DAMN WELL BE DELETED too.

I mean your phone number. WhatsApp finds contacts by phone number, and messages them over SMS if they are not themselves on WhatsApp. (At least, I thought it did?)

So I'm saying I assume the situation after deleting WhatsApp is the same as if you'd never had it, SMS.

It wouldn't make sense for User B deleting WhatsApp to cause B's phone number to disappear from User A's contacts.

Signal can send SMS message as a fallback, but I don't think WhatsApp has that feature.

I did not know Signal was able to do that. Seems kind of like it is defeating the purpose of Signal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com