You can hide a WhatsApp chat thread by long-pressing or swiping on your conversation.
By obscuring your message history, you are archiving it rather than deleting it. Conversations that have been archived can be restored in the same way that they have been hidden.
WhatsApp is one of the most widely used encrypted messaging services today. Although it does not have the same appeal among US users as other platforms, the Meta-owned app has over 2 billion users worldwide.
With that kind of popularity, the number of conversations for your average user may become so large that you need to organize them. Either the number of conversations becomes unwieldy to navigate, or there are people on the app with whom you no longer communicate. In any case, here’s how to archive and restore WhatsApp conversations.
A quick tip: By default, when you receive a new message in a chat, it will be archived. The app’s settings allow you to change this.
How to Hide WhatsApp Messages on an iPhone
- You can hide your chat messages on an iPhone in a couple of ways:
- Long-press the conversation you want to hide and select Archive from the pop-up menu that appears.
- Swipe the chat from right to left until Archive appears; releasing at this point will archive the chat.
A quick tip: You can also archive all of your chats at once by going to Settings, Chats, and then Archive All Chats.
You can recover an archived chat by tapping the Archived button and swiping left on the chat you want to recover. If you don’t see this option, you don’t have any archived chats.
On Android, how do you hide WhatsApp chats?
- On Android, you can only archive WhatsApp chats by long-pressing on the chat you want to hide and selecting the Archive button, as shown below.
- The Archive button has been highlighted.
- You can restore an archived chat in the same way you did on your iPhone by tapping the Archived button at the top of the chats list. Once you’ve found the chat you want to restore, long-press it and then tap the Unarchive button at the top of the screen.