WhatsApp’s hidden contact feature revealed — here’s how it works

It was playing hide and seek.

Popular messaging application WhatsApp has a hidden contact feature that’s recently been revealed — and it can prove to be super helpful, especially when trying to remember things on your to-do list.

In November 2022, the company rolled out a feature allowing you to send messages to yourself in the application on mobile devices, according to Mashable.

This means that the next time you’re trying to remember what to buy at the grocery store or attempting to jot down a confirmation code for a login, you can just send a quick note to yourself and come back to it when needed.

In order to message yourself on WhatsApp, you can simply start a new chat, and your own number should pop up at the top of your list of contacts with the option to “message yourself.”

Once you click that option, it should allow you to do just that — send messages to your own contact.

The outlet also noted that the messages to yourself are “end-to-end encrypted,” and are able to be seen on all of your devices that are connected to WhatsApp.

And, the app also has a feature that permits the user to pin the self-chat message to the top of their conversation list, per Tech Crunch, which saves you some time from searching through your contacts.

In January, TikTok user @mysecrethacks made a video reminding people of this feature, and even claimed that you can download the messages you send to yourself on to the computer via WhatsApp web.

“You can use it to take notes, save links, save photos, save videos, and after that, download them on your computer through WhatsApp web,” he said in the clip, which has reached over 138,000 views.

However, WhatsApp is not the only application that has introduce something like this, though — both Slack, Messenger and Signal allow their users to send notes to themselves, as well.

It’s also not the only social media app that has a “hidden feature” that’s been revealed recently — in April 2022, users discovered how to find the first Instagram photo they had ever “liked.”

In order to find this out, you can click the “settings” icon on the app, and type in the phrase, “manage likes” into the search bar that’s at the top of the page.

All of the photos that you’ve ever liked on Instagram should come up on the page, and you can hit “sort by” and “oldest to newest” to view your oldest “liked” photo.

And, earlier this month, design expert Preston Konrad, who is the host of TLC’s “Style by Jury,” took to Instagram to share a hack to find some of the best items on the Amazon app.

He explained that if you tap on the little “lightbulb” icon on the app, will get a feed that looks “identical to TikTok.”

Konrad explained that if you click on a certain category, the feature allows you to shop other people’s curated buys and finds.

“Am I the last person to know about this?” Konrad wrote in the caption of the video. “So much easier to find good picks (especially home decor etc) instead of tons of digging.”