WhatsApp is rolling out usernames: a way to identify a WhatsApp account by name instead of by phone number. This affects two different things, so we've split this article in two:
Your contacts: the people you contact or who message your business
Your business: your own WhatsApp account
What it means for you contacts ?
Until now, every person messaging you was identified by their phone number. Now, people can set a personal username and choose to hide their phone number behind it.
From now on, when you message with a contact on WhatsApp, you'll see one of three things:
Phone number only: the contact hasn't set a username, nothing changes.
Username only: the contact has a username and has chosen to hide their phone number. You'll see their username, not their number.
Username + phone number: the contact has a username, but because you already had a conversation with them, you can still see both.
This is entirely each contact's personal choice, some will start showing a username, others won't.
What changes in your WAX inbox: for contacts who hide their number, you'll see their username where you used to see a phone number.
Behind the scenes, WhatsApp now identifies every contact with a permanent ID (a "business-scoped user ID"), instead of relying only on the phone number. WAX already uses this ID to keep track of your conversations, so:
You won't lose any conversation history.
You can keep messaging these contacts exactly as before.
Nothing breaks if a contact changes their username later, WAX still recognizes them as the same person.
If a contact hides their number and you've never messaged with them before, their phone number simply won't be available to you, only their username and WAX's internal contact ID.
What does it mean for your WhatsApp business account?
Separately, you can also claim a username for your own business, the same way a company might claim a handle on social media.
The important difference: unlike your contacts, your business phone number cannot be hidden. Claiming a username is purely an added identity.
Your clients will keep seeing your business's phone number exactly as they do today, whether or not you set a username.
In short, usernames give end users a genuine privacy option (hide the number), while for businesses it's a branding/identity option only.
A few practical notes if you're considering claiming one:
They can only contain Latin letters (a-z), numbers (0-9), periods (.), and underscores (_);
Accented characters (such as ñ, é, ü) are not supported and will cause the request to fail;
They must be between three and 35 characters long;
They must contain at least one letter of the Latin alphabet (a-z, A-Z);
They must not start or end with a period, or contain two periods in a row;
They must not start with www;
They must not end with a domain suffix (e.g., .com, .org, .net, .int, .edu, .gov, .mil, .us, .in, .html, and so on);
Case is not considered when comparing usernames, unlike periods and underscores. For example, myID and myid are considered the same username, while myid, my.id, and my_id are considered different.
If a reserved username is already in use by your Facebook Page or Instagram account, you must link your business phone number to your Facebook Page or Instagram account before you can claim the username.
Each username is globally unique across WhatsApp — first come, first served.
Claiming is done through WhatsApp Manager, or on directly on WAX here.
What you need to do
Nothing is required.
This is a platform-level change from WhatsApp, and WAX already supports it under the hood. Your inbox, contact records, and message history keep working as usual, you'll simply start seeing usernames alongside (or instead of) phone numbers for some contacts.
Claiming a username for your own business is entirely optional.
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