Invisible on Whatsapp – Hide Last Seen Online And Messages Notifications

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On May 30, 2013

Today, those who have an iPhone are less and less interested in sending normal SMS’s because they cost money, but prefers to chat with free messages on applications such as WhatsApp.

WhatsApp is a great application, has almost become a standard even higher than Facebook at least for direct messages. The only problem with WhatsApp is related to privacy and the fact that our friends always know when was the last time we were online and if a message has been read.

You cannot really turn off this feature and it is impossible to be invisible while you chat and you remain connected in WhatsApp, unless you use a simple, perhaps trivial, but useful trick.

Let’s say that a person who you would like to ignore for now sends you a message through WhatsApp, how can you read it without him or her to be aware that you’ve read it? Or, how can you send a message to a person avoiding everyone else to know that that was the last time you were online?

To use WhatsApp for Andoid (Samsung Galaxy, Nexus, LG, HTC, etc.) without appearing to others the last online access and notify them when reading a message you must first enable the Airplane mode, or at least disable any network connection. In practice, when a message is received or read a previously received one, prior to opening in WhatsApp, enable the Airplane mode and then open the application to read all messages. Then exit from WhatsApp and re-enable the Airplane mode.

We understand that this is a bit ‘corny trick, but really there is no other way.

Should this happen often, to avoid any awkward things, you can install an application called WhatsApp Shadow. This application adds a button in the top bar of WhatsApp to go offline or to disable all network connections.

WhatsApp for iPhone on the other hand does not require you to install anything, you just need to go in the application options in the Advanced Settings Chat to disable the notification of “last seen online”.

It seems that changing this option needs around 24 hours to be applied so be careful and do some testing before giving a bad impression.

If you want to completely disable the display of the last access on WhatsApp you can install the Cydia tweak WhatsApp LSeen TimeStamp.