Using Two WhatsApp Accounts on the Same Desktop

Here in Indonesia, WhatsApp is the de-facto official phone and messaging system. People use it far more than traditional phone & SMS, and most businesses maintain a WhatsApp account for customer service.

Since I spend so much time in front of my laptop, I make extensive use of the WhatsApp desktop client. Just make sense.

TL/DR: WhatsApp publishes a beta Windows desktop client. Download it here and attach it to a second WhatsApp account!

But now that I’m launching John Galt Services, I need to maintain a business account. And since I’m deep in the talent-search process, I need to be able to click on a candidate’s phone number in JobStreet and have it open in WhatsApp Desktop so I can start a screening conversation.

The challenge is that the WhatsApp desktop client only supports one account at a time! So I had to find a workaround.

One option was to get my Windows system to open up tel links in WhatsApp Web. But that turned out to be a huge hassle. I could get it to work on my system, no problem, but getting it to work for the rest of my team would quickly turn into an internal tech-support nightmare. So that was a non-starter.

But while I was hacking away at the problem, I ran into an awesome solution that worked instantly, perfectly, and with no fuss. And it’s so simple, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.

Here you go: WhatsApp publishes a beta Windows desktop client!

Just download the WhatsApp Beta app from the Windows Store. You can install & run it right alongside the regular WhatsApp app. Attach it to a different WhatsApp account, and hey presto: two WhatsApp accounts on the same desktop!

You’re welcome. 😎

I’m not a Mac user, but I bet there’s a similar solution for MacOS. If you know what it is, please share it in the comments!