How to hide your chat messages in WhatsApp to organize your conversations on the messaging platform

• To hide a WhatsApp chat thread, you need to either long-press or swipe on your conversation.
• By hiding your message history, you are archiving it, not deleting it.
• Archived conversations can be restored the same way as they are hidden.

WhatsApp is one of the most popular encrypted messaging services available today. Although it doesn't hold the same appeal with US users as other platforms, the Meta-owned app has more than 2 billion users across the globe.

With that kind of popularity, the number of conversations for your typical user may add up to the point where you need to organize them. Either the number of conversations becomes unwieldy to navigate, or maybe there are people you no longer talk to on the app. In any case, here's how to archive and restore conversations on WhatsApp.

Quick tip: By default, chats will remain archived when you receive a new message in that conversation. This can be adjusted in the app's settings.

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How to hide WhatsApp chats on iPhone

On an iPhone, there are a couple of ways that you can hide your chat messages:

• Long-press on the conversation that you wish to hide and select Archive in the pop-up that appears.

• Swipe from right to left on the chat until Archive appears; releasing at this stage will archive the chat.

Quick tip: You can also archive all your chats at once by clicking on Settings, then Chats, then selecting Archive All Chats.

You can restore an archived chat by tapping the Archived button and swiping left on the chat that you wish to restore. If this option doesn't appear, you don't have any archived chats.

How to hide WhatsApp chats on Android

On Android, archiving WhatsApp chats can only be accomplished through long-pressing on the chat you wish to hide and selecting the Archive button, as highlighted below.

Similar to the above iPhone instructions, you can restore an archived chat by tapping the Archived button at the top of the chats list. Once you have located the chat that you wish to restore, long-press it and tap the Unarchive button at the top of the screen.