With the most recent update to WhatsApp, a new annoying notification is being displayed if you’re using their WhatsApp Web feature.
The WhatsApp Web feature allows you to mirror the WhatsApp application on your phone to your browser. It’s a great benefit for those that use WhatsApp often to communicate; it allows you to read and respond to messages via web browser.
However, an update to the Android app (not sure if this is happening on iOS) has an irritating new notification that shows up in the running apps in the pulldown menu. A constant “WhatsApp Web is Currently Active” when you’re using the feature.
And you can’t easily swipe it away. Long pressing on a notification usually would give you a sense or direction of how to adjust the settings, but that’s not the case here.
For example, when you sign up with Virgin games promo code or download a new app for your mobile phone, notifications are normally turned on. So when the first push notification appears on your home screen, you can hold down that notification to open up a menu with notification settings to disable them, choose what type of notification you want to see, or simply remove that notification.
Unfortunately doing that for this doesn’t give one any idea of how to disable the notifications from WhatsApp. That’s not surprising for smaller intrusive apps, but this is odd considering it’s a well-known app that’s owned by a company really struggling with privacy concerns.
How to disable “WhatsApp Web is Currently Active” notification
In order to get rid of this notification, first I went into my WhatsApp settings — you can get there through the app menu or by long pressing the actual notification. From there, you can’t easily tell which option allows you to disable it. At first I thought it was the “Set as Priority” option — but that is already disabled for me. The only two notifications that I have enabled were: “Allow notifications” and “Preview in pop-ups”
I turned off “Preview in pop-ups” and that seemed to do the trick; switching this off disabled the “WhatsApp Web” notification on my Android phone. What sucks about this is that it also turns off the preview of individual messages when I go to view them in the pulldown menu.
UPDATE: So I lied, this method didn’t work entirely. The next day, the notification showed up again. Even though it still shows up on my notification menu, it’s not always present (even when WhatsApp Web is active).
We hope that WhatsApp’s next Android update will allow to pick and choose which pulldown mennu notifications we can enable and disable.