WhatsApp coexistence checker

The Whole Business Is in Somebody’s Pocket

The WhatsApp Business app runs on one phone, and that phone belongs to one person. Every booking, every price question and every complaint arrives in that pocket, and when its owner is on holiday, driving or asleep, so is your customer service. Coexistence is the arrangement where that stops being true without your number changing, and the WhatsApp coexistence checker above works out in about a minute whether your setup qualifies for it.

The number stays the number. The app stays on the phone. What gets added is everybody else.

What Coexistence Actually Means

Two things running on one number at the same time. The WhatsApp Business app carries on working the way it always has, in the hand of whoever has been answering, and a platform connects to the same number so that a team can answer from a shared inbox on a computer.

The alternative, and it is a perfectly good one, is a standard migration: the number moves onto the official platform and the app stops being how you answer. Which of the two is right for you is mostly about whether anybody genuinely needs to keep replying from a phone in the way the app allows.

Both routes keep your number. That is worth saying early, because the fear that stops most people from doing anything is losing the number their customers already have.

What the WhatsApp Coexistence Checker Asks

Six conditions. Tick the ones that are true, and the panel counts them, bands you, and lists what to sort out from the boxes you left empty.

Four of the six are facts about your setup. Two are decisions you have to make, and they are the ones worth slowing down for, because they are about what you are giving up rather than about what you have got.

It Has to Be the Business App

The first condition rules out two situations and it is worth checking which one you are in.

Personal WhatsApp does not qualify. If your business runs on an ordinary WhatsApp account, the number needs to move onto the WhatsApp Business app before any of this applies.

A number already on the API does not qualify either, for the opposite reason: it has already made the move, and there is no app on a phone to coexist with.

The second condition is the dull one that catches people: the app has to be on a current version. Update it before you try to connect anything, and update it on the actual phone the number lives on rather than the one in your hand.

One Number, One Platform

If the number is already connected to another messaging provider, it has to be disconnected before it can be connected to a new one. That is the plain shape of it: one number, one platform.

This matters mostly to businesses that tried something before and half abandoned it. An old provider account nobody has logged into for a year still counts as a connection, and it will stop the migration without explaining itself. If you are not sure whether something is still attached to the number, that is worth establishing before you book in a move.

Verification Comes First Here Too

Business verification in Meta Business Manager is a condition of connecting the number at all, which puts it in front of everything else on this page.

It is the slowest item on any of these checklists and the one with the most ways to fail on a technicality, so start it early. The Meta business verification checker goes through what is actually asked for, which is mostly a matter of your documents agreeing with each other.

The History Question

Here is the first of the two decisions, and it is the one people wish they had read about first.

Coexistence brings across recent chats rather than a full archive. The panel’s guidance is to export anything older than about six months before you connect, because only recent history comes with you.

For most businesses that is fine: last week’s conversations are the ones you need in front of you, and a three year old thread about a booking is not doing any work. For some it is not fine at all. If your chats are your records, if you go back through them for disputes, quotes or a history of what somebody was told, get the export done first and keep it somewhere sensible.

Availability and behaviour here vary by region and by app version, which the panel says in its own footnote. Treat the six months as the shape of the thing rather than as a guarantee, and confirm what will actually come across for your number before you commit to anything.

Your Automations Move to the Platform

The second decision. Away messages, greetings and quick replies stop being things you manage on the phone and become automations managed centrally.

That is a real cost on the day: you will be rebuilding what you already had, and the version in the app took you ten minutes to set up years ago. Budget an hour and write down what you currently have before you start, because the away message you have not looked at since 2023 is surprisingly hard to reconstruct from memory.

What you get back is worth more than what you rebuild. A greeting on the app is one message. A greeting on the platform can vary by what the customer asked, hand off to a person, or open a booking. If you are rewriting them anyway, this is the moment to make them better rather than to copy them across word for word: the welcome message generator covers what a first reply should actually say.

Reading the Three Bands

All six gives you a good fit for coexistence: you can keep answering on the phone while a shared inbox runs on the same number.

Four or five gives you close, and the fixes underneath are usually the practical ones, an app update or a provider to disconnect.

Under four gives you a verdict that is easy to misread as a failure and is not. It says migrate instead: a standard migration is the better route right now, and the note adds the important half, which is that you keep the number either way.

That is the point worth taking away from the whole panel. Coexistence is a convenience about where you answer from, not a condition of keeping your customers. Nobody loses the number.

What the WhatsApp Coexistence Checker Cannot Do

It is six questions and a verdict, and the limits are the ordinary ones plus one that matters more here than on most of these pages.

• It cannot see your number. No lookup, no connection to Meta, no check of what your number is currently attached to. Every answer is yours.
• It cannot check availability where you are. The footnote says it plainly: coexistence availability still varies by region and app version. A perfect six here is not a promise that the route is open for your number today.
• It does not migrate anything. Nothing is started, connected or moved by ticking boxes.
• It cannot tell you what history will come across. It tells you to expect recent chats rather than an archive, which is the shape rather than the specification.
• Nothing is stored. No account, no record of your answers.

The checklist is rendered on the server before any script runs, so every condition, band and fix is readable before anything loads.

What to Do Before the Day of the Move

Four things, and doing them in this order removes most of the ways a migration turns into a bad afternoon.

• Export the chat history you care about. Before anything is connected, not after somebody notices it is missing.
• Write down your current automations. The greeting, the away message and every quick reply, copied into a document.
• Find out what else is attached to the number. Old providers, old integrations, anything set up by somebody who has left.
• Get verification started. It is the long pole, and everything else can be done while it is in progress.

Then pick the day. Not the day before a promotion, and not a Friday.

Keep the Phone, Add the Desk

The reason coexistence exists is that a lot of businesses were being asked to choose between two things that were both true: the phone is genuinely the fastest way for one person to answer a customer, and one person answering everything is genuinely the bottleneck.

DMly supports coexistence, so the app stays in your pocket for the conversations you want to handle yourself while the rest of the team works from a shared inbox on the same number, with the history and the customer record in one place rather than two.

If the checker sends you towards a standard migration instead, that is not a worse outcome. It is the same destination without the phone, and for a business where nobody is wedded to answering from a handset it is the simpler setup of the two.