WhatsApp’s New Restricted Chat Feature Locks Conversation on Your Primary Phone

WhatsApp is developing a new privacy control called Restricted Chat that will keep selected conversations accessible only from a user’s primary mobile phone.

The feature is designed to prevent protected chats from syncing to WhatsApp Web, desktop sessions, and secondary phones linked to the same account.

WhatsApp identified the capability in Android beta version 2.26.36.5. However, it remains under development and is not yet enabled for beta testers.

WhatsApp has not announced a public release date or confirmed when the feature will reach stable Android, iOS, Web, or desktop versions.

Restricted Chat appears to be an evolution of WhatsApp’s existing Advanced Chat Privacy setting, rather than a replacement for end-to-end encryption or the Chat Lock feature.

It will be optional and applied on a per-conversation basis, allowing users to restrict only sensitive chats while continuing to use linked devices for ordinary conversations.

WhatsApp New Restricted Chat Feature

When Restricted Chat is enabled, WhatsApp will retain the selected conversation on the primary phone and exclude it from the account’s linked-device synchronization process.

The conversation should therefore not appear in WhatsApp Web, a desktop client, or on a secondary mobile device connected to the same WhatsApp account.

This creates a narrower access boundary for confidential discussions. A user may still link a laptop, tablet, browser session, or another phone to their WhatsApp account.

However, those linked endpoints would not receive the restricted conversation content. The design is important because linked devices can expand the number of places where messages are available.

An unattended browser session, a shared workstation, or an unauthorized linked device could expose conversations even if the primary phone remains physically secure.

Restricted Chat aims to reduce that exposure by preventing the protected Chat from reaching those devices in the first place. Restricted Chat is expected to preserve the controls already available through Advanced Chat Privacy.

WhatsApp introduced Advanced Chat Privacy in April 2025 as an additional, per-chat protection for conversations requiring stronger controls over data sharing.

For a restricted conversation, the following protections are expected to remain active:

• Participants cannot export the complete chat history through WhatsApp’s built-in export function.
  
• Media will not automatically save to a device’s gallery or camera roll.
  
• Messages in the Chat cannot be used with Meta AI features.
  
• The conversation will not synchronize to linked devices, including WhatsApp Web and secondary phones.

WhatsApp also displays a system notification when a participant changes the Advanced Chat Privacy setting, making the privacy-status change visible within the conversation.

The feature could be particularly useful for journalists, incident responders, executives, legal teams, activists, and organizations discussing credentials, breach details, threat intelligence, financial information, or other sensitive material.

It may also limit exposure to unofficial or modified web clients that rely on linked-device access. Such tools can potentially read synchronized conversations, and some may pass message content to third-party automation or AI services.

By withholding a restricted chat from linked-device synchronization, WhatsApp reduces the data available to software operating through those sessions. However, Restricted Chat should not be treated as a complete anti-leak solution.

It cannot fully prevent a participant from manually copying text, photographing the screen, taking screenshots where supported, or sharing information outside WhatsApp. The control primarily reduces convenient, bulk, and linked-device-based extraction paths.

Restricted Chat is currently an Android feature in development. Installing WhatsApp beta version 2.26.36.5 will not make the option available because the feature has not been activated for testing. Users should continue reviewing and removing unrecognized linked devices while waiting for WhatsApp to disclose a rollout schedule.

Learn 7 Metric-Gated AI SOC Deployment Phases – Download Free AI SOC Deployment Playbook 2026.