Annoyed at people who track you on WhatsApp? This trick hides your online status from others

WhatsApp has its own advantages and disadvantages, of course with more pros and less cons. But while you use WhatsApp, and you sure have to use it a lot given how popular it is nowadays, you also have to give up a bit of your privacy. When you chat on WhatsApp people know you do. By default they also know when you read a message, or what sort of new DP photo you have and so on and so forth. But there is way to avoid broadcasting your status to the world, in case if you are interested in avoiding some people and wants them not to know when you are online.
Often there are times when you want to avoid some people on WhatsApp. You also don’t want them to see when you are online on WhatsApp. The way to do this, and it is not something that you will be able to do always, is to avoid going into WhatsApp. This also means you mostly use Android’s quick reply and notification centre to read and reply to your WhatsApp messages.
There is this problem — or rather a psychological pressure — to reply immediately to any message as the sender has seen you online. This happens many a times. There are people who expect you to be online all the time and instantly reply to their messages. This can be little irritating at times. Now, the problem gets tricky to solve if you just want to talk to one person on chat and the other friend also starts bombarding your chat app with continuous messages just because he/she saw you online.
A lot of people on WhatsApp have tweaked their privacy settings to turn off Last Seen, Read Receipts etc but the chat app cannot hide your online status. If you are online, it will show the person the other side that you are online. The online message appears in the chat window just below your name. WhatsApp has not given users a way to control this, unlike the old Google Chat that allowed people to go Invisible.
But, you can try a “hack” to hide your online availability from others. It is simple. Do not open the chat and reply from the notification panel. The quick reply feature in WhatsApp not only allows you to reply from the notification panel without even opening the app but also hides your online status from other contacts. So, only you and your preferred contact can chat now without anyone knowing that you are online.
This trick is simple, smart and requires no extra effort. Although it does have limited appeal. If you are chatting with multiple people at the same time, it gets tricky to use quick replies. Same is true if there are lots of photos or videos you are sharing through chats. But even with limited appeal, there are moments when it can save you some headache on evenings or days when you don’t want to broadcast to the whole world that you are online.