WhatsApp deep link to a specific mobile number

Question

So, a friend of mine told me they have been using Facebook ads to post a deep link to send a whatsapp message and ask for the information about the ad via whatsapp. Bad news: this friend is not very tech savvy so that's all he knows.

Now, the subject actually caught my eye so I started researching. Unfortunately: official documentation states the url scheme for whatsapp is something like:

    whatsapp://send?text=WHATEVER_YOU_WANT&abid=RECIPIENT_ADDRESSBOOK_ID

Now: big issue is that the abid (Adress Book ID) is relative to each phone and obeys only to the order each one was added to the specific phone we're talking about. In this case, the contact I want to send the message is 402. But 402 on each of your mobile devices will be any other person. Not the one you want to be.

So I reached the abid by downloading iMazing and sqlitebrowser and making a backup of my iPhone using the iMazing backup tool to then extract the ChatStorage.sqlite from said backup and looking into the sql database. I found that each contact does have an e-mail address time ID named ZCONTACTJID ([email protected]) and another id named ZETAG (w:APPARENTLYRANDOMNUMBER;)

Is anyone of you familiar with such ID's or do have a way to make a deep link useful for send a message to a specific number?

Thanks!

Solution 1

For someone like me who is still looking for it, the following link seems to work -

<a href="whatsapp://send?text=Hello World!&phone=+9198********1">Ping me on WhatsApp</a>

Note: Use the parameter 'phone' and pass the actual phone number value instead of Adress Book ID.

It opens the contact in WhatsApp app, along with the message 'Hello World!' prepopulated in the input text box. The link works even if the phone number is not a valid contact in the phone's contact list.

(Tested this with google chrome on an android phone.)

Solution 2

Maybe you should better use the official Whatsapp API mentioned in THIS OTHER ANSWER (because S.O. policies I had to put a link to the solution, no duplicates).

Solution 3

The WhatsApp ABID is actually the standard iOS ABRecord (source). You can get that programmatically if you're writing a native iOS app, but unfortunately there's no way to access it within the context of a Facebook ad. And in any case, the abid is totally unsupported on WhatsApp Android (source).

A workaround would be to specify the number to send to within the message text, so that the user can enter it manually. Hacky, but maybe better than nothing...

Comments

[ans4175]

is there any deeplinking for call? rather than chat?

[silent_grave]

This has stopped working in iOS as of update v2.2.50