The fear when leaving the app for the API is simple: the customer chat stays on the phone and the panel starts empty. With coexistence, Meta has a path that avoids that swap. The app stays, and one-to-one history can move to the platform — with rules, and only if the business allows it.

What can come over

If the business agrees to share at connection time, Meta describes the one-to-one chats from the previous 180 days. Once. It is not an ongoing sync of the old archive, and it does not include groups.

  • Messages sent and received in person-to-person chats are included.
  • Contacts that have a WhatsApp number can come in the same package.
  • Media from the last 14 days can include the file. Older media can show up in the history without the attachment.

A business that declines sharing on the phone does not lose what is on the device. It simply does not send that past to the platform. The new operation starts from that point forward.

What does not come, even if you allow history

  • Groups. They stay on WhatsApp Business. The API does not receive those messages.
  • Broadcast lists. New ones cannot be created. Existing ones become read-only and do not join the API.
  • Disappearing messages, view-once and live location. They are turned off for individual chats.
  • WhatsApp Web and other linked devices. They log out at connection. Companions Meta supports can be linked again. The Windows app and Wear OS are not supported as companions.

The full map of the mode is in what coexistence is.

The phone cannot leave the picture

Coexistence is not “connect and put the handset in a drawer”. Uninstalling WhatsApp Business cuts the link with the API. A primary device idle for about 14 days disconnects too. Calls, status and catalog stay in the app, not in the panel.

If the goal is to retire the phone for good, this is not the path. Dedicated Cloud API is, and in that case there is no app history to import.

What the team starts to see

From then on, a message typed in the app reaches the platform, and a message sent by the API shows up in the app. That day-to-day mirror is described in app and API on the same number.

In GrowHub, that number becomes an agent queue, campaigns and flows. The panel does not rebuild a group, a broadcast list or a file Meta did not send. What the business did not allow on the phone does not come in.

Changing phones or registering the number again can drop the API until it is reconnected. That is not a second onboarding with a fresh history dump: Meta treats it as a reconnect, and the message gap in that window tends to be short because the return is quick — but the team should expect the panel to go quiet while it happens.

Source: Meta’s documentation on history and onboarding a WhatsApp Business app number to Cloud API, read in October 2026.