WhatsApp Coexistence

Before Coexistence, connecting a number to the WhatsApp Business Platform meant giving up the WhatsApp Business App on that number. For a small team that had spent years building chat history on one handset, that was a genuine reason not to adopt the API at all.

Coexistence removes the choice. An eligible number runs both surfaces at once, so a shop owner can keep replying from the phone while campaigns, automations and a shared team inbox run through the API on the same number. The engineering that matters is echo de-duplication — a message sent from the handset must not reappear as an inbound message in the API inbox — and origin tracking, so a team can still see which surface each reply came from.