Why linked devices are not the answer
Linked devices were built so one person can use their own account on a laptop as well as a phone. Everyone signed in sees the same undivided list of chats.
That breaks in ordinary ways once there is a team. Two agents answer the same customer within a minute of each other. A chat gets read, so it stops looking new, and nobody replies at all. Someone leaves and the conversations they were handling are indistinguishable from everyone else's.
What a shared inbox adds
- A login per agent, so a reply has a name attached to it
- Assignment, so a conversation belongs to someone until it is done
- Labels and internal notes that the customer never sees
- Search across the full history, including chats handled before an agent joined
- Response time and volume per agent, which is the only honest way to staff a shift
- A bot that can hold the conversation outside business hours and hand over in the morning
What it costs you to move
A number lives in one place at a time. Migrating it from the Business app to the API leaves the old on-device history behind — it does not travel with the number. Export anything you need first.
Your display name and green tick move with you. What changes is billing: messages you start become chargeable through Meta by template category and destination country, while replies inside the service window stay free.
Where we sit
Waphie is our own shared inbox, so treat this as informed rather than neutral. It is built as a close copy of WhatsApp Web specifically so that agents who already use WhatsApp need no training.
The honest version: if two people share the number and volume is low, the free app is fine. The move earns its cost at the point where chats are being missed or nobody can say how many enquiries came in last week.