Has it happened to you that you don’t know how to add a friend who lives in another country to your WhatsApp? In fact, it happened to me recently with an Argentinian friend, who tried to add him to my WhatsApp contacts and couldn’t find any way to do it.
It is generally easy to add a WhatsApp contact when they live in your country, but when they are in another country, things get complicated. However, at Androidphoria we managed to find the solution and now we show it to you so you don’t despair. We teach you how to easily add contacts from other countries on WhatsApp .
The country code is the secret to add foreign contacts to your WhatsApp
Unlike when you add a contact from your own country, to add people abroad to WhatsApp you need to know the telephone code of the destination country . Do you have doubts about this? Here are the answers:
- What is the country code? Simple, it is an identifying telephone prefix that is assigned to each nation and allows international communications.
- Is it unique for each country? In general, yes, but a few are shared.
- Why does it exist? Because in two different countries there can be two identical phone numbers and this prefix allows you to identify which country you want to communicate with.
- How can you get it? Hundreds of pages on the Internet have this information, but we leave you the list of world telephone codes on Wikipedia to make your task easier.
As you can see, the prefix for Spain is +34, for the United States and Canada is +1, for Argentina is +54, for Venezuela is +58 and so on with each country. Just write down the prefix you need so you can add an international contact in your WhatsApp.
How to add a friend on WhatsApp if you are abroad
Now that you know what it is and you have the telephone prefix of the country where your WhatsApp friend is, it’s time to get to work. The process to follow is simple, and in fact it is identical to adding a local contact on WhatsApp, but using the prefix you wrote down. These are the steps to follow:
- Open the contacts app on your mobile.
- Create a new contact in the address book or edit a contact you already have if your friend just changed their number.
- When adding the new contact’s phone number, type the plus symbol (+) first .
- Enter the country code below, the one you wrote down earlier.
- Fill in the telephone number of your new contact (including the area code, provincial prefix or mobile prefix).
Once you have done this, save the contact and if you did everything right you will be able to see it on WhatsApp without any problem. It works the same for Android and iPhone. In any case, we leave you some examples with numbers from other countries, in addition to other sections with special cases. These are the examples:
- Add United States number to WhatsApp : +1 408 555 1234 (where “+1” is the international prefix, “408” the area code and “555-1234” the phone number).
- Add contact from Spain to WhatsApp : +34 672 555 123 (where “+34” is the international prefix, “672” the mobile prefix and “555 123” the telephone number).
- Add Italian mobile to WhatsApp : +39 333 5423 473 (where “+39” is the international prefix, “333” the local area code and “5423 473” the phone number).
As we mentioned, there are some special cases that create problems among users when adding them to WhatsApp, we will dedicate separate sections to them.
How to add to WhatsApp a Venezuelan, Uruguayan number or from countries with mobile prefixes that start in “0”
One of the cases that gives more problems when adding international contacts to WhatsApp are those of countries that have mobile numbers that start with zero . It happens a lot with Venezuela (mobile phones have prefixes 0412, 0414, 0424, 0426 and 0416) and with Uruguay (mobile phones have prefix 09x).
In these cases, the only thing you have to do when adding the contact to WhatsApp is to remove that “0” at the beginning of the prefix . Then just perform the steps that we taught you before and voila. We leave you an example:
- How to add a number from Venezuela on WhatsApp : +58 412 123 5555 (where “+58” is the international prefix, “412” the mobile prefix without the 0 and “123 5555” the phone number)
- This is how you can add a contact from Uruguay to WhatsApp : +598 91 123 123 (where “+598” is the international prefix, “91” the mobile prefix without the 0 and “123 123” the phone number)
How to add Argentine numbers to WhatsApp
Another headache among WhatsApp users. The reason? The format of telephone numbers in Argentina is absolute chaos , having to dial the number in one way or another depending on what you are going to do. We will not explain everything so as not to confuse you unnecessarily, but we will only explain the format you need and why it is so. We leave you an example of how to add an Argentine number in WhatsApp:
- How to add an Argentine contact to WhatsApp : +54 9 3541 12 3456 (where “+54” is the international prefix, “9” is the mobile prefix to communicate from abroad, “3541” the local area code and “12 3456 ” is the phone number).
You may be wondering , but isn’t the prefix “15” the one that identifies mobile numbers in Argentina? Yes, but it only applies when you communicate from Argentina. When you do it from a number abroad, you must replace that “15” with a “9” so that the final number has 13 digits in total.
How to add Mexican numbers to WhatsApp
With Mexico something very similar happens to the Argentine case, which means that you must add an additional number after the international code and before the mobile code. In the Mexican case, that number is “1” and you must include it even with a Nextel phone. Look at the example:
- How to add a contact from Mexico to WhatsApp : +52 1 55 4175 7509 (where “+52” is the international prefix, “1” is the mobile prefix to communicate from abroad, “55” the local area code and “4175 7509” is the phone number).
Now yes, you are ready to add any friend on WhatsApp no matter where they are in the world. By the way, there is also a much simpler way out of this problem. How? Learning to share your WhatsApp contact through the QR code, although you will have to share it in another way because they still do not have you on WhatsApp.
Was this guide useful to you? Do you know another country that has problems with the number format?
