To call someone on WhatsApp today, both of you need the app and an account. That sounds trivial until you are a business trying to reach a customer on another messenger, a relative abroad who never signed up, or a client who will not install an app for one call. WhatsApp's answer, reported by WABetaInfo, is guest calling: a link that opens a WhatsApp call in a web browser, for anyone, with no account.
How it will work
- In the Calls tab, create a call link and choose voice or video.
- Send it by SMS, email or any other channel.
- The recipient taps it, WhatsApp Web's call screen opens in their browser, and they join — nothing to install, no number to register.
The creator stays in control: they can add or remove participants during the call and end it for everyone. WhatsApp is expected to apply end-to-end encryption to calls with guests, so a browser participant does not weaken the conversation's security.
This is not a new architecture. WhatsApp already lets people without an account join text conversations through a link — guest chat — and guest calling extends that mechanism to audio and video, which is why it can promise the same encryption model.
What encryption means when nobody has an account
Worth separating two things that get conflated, because "end-to-end encrypted" answers a narrower question than people assume.
Encryption guarantees that the content of the call is readable only by its participants — not by WhatsApp, not by anyone on the network between you. That protection is about eavesdropping, and it holds whether or not a participant has an account.
What encryption says nothing about is who the participants are. On a normal WhatsApp call, identity comes from the account: a phone number, verified once at registration, attached to a name you may have saved. A guest has none of that. They are whoever opened the link, under whatever name they typed.
So guest calling makes a precise trade. It keeps the confidentiality property and gives up the identity property, for the participants who join as guests. For a sales call that is exactly right. For a conversation where knowing who is listening matters — a legal discussion, a medical consultation, anything about money — it is a different proposition from a call between two verified accounts, and knowing which one you are having matters.
The link is the credential
This is the lesson every conferencing platform learned publicly, and WhatsApp is inheriting it.
When access is by link and nothing else, anyone holding the link can join. Links get forwarded, screenshotted, pasted into group chats, and posted publicly by people who did not think about it. In 2020 the conferencing industry discovered this at scale when meeting links shared on social media produced uninvited participants, and the fixes that followed — waiting rooms, host admission, passcodes, expiring links, locking a call once everyone has arrived — were all responses to the same structural fact.
Host controls over participants are therefore not a convenience feature. They are the compensating control for an access model that has no authentication in it, which is why it matters that the creator can remove people and end the call for everyone.
The practical habits follow directly. Treat a call link like a password: send it to the person who needs it rather than to a group, do not post it anywhere public, and if you are hosting anything sensitive, watch who arrives rather than assuming. Create a fresh link per call instead of reusing one, because a reused link is a standing invitation to everyone who has ever had it.
What a browser can and cannot do
A guest joining in a browser is using the web platform's real-time communication support, which is mature and present in every current browser — but a browser call is not identical to an app call. Expect more sensitivity to a weak connection, no background operation if the tab is closed, and dependence on the guest granting microphone and camera permission to a page they just opened, which some people will decline and others will not find.
Older browsers and locked-down corporate machines are the predictable failure cases. For a business relying on this, the sensible preparation is a one-line fallback — a phone number — for the guest whose browser does not cooperate.
Who this is really for
Consumers will use it occasionally. Businesses will use it constantly.
WhatsApp is the customer-service channel for a great many small businesses, and the recurring failure is the customer who is not on it. A link that turns any phone number or email address into a WhatsApp call removes that step entirely — and the value is not that WhatsApp gained a feature Zoom has had for years, but that it brings an install base of over two billion people to the one case where the network effect runs backwards: reaching the person who is not on the network.
The feature is still in development with no timeline. Guest chat rolled out in beta first, then gradually over months, and a similar path is likely. Until then the workaround stands, and it is exactly the friction this exists to remove: the guest installs WhatsApp for one call and deletes it afterwards.
