How I secretly leave a WhatsApp group

Don’t get it twisted: too much of a good thing can exist, and that includes group chats. One overactive group of friends is enough to roll your eyes, but add on a work chat, a class chat, or even a gaming chat all at once, and it’s enough to make you want to pull your hair out.

WhatsApp group chats come with annoying notifications that can pull you away from important work, interrupt your gaming sesh, or simply just irritate you if you aren’t fond of the dialogue going on. The easiest thing to do is leave, but what a ruckus that would cause — not to mention, I don’t want people talking about why I left after the fact — I won’t even see what they’d say about it.

Leaving the group chat is a dramatic move. It opens up a whole new topic of conversation: why did so-and-so leave? What’s gotten into them? Where did they go? Often, it’s just not worth it. If only you could silently from your WhatsApp group chats… oh wait, you can. Here’s how.

How to leave your WhatsApp group silently

No one will know — except the admins

Credit: WhatsApp / Pocket-lint

No bells, no whistles, no notifications — WhatsApp lets you leave the messaging party without so much as a peep (and only a whisper to the chat admins). The process is easy, and gives you a one-way ticket out of notification station:

Open the chat you want to leave.
Tap the name of the chat at the top of your screen.
Scroll to the bottom of the information page.
Tap “Exit Group” in red.
It will ask you if you want to exit the group or exit and delete it — choose whichever you prefer.

When you leave a WhatsApp group, none of the members (save the admins) will be notified of your exit. Back to peaceful silence — and a more organized conversation list if you

Group members can still find out if you left by going in and checking the chat’s member list.

Other options

You don’t have to say goodbye

If you don’t want to leave your WhatsApp groups entirely, you have two other options: Mute or Archive.

Muting a group means that you’ll stop receiving notifications for messages from the chat, but you’ll still be able to see them when you open the app. You can silence a conversation for a certain period of time, or choose to always have it muted. The person or group you’re messaging will not be notified that you’ve muted them. To mute a chat, you can tap and hold the conversation on the main page and select Mute from the dropdown list.

Archiving is the common ground between muting and leaving a group chat — it hides the thread from your main conversations and groups it into a separate folder. You’ll still be a part of it and receive messages, but be aware that when a new message appears, it will automatically put the archived chat back on your main page. You can prevent this by enabling “Keep chats archived” in your settings. To archive a chat, you can tap and hold the conversation on the main page and select Archive from the dropdown list.