What happens when Whatsapp chat messages are archived

The Facebook-owned WhatsApp Messenger with around 1 billion users in over 180 countries, is the most popular cross-platform instant messaging service for smartphones. It offers a lot of useful features to its users and one of them is the archive chat feature.

The archive chat feature is meant to clear up the chat list by getting rid of unwanted or less important chats. It can also be used to hide a conversation from the main chat foreground and access it later when needed. The archive chat feature doesn't delete the chat and it only creates a local archive. No backup of the archived chat is performed on the device's SD card.
The archived chats will automatically appear back on the main chat screen as soon as it receives a new reply. One can also manually unarchive the chats by just scrolling down to the bottom of all the chats in chats screen and tapping the unarchive button.

I find it handy to quickly hide sensitive chats, without deleting them, while handing my phones to not so trustable friends. So, what about you guys. How often do you use the WhatsApp archive chat feature? Let us know what do you think of it in the comments below.

Archiving chats is nothing more than a cleaning feature on WhatsApp. You use this when you do not want to delete the conversation entirely but still clean up the landing page. Now archiving chats is useful to hide the chats which are infrequent. You all have that friend or relative to whom you send a message during holidays or vacations. The archive feature helps you ignore that chat until the other side has sent a message or vice versa. Now archiving can only be effectively used for personal chats, when it comes to group chats, muting them is your only option.

In Hike you have a better feature of hiding your chats and that is password protected chats. On the Windows Phone version which I am using all you have to do is tap on the innocuous Hike logo, set a four digit passcode and you can hide chats. This feature keeps hiding your chats when the other side sends a message. This feature would be very welcome on WhatsApp and I do not know what is keeping WhatsApp from implementing such a simple and useful feature.