Want to turn off WhatsApp's Away Message or Greeting Message? Here's how to disable them properly on Android and iPhone, without losing the message text you already wrote.
If you set up an Away Message or Greeting Message (WhatsApp Business’s automatic reply feature) and it’s no longer doing what you need, turning it off takes under a minute. Here’s exactly where to look, on both Android and iPhone.
WhatsApp Business runs two separate automatic reply tools, and each has its own on/off switch:
You can disable one without touching the other — turning off your away message doesn’t remove your greeting message, and vice versa.
Your message text stays saved in the background. If you switch it back on later, you won’t need to retype it.
Same as with the away message, your greeting text is preserved for next time: WhatsApp only stops sending it, it doesn’t delete what you wrote.
There’s no per-contact toggle in WhatsApp. The setting is either on or off for whichever recipient group you’ve configured (everyone, contacts only, non-contacts, or a custom list). If you only want to stop auto-replying to a handful of people, your one option is to adjust the Recipients list under each message’s settings and remove them from the group it applies to.
If you’re turning off auto-reply because you’d rather handle every conversation yourself, that’s a completely reasonable call for a low-volume inbox. Just be aware of what you’re giving up: anyone who messages outside your working hours now sees nothing back until you’re online, and first-time contacts no longer get an automatic welcome.
This is the more common reason people go looking for how to remove auto-reply: not because they want silence instead, but because the canned message wasn’t actually helping. A flat “we’re away, we’ll get back to you” doesn’t answer a pricing question, doesn’t collect a lead’s details, and sends the exact same line to a first-time buyer and a customer with a complaint. (For the full list of what it can’t do, see Why Not to Use WhatsApp’s Auto-Reply.)
If the message itself is the problem rather than the idea of auto-reply, it’s worth trying a different one before switching it off for good. 10 WhatsApp Auto-Reply Examples has templates built for specific situations, from holiday closures to lead capture.
Rather than going back to manual replies for everything, The Chat Quotient’s AI Inbound Agent replaces the static message with one that actually reads what the customer wrote:
For a sales team, that’s the difference between an away message that just buys time and one that keeps a lead warm while you’re offline. How to Set Up AI Auto-Reply on WhatsApp Business covers the full setup.
Install The Chat Quotient and turn that chat into a tracked lead, a faster reply, and — eventually — a closed deal. Free to start, right inside the WhatsApp Web you already use.
