WhatsApp already offers the ability to unsend messages after you’ve pressed the all-important ‘send’ button but soon the messaging service could take the feature to the next level.
WABetaInfo has uncovered a new “disappearing messages” feature in version 2.19.275 of the Android app. It’s currently in the early stages of development and could still be subject to change, but in its current form the feature allows you to set messages to delete after either 5 second or an hour leaving no trace of them behind.
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Unfortunately Disappearing Messages appears to be limited to group chats at the moment. Also, to activate it every message in the chat needs to be deleted after the selected time-frame it can’t simply be limited to a few messages from one person. Nevertheless, this is a functionality that could be added in the future.
Other things that could be added in the future include the option of other time-frames either 5 seconds or 1 hour is a pretty drastic difference and compatibility with private WhatsApp conversations where the feature could be limited to just a small group of messages.
It’s unclear when Disappearing Messages will roll out to WhatsApp users but the feature will eventually allow the messaging app to reach parity with Telegram which has offered a Secret Chats feature for quite some time.
You’ll receive an update to the WhatsApp Messenger app if you already have it installed on your device.
If you don’t have the WhatsApp Messenger app installed, download it on Google Play.
Note: It can take a while for you to receive the update.You can leave the testing program at any time. You can switch to the public version of the app if that’s available.
To switch to the public version:
- Uninstall the testing version.
Install the public version on Google Play.
Note: It can take up to a few hours before you can download the app’s public version.