WhatsApp ‘Delete for Everyone’ feature has got an extension. You can now delete your wrongly sent messages within a longer time frame — over two days — after transmitting it. Until now, the Meta-owned instant messaging platform allowed its users to delete a wrongly sent message within one hour, eight minutes, and 16 seconds’ time frame. The first mention of this extension was in February this year. The development comes as WhatsApp announced three new privacy features in order to provide a more secure conversation experience on the app.
WhatsApp shared a post on Twitter announcing that “you will have a little over 2 days to delete your messages from your chats after you hit send.” WhatsApp rolled out the over one-hour time limit to delete messages from the chat in 2018. The feature to delete messages for everyone in the chat originally had a time limit of seven minutes after hitting send. WABetainfo, a platform that tests WhatsApp features before they are released to the masses, replied to WhatsApp’s post on Twitter explicitly mentioning that the new time limit for “Delete Message for Everyone” is 2 hours and 12 hours.
In order to be able to delete messages within two days, you as well as all the recipients should have the latest version of WhatsApp. There is no clarification whether this feature is only available for Android or iOS users. However, it should be available to both WhatsApp for Android and WhatsApp for iOS. Deleting a message for everyone should be simple. You just need to tap and hold the message (image, video, or document) you want to remove, and tap Delete > select “Delete for everyone”.
As mentioned, the development comes as WhatsApp introduced three new privacy features with an aim to provide more control over conversations and offer more privacy. These new features are: exit group chats without notifying everyone, control who can see when you’re online, and prevent screenshots on view once messages.
WhatsApp already provides other features such as default end-to-end protection for calls and messages, disappearing messages, end-to-end encrypted backups, 2-step verification, and the ability to block and report unwanted chats.
