WhatsApp is giving users more time to delete sent messages

Since being acquired by Facebook in 2014, many of WhatsApp’s feature updates have revolved around encryption and bolstering user privacy. In October, WhatsApp took another step in that direction by allowing users to revoke sent messages under certain conditions and within a strict time window. Now this week, the messaging service has begun to expand on this further.

When the ability to revoke sent messages first launched, users only had seven minutes to act on it. Now the latest WhatsApp beta update for Android has extended this to just over an hour. The ability to delete sent messages within an hour extends to images, GIFs, files as well as standard text messages.

When you go to delete a sent message you should have two options, one to delete the message for everyone in the chat, or to just remove it from your own device. However, there is always the possibility that someone will see the message before you remove it. Once a message is deleted, people in the chat will see a “this message was deleted” notification in its place.

This particular update will begin rolling out to all Android users later this month. We've only had news from the Android beta so far, but it seems likely that this update will also head to iOS.

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KitGuru Says: Skype and Discord have offered the ability to remove messages for quite some time, though without any time restrictions. How many of you use WhatsApp regularly? Is this ‘delete window' extension going to be useful? 

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