The Meta-owned instant messaging app the Delete For Everyone feature in 2017. It protects you from those embarrassing moments when you accidentally send a message intended for one person to someone else. This feature also comes in handy in situations where you want to take back what you’ve said, or if there’s some factual error in your message and you want to rectify it. But there’s a time limit for it. You can’t just delete the message for everyone whenever you want. After multiple revisions, WhatsApp currently lets you do it within one hour, eight minutes, and 16 seconds. After that, the confirmation pop-up when trying to delete a message doesn’t include the “Delete For Everyone” option. You only get the “Delete For Me” option, which is there forever. WhatsApp is now significantly extending the time limit to 60 hours. That’s 12 hours more than Telegram’s limit of 48 hours. This change was first spotted in development by the same source in February this year. Perhaps the company also mulled extending the limit to more than a week: seven days and eight minutes. But it has seemingly settled on a little shorter limit, which still gives users plenty of time to rethink and delete sent messages. A week would have been overkill. According to the new report, Meta (still called Facebook back then) had originally planned the 60-hour limit when it developed the Delete For Everyone feature for its ultra-popular messaging app. It is now starting to test the extended time limit among a small group of beta users. A wider beta rollout may follow in the coming weeks, with a public rollout to follow next. We will keep you posted.
WhatsApp will also let group admins delete messages for everyone
In another similar development, WhatsApp is preparing to let group admins delete messages sent by any group member. If a message violates the group’s rules or is inappropriate, admins would be able to remove it from the chat for everyone. Members will see who deleted the message. The same time limit of 60 hours may apply here as well. This feature is still in development and may roll out to beta users in the coming weeks. We will let you know as and when we have more information about it.
