Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Social Media
  3. News

WhatsApp may soon let you send disappearing messages in private chats

Shubham Agarwal
By

WhatsApp may, at long last, add a feature most of its rivals have been offering for ages. The Facebook-owned messaging service is reportedly trialing a new option that will let you send self-destructing messages in private conversations.

Spotted by WABetaInfo, which reverse-engineers WhatsApp clients to unearth unannounced functions, the messaging app’s latest Android beta comes with a hidden “Delete messages” setting. It allows you to set a blanket expiration timer for all of your messages in a one-on-one personal chat. Once activated, each of your sent messages in that conversation will vanish some time after the recipient has read it. You can have them gone as quickly as an hour or up to a year.

Recommended Videos

Since the new option applies to every message of a chat, it’s unclear how WhatsApp plans to promote it. Most of its competitors such as Telegram offer the ability to fire up separate “secret” ephemeral chats that don’t affect your existing conversations with a contact. WhatsApp’s implementation, at least in its current early-stage form, also lacks a way to share messages that delete immediately after the other person has read or viewed it — similar to what its sister platforms such as Instagram already offer.

Related

In addition to private chats, WhatsApp is expected to bring this toggle for groups, too. However, we don’t know when it will roll out to the masses. Since it’s not even yet turned on for public beta users, it’s likely that the new update will take a minimum month or two before becoming broadly available. WABetaInfo didn’t comment on whether WhatsApp is testing it for its iOS clients as well.

To be first in line to try it out, you can sign up for the Android beta channel by heading over to this link. The iOS TestFlight channel for WhatsApp generally tends to be full. Although you can keep an eye on this page to know when new slots open up.

Other than self-destructing messages for private conversations, WhatsApp is also testing password-protected chat backups. Plus, the messaging platform recently publicly rolled out a dark theme for its Android and iOS apps.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Shubham Agarwal
Shubham Agarwal
Journalist
Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, India. His work has previously appeared in Firstpost…
Twitter Circle is coming soon. Here’s what you need to know
A Twitter icon on a blue background on a smartphone's screen, all on a white background.

Instead of just live tweeting their thoughts to everyone all at once, more Twitter users are now able to set some tweets to only be visible to specific people.

While Twitter announced that it began testing its Twitter Circle feature earlier this month, it appears that the social media platform has now expanded its test to more users. This past weekend, Android Police reported that the feature is now live for more users and shared a series of screenshots showing how Twitter Circle will appear. Twitter Circle is still not available for everyone, however, despite the expanded rollout.

Read more
Twitter Circle will soon let you send semiprivate tweets
A Twitter icon on a blue background on a smartphone's screen, all on a white background.

Robert de Niro introduced Ben Stiller and all of us to a concept called the Circle of Trust in the 2000 film Meet the Parents. Now, over 20 years later, Twitter is taking that lesson to heart and spinning it into a new feature it's testing called Twitter Circle.

The Twitter Safety team on Tuesday introduced the feature, which is designed to allow users to share their tweets with up to 150 people instead of sharing them with a public audience. Some people are able to use Twitter Circle already, but it's currently unknown when it will be rolled out to everybody. The testing phase is not exclusive to either iOS or Android, nor is it exclusive to Twitter Blue subscribers.

Read more
WhatsApp Communities want to be your private social media
Whatsapp Communities on Samsung smart phones.

WhatsApp is adding a Communities feature to the eponymous instant messaging platform, adding a social media aspect to it that will have all group conversations protected by end-to-end encryption. Unlike the new community feature on Twitter that brings together like-minded users, the core idea of Communities on WhatsApp is that it allows multiple groups to be aggregated into one super-group.

But unlike social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, a WhatsApp Community won’t be openly discoverable. The phone numbers of users also won’t be publicly visible to all Community members. Only the admin and other members of a group can see them.

Read more