October 2 (India Today) – Two years back WhatsApp introduced Delete for Everyone feature on its platform introducing a 7 minute limit for deleting the messages. The company gradually increased the limit to over an hour. Now the Facebook-owned social messaging company is working on a new feature that would allow WhatsApp users to set a self-destruct limit to their sent messages.
According to a report by WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is working on disappearing messages that will be automatically deleted from the chat. These messages were will be particularly useful when users want to share some information over the social messaging platform but don’t want it to stay on record forever. A similar feature is available on GMail and Telegram as well.
The blog notes that WhatsApp’s disappearing messages feature is in its alpha stage of development, which means that the company has just started working on it. As far as the implementation of the feature is concerned, the disappearing messages feature is available only in the group chats as of now. Users can tap on Disappearing Messages option in the Group Settings to enable this feature. In doing so, users will be asked to select a time after which messages will get deleted automatically. At present, WhatsApp is offering two options — 5 seconds and 1 hour – to users. There is no time frame in between.
Enabling this option will automatically delete the sent message leaving no trace of it at all. This feature, as I mentioned before, is available for group chat only. However, it is possible that WhatsApp adds support for private chats in the course of the feature’s development later. If you are using an Android smartphone, you can try your luck and download WhatsApp Beta for Android version 2.19.175 to try this feature. But if you are unable to use this feature even on downloading this version, don’t fret over it as chances are that WhatsApp has not rolled out this feature to all its beta users yet.
Separately, the blog site also confirmed that WhatsApp is working to bring a dark mode to its iOS based app. iOS 13 brought a dark mode to iPhones and the company is actively working on this feature. However, there is no timeline as to when support for dark mode will be available on WhatsApp’s iOS based app yet.
