WhatsApp Now Lets You Delete Sent Messages for All Recipients
Tobenna Ezike
In its most recent update, WhatsApp is rolling out a new feature called ‘delete for everyone’ which allows you delete or retract sent messages for all participants of the chat. In the IM ecosystem, message retraction isn’t quite a new thing. Chat apps like BBM already introduced the feature some years back. However, the more than 1 billion people that use WhatsApp are happy to have this feature. Seems everyone has a few things they’d like to unsay.
The deleted message disappears from both your phone and that of your recipient. This is handy if you text someone mistakenly, or make a typo, or maybe you tried leaving the friend zone by popping in a quick ‘I love you’ while texting whoever, it’s your lucky year, you can delete all that now.
A few things to note though:
You can only delete the message 7 minutes after sending it. Once 7 minutes is gone, you can no longer use the ‘delete for everyone’ feature.
There’s a chance your recipient already read the message before you decided to get rid of it. At least they won’t be able to take a screenshot of it.
There’s no ‘message successfully deleted’ However, you’d see a “This message was deleted”or “You deleted this message” text in place of the message you deleted.
If you or your recipient are not using the latest version of WhatsApp for Android, iPhone or Windows Phone, this feature will not be supported.
How to use the feature:
Go to your app store (Android, iOS, or Windows), and update your WhatsApp messenger app.
Open the chat you want to delete a message from on your WhatsApp messenger.
Tap and hold the message. You can select multiple messages to delete.
Tap Delete at the top of the screen, then select ‘Delete for everyone.’
Voila! The message will leave the chat immediately.
