Paul Morris·

Want To Delete WhatsApp Sent Message On iPhone Or Android? You Now Can

You can now delete a WhatsApp sent message after the company started rolling out the feature on both iPhone and Android devices. Here are the details.

After a successful trial with a string of users, WhatsApp is rolling out this new functionality globally today which will give users the ability to delete messages once they have been sent.

If you have ever sent a message to the wrong person accidentally, sent some content which you have immediately regretted, or just partook in some alcohol-fueled messaging with someone which you shouldn’t have after a heavy night, then this new feature is going to be a godsend to you, allowing you to remove that message before or after it has been read. Facebook-owned WhatsApp has put in place a system that isn’t exactly based on stealth, which means that deleted messages still leave their mark in the form of a placeholder string informing any other members of the chat or group that a message has been deleted, as per the company’s post on the topic:

Messages you successfully delete for everyone will be replaced with “This message was deleted” in your recipients’ chats (*). Similarly, if you see “This message was deleted” in a chat, it means that the sender deleted their message for everyone.

That means if you see “This message was deleted” in one of your chat conversations then someone you are speaking to has posted something that they felt the need to remove before it being seen. This is likely to actually invoke more conversations between users as people start to query what content has been removed from view. The removal of messages also comes with a caveat in that if you want to delete something you are going to have to be extremely quick about it. WhatsApp will give you exactly seven minutes of procrastination before the functionality is removed:

You can only delete messages for everyone for up to seven minutes after sending. Once seven minutes have passed, there is no way to delete messages for everyone.

So there you have it, new-found functionality baked into WhatsApp on all platforms which grants you with the luxury of having seven minutes to delete an erroneous or misdirected message. Just make sure that you are confident that all members of the conversation are running the latest version of WhatsApp on iOS, Android, or Windows Phone, or the message may not be successfully deleted for all recipients.

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