WhatsApp Rolling Out Disappearing Messages Feature for iPhone and Android

BY Rajesh Pandey

Published 5 Nov 2020

WhatsApp Disappearing Messages

As previously reported, WhatsApp has started rolling out the disappearing messages for its platform. As the name suggests, disappearing messages will automatically disappear after seven days.

Users will have the option of enabling/disabling disappearing messages in private chats while in group chats, it will be under the control of group admins. WhatsApp is not offering users the option to customize the duration of the disappearing messages. This means any disappearing message that you send or receive will automatically disappear after seven days itself — there’s no way to increase or reduce this duration.

WhatsApp notes that any media sent as a disappearing message will disappear from the chat but if auto-download is on, the media will be saved in the phone’s internal storage. A disappearing message will automatically disappear after seven days even if the recipient has not read the message. WhatsApp does note that if there’s a quoted reply to the disappearing message, the quoted text might remain in the chat after seven days.

WhatsApp says that the purpose of disappearing messages is to make “conversations on WhatsApp feel as close to in-person as possible, which means they shouldn’t have to stick around forever.” The company will roll out disappearing messages for all its users this month.

The new disappearing messages feature in WhatsApp comes just a day after it started rolling out a new storage manager feature to help users quickly free up space on their iPhone by removing junk forwards and media files.

[Via WhatsApp]