WhatsApp ‘Delete for Everyone’ Feature May Get Extension to Over 2 Days; Communities Details Surface

WhatsApp is reportedly working on extending the time limit for the ‘Delete for Everyone’ feature to two days and 12 hours from the existing one hour, eight minutes, and 16 seconds’ time. The extension would help users delete their wrongly sent messages within a longer time frame. Separately, WhatsApp Communities feature has been detailed through a screenshot. The feature would allow group admins to add and manage their multiple WhatsApp groups from a single place. It would also let admins send important announcements to all members at once.

As per a report by WhatsApp beta tracker WABetaInfo, WhatsApp for Android beta version 2.22.410 has carried references to suggest the extension of the time limit for ‘Delete for Everyone’ to two days and 12 hours. This, in other words, means that users would get two-and-a-half days to permanently delete a message.

Once deleted using the feature, the message will be replaced with a notification saying, “This message was deleted.”

This is notably not the first time WhatsApp is reported to have an extension for the ‘Delete for Everyone’ feature in the works. In November last year, the instant messaging app was reportedly planning to extend its time limit to more than seven days.

WABetaInfo reports that the extension for more than seven days seems unfair as most people would not want to delete a message that they sent over a week before. However, it is currently not clear whether WhatsApp will make the new time limit final or bring some alterations when making it public.

WhatsApp introduced the existing over one-hour time limit in 2018. The feature to delete messages for everyone in the chat originally had a time limit of seven minutes.

The update is not yet visible even to beta testers. Similarly, the exact timeline on when it would arrive is not yet available.

In addition to the time limit extension, WABetaInfo has spotted an introduction screen for WhatsApp Communities in WhatsApp for Android beta version 2.22.4.9. The screen would essentially inform users about how the new offering will work.

As seen from a screenshot of the introduction screen shared by WABetaInfo, WhatsApp Communities would allow group admins to add groups that they manage to one place for quick access. The Community section will also help group admins simultaneously send new announcements to all members of their groups.

WhatsApp Communities may just be around the corner
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo

WhatsApp has not yet provided any details on when exactly Communities will be available to end users. The beta version in question also doesn’t give any public references about the update.

WABetaInfo has also tweeted a couple of images to purportedly show how message reactions would be available to WhatsApp users on Android and iPhone in the future. The reactions are said to be secured by end-to-end encryption — just like the messages being shared on the app.

Details about when we could see the reactions in a public release of WhatsApp are yet to be revealed. The feature has, however, been in testing if we look at some recent reports.