In November 2020, WhatsApp introduced a much needed privacy setting: disappearing messages. Oddly, the feature only had one default setting that made new messages disappear from chats after seven days, which may not be optimal for some.
Now, WhatsApp is working on making the feature more useful with some additional options. According to WABetaInfo, the latest beta version of WhatsApp now has three additional options for the period after messages disappear: 24 hours, seven days, or 90 days.
While this is still not as granular as you get on Signal, where you can set messages to disappear after 30 seconds, five minutes, one hour, eight hours, a day, a week, or a month, but it’s an improvement. It may look small, but it’s the type of feature that really needs at least a couple of options to accommodate for the different needs of different users.
I asked Facebook (which owns WhatsApp) about the lack of granularity for this feature after it launched, and a spokesperson told me that seven days “strikes a balance between the benefits of ephemerality and the utility of being able to remember what you’re talking about as you’re having a conversation.” It appears that Facebook is slowly figuring out that this balance is a little different for everyone.
Now for the bad news: The fact that these options are showing up in the WhatsApp beta doesn’t mean it’ll appear in the final version anytime soon. In fact, the 24-hour option first appeared in a WhatsApp beta back in April, while the 90-day option showed up in a beta released on Wednesday. The new options are still probably going to show up in WhatsApp one day, just don’t expect it to necessarily happen very soon.
