A shame if your message is 1 hour, 18 minutes, and 17 seconds old
WhatsApp first introduced the ability to let you delete your messages for everyone in a group chat in 2017. Initially, there was a strict time limit of eight minutes, but the app tweaked that cut-off time to a more precise 1.13777778 hours. There were hints last year signaling that the app would further expand this limit to as long as three months. The change was never rolled out, though, presumably because the developers realized the time limit could be too long. We do know now that plans are still in place to expand that time limit, but not by weeks.
WABetaInfo reports that WhatsApp has increased the time limit to delete sent messages to 2 days and 12 hours for some users on the latest v2.22.15.8 beta release. It’s less arbitrary than the current cut-off of 1 hour, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds — admittedly less arbitrary in devspeak when you figure that this equates to 4,096 seconds and that the number can be stored on 12 bits.
Major competing app Telegram lets its users delete sent messages within 48 hours of the push, so WhatsApp looks to gain a 12-hour advantage here.
There’s no indicator in the WhatsApp beta to notify you about the increased limit. You’ll need to just try it for yourself by sending a message to a group and then attempt to delete it after a couple of days
This is not the only improvement that WhatsApp is working on for deleting messages: a feature to allow group admins to delete chats from anyone in the group for other members is also under development.
The Meta-owned messaging app is known for taking its sweet time in passing new features onto subsequent development stages, but we do think the extra time will eventually make it to the stable channel release.
