It doesn’t look great when even Twitter’s beaten you to edits
Developers at Meta seem like they’re always busy working on new features for WhatsApp, whether we’re talking about blocking screenshots of view-once media or bringing multi-device support to Android tablets. Recently, we’ve been taking a look at efforts to make message editing on WhatsApp a reality. While it’s still not quite ready to go live, we’re now learning a little more about how this feature will end up working.
After years of asking for it, Twitter users have an edit button to toy with, but WhatsApp is still playing catch-up. WABetaInfo dug into WhatsApp beta 2.22.22.14 to get a peek at how its implementation will ultimately work, and while nothing’s yet active, even in beta, there is some early evidence to analyze. For instance, it looks like the app will give users up to 15 minutes to edit their messages after initially sharing.
Once edited, the message will appear with a label making clear that it’s been changed, just beside the timestamp showing when it was sent. We’ve still got some questions about how edits will sync between devices, and what happens if the recipient’s is offline during that edit window, so we may have to wait for a future beta to get further insight there.
While this is progress, we still know very little about WhatsApp’s launch timeline for message editing. When it does arrive, we will get any kind of Twitter-style visible edit history? Could the implementation end up working more like Slack’s message editing feature? We’re looking forward to finding out, but until it rolls out for beta testers, we’re stuck with the tedium of copying messages, deleting them for everyone, pasting them again, editing, and re-sending. Edits cannot come soon enough.
