WhatsApp has in many ways become rather synonymous with internet based text messaging in general, but since it was acquired by Facebook in many ways the charm of the company has started to subside to a certain extent. Because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up costing the company its current domination of the market, WhatsApp has decided to take a leaf out of the books of its up and coming competitors, much like Facebook did with Snapchat and other upcoming competitors that had features that Facebook had not been able to think of beforehand thereby making genericizing these features the only option they could look into.
The latest feature that is coming on WhatsApp is that of disappearing messages. Competitors such as Signal and Telegram have been offering such a feature for quite some time now, but this isn’t Facebook’s first foray into the world of disappearing messages since the social media platform actually started letting users use a special form of Messenger several years ago, but with all of that having been said and out of the way it is important to note that WhatsApp’s current foray is an important step since this app is considered to be separate from Facebook’s traditional and closely knit family of services and platforms.
This feature actually is fairly restrictive since it only allows users to turn on an option that would lead to messages disappearing after seven days have passed. Most of WhatsApp’s competitors offer more control over how long your message would be available before it gets deleted, so chances are that this might not do much to make people switch back from more privacy oriented WhatsApp competitors as they would most likely require a lot more control when it came to the various ways in which they can have messages disappear on their own.
Read next: WhatsApp rolled out a new feature that will ask for 'content of messages' to verify reported accounts
The latest feature that is coming on WhatsApp is that of disappearing messages. Competitors such as Signal and Telegram have been offering such a feature for quite some time now, but this isn’t Facebook’s first foray into the world of disappearing messages since the social media platform actually started letting users use a special form of Messenger several years ago, but with all of that having been said and out of the way it is important to note that WhatsApp’s current foray is an important step since this app is considered to be separate from Facebook’s traditional and closely knit family of services and platforms.
This feature actually is fairly restrictive since it only allows users to turn on an option that would lead to messages disappearing after seven days have passed. Most of WhatsApp’s competitors offer more control over how long your message would be available before it gets deleted, so chances are that this might not do much to make people switch back from more privacy oriented WhatsApp competitors as they would most likely require a lot more control when it came to the various ways in which they can have messages disappear on their own.
Introducing disappearing messages. Now you can set chats to disappear after 7 days. Because not all messages need to stick around forever. pic.twitter.com/3Ny2mVxSaQ
— WhatsApp Inc. (@WhatsApp) November 5, 2020
Read next: WhatsApp rolled out a new feature that will ask for 'content of messages' to verify reported accounts
