WhatsApp head Will Cathcart has recently confirmed that the most-anticipated disappearing mode will soon be arriving to mobile devices across the board.
Privacy matters to a lot of individuals. Accordingly, there are some chats that users would like to have absolutely no records kept of. Sure, deleting messages is an option, but a cumbersome one at that. Who has the energy to delete a day's worth of messages? The other person has to delete their own as well. Therefore, disappearing messages ended up coming as a form of relief for users. Now, messages would disappear entirely, leaving no trace. The seven day limit after which they'd entirely disappear also gave users a lot of leeway to carry out longer conversations and make surprise plans. All of this without the cluttered up feeling that a slew of deleted messages would supply
The only limitation to disappearing messages is that they could only be activated for individual contacts, and not whole groups. This, in this author's opinion, is an incredibly limiting caveat. Individual chats, due to their being confidential by nature, don't exactly require records to be entirely swept for the most part. It's usually group conversations, involving multiple individuals, that require such careful measures to take place. At any rate, the utilization of such features is a detail we leave entirely up to our users. What is more interesting is that WhatsApp was apparently caught testing out the new disappearing mode in the latest beta mode, as reported by WABI.
It's implementation shouldn't take all too much long, considering that it's already under a form of beta testing. However, this beta testing is developer controlled, as opposed to the typical A/B testing patterns that all social media platforms follow. Therefore, it is possible that WhatsApp will want to test the feature out once more with its community before finally releasing the feature. The wait could be a few months, or a year. Who knows? All that we're aware of is that we can finally hold a conversation on WhatsApp groups without seeing a slew of redacted messages cluttering up the space.
Read next: WhatsApp is making account restoration a lot more easier by introducing the Ban Review feature for Android users
Privacy matters to a lot of individuals. Accordingly, there are some chats that users would like to have absolutely no records kept of. Sure, deleting messages is an option, but a cumbersome one at that. Who has the energy to delete a day's worth of messages? The other person has to delete their own as well. Therefore, disappearing messages ended up coming as a form of relief for users. Now, messages would disappear entirely, leaving no trace. The seven day limit after which they'd entirely disappear also gave users a lot of leeway to carry out longer conversations and make surprise plans. All of this without the cluttered up feeling that a slew of deleted messages would supply
The only limitation to disappearing messages is that they could only be activated for individual contacts, and not whole groups. This, in this author's opinion, is an incredibly limiting caveat. Individual chats, due to their being confidential by nature, don't exactly require records to be entirely swept for the most part. It's usually group conversations, involving multiple individuals, that require such careful measures to take place. At any rate, the utilization of such features is a detail we leave entirely up to our users. What is more interesting is that WhatsApp was apparently caught testing out the new disappearing mode in the latest beta mode, as reported by WABI.
It's implementation shouldn't take all too much long, considering that it's already under a form of beta testing. However, this beta testing is developer controlled, as opposed to the typical A/B testing patterns that all social media platforms follow. Therefore, it is possible that WhatsApp will want to test the feature out once more with its community before finally releasing the feature. The wait could be a few months, or a year. Who knows? All that we're aware of is that we can finally hold a conversation on WhatsApp groups without seeing a slew of redacted messages cluttering up the space.
Read next: WhatsApp is making account restoration a lot more easier by introducing the Ban Review feature for Android users
