There are plenty of things you could do with WhatsApp these days from sending documents to even letting your friends know your live location while you're on the move, but the one thing you couldn't do so far was to recall that awkward message once it has already been sent.
Well, you won't need to worry about such unintended messages anymore, as WhatsApp has finally rolled out the much-needed "Delete for Everyone" feature.
According to WABetaInfo, a site that specialises in the latest information about WhatsApp's upcoming features, WhatsApp has taken the feature out of beta testing stages and is rolling it out to Android, iOS and Windows Phone users.
What this means is that, starting from today, smartphone users across the three platforms (Android, iOS and Windows) can recall or stop the wrongly sent message from reaching the recipient. This feature comes in very handy when dealing with messages that are mistakenly sent to other chat groups as well. Not just that, the feature works well for GIFs, images, voice messages, location, contact cards, quoted messages (in future) and status replies as well.
WABetaInfo notes that the roll-out is somewhat slow and that both the recipient and sender should be on the same updated version of WhatsApp for the feature to work.
How the feature works?
When you recall a message, the Delete for Everyone feature sends a fake copy of the unintended message to the recipient. When the recipient receives the copy, their phone won't show the message notification, nor will it show up in the recipient's chat history (as it gets deleted automatically). However, in the off chance that the ID of the message is present in WhatsApp's database, the feature locates it and correctly revokes the message.
The recalled messages will also be deleted in the notifications centre on iOS. On Android, the recalled message will be replaced with "This message was deleted for everyone."
Important things to Know about Delete for Everyone Feature:
You can only use the 'Delete for Everyone' feature within seven minutes of sending an unintended message, meaning that messages can be recalled only within a 7 minute-time frame after which you won't be able to recall or revoke it.
The recall feature aka Delete for Everyone does not work with quoted messages as of now, as WhatsApp is currently not recalling messages contained in a quoted reply.
The feature is available only for Android, iOS and Windows Phone platform. WhatsApp for Symbian does not support the feature.
Delete for Everyone does not support messages sent in a Broadcast List (saved list of message recipients who you can repeatedly send broadcast messages without having to select them each time).
The feature requires both the sender and recipient to use the updated version of WhatsApp. If any of the two are using older versions of WhatsApp, the feature simply will not work. Meanwhile, WhatsApp will be enabling the Delete for Everyone feature for older versions too as times goes by, but very old versions will not be supported.
As mentioned earlier, the roll-out is slow. However, the feature will hit iOS devices earlier than Android and Windows. You should recieve the activation message soon if you are using the latest verison.
