Facebook-owned WhatsApp has updated the ‘Recipient limit’ of its ‘delete for everyone’ feature.
NEW DELHI: Facebook-owned WhatsApp has updated the ‘Recipient limit’ of its ‘delete for everyone’ feature. Launched earlier this year, the much-awaited ‘Delete for Everyone’ feature allows WhatsApp users to delete/recall a sent message. At the time of the launch, users were allowed to delete/recall a message within 7 minutes of sending it. Later, the company increased this limit to 1 hour 8 minutes and 16 seconds. Now the company is reportedly planning to change this feature further for better user experience.
According to WABetaInfo, the Twitter account that tracks changes in WhatsApp’s beta builds, the company is rolling out a new update after which if the recipient of a message has not received the delete request for a message within 13 hours, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds then the message will not be deleted. This means that a message sent cannot be deleted by the sender from chat after a 13 hours, 8 minutes and 16 seconds even after he/she tapped on the ‘Delete for Everyone’ if the recipient failed to get the delete request during this time frame (maybe because the phone was off).
“What does it mean? If you delete a message for ev eryone, but the recipient won’t receive the revoke request within 13h, 8m, 16s (maybe because the phone was off), the message will **not** be revoked. This is a protection against modded users that revoked messages sent weeks, months and years ago. You can still delete a message for everyone within 1h, 8m, 16s as long as the recipient will receive your revoke request within 13h, 8m, 16s,” goes the tweet.
Reasoning the move, the tweet from WABetaInfo adds that the change is intended to be a protection against modded users that revoke messages sent weeks, months and years ago. With this feature the company aims to ensure that the modified version of the app does not manipulate the time of days, weeks and months for ‘delete for everyone feature. Moreover, all the request for delete works in the background and the user don’t have to do anything on the front end.
The feature is expected to roll out in the coming days along with the stickers update in WhatsApp.
