WhatsApp has added yet another handy feature. Wow, WhatsApp, and by extension, Meta, has been very busy lately. Anyhow, WhatsApp’s latest addition allows users to edit sent messages in the app, roughly 15 minutes after hitting ‘Send’. That’s like, in the most basic sense, time travel.

Will The Sent Message Change?

As seen in their official example, users can now update any sent message within 15 minutes of submitting it. That then should help address small errors within their DMs. According to WhatsApp:

“From correcting a simple misspelling to adding extra context to a message, we’re excited to bring you more control over your chats. All you need to do is long-press on a sent message and choose ‘Edit’ from the menu for up to fifteen minutes after.”

Edited messages will show an ‘edited’ marker alongside them, so readers will be made aware of any corrections, though they won’t have an audit history – so you won’t be able to see what was edited, specifically, in each comment. Well, you can’t win them all, right? At the very least, WhatsApp is allowing users to still be able to change messages that they recently sent, removing the need to ‘unsend’ and then resend messages to correct errors. Granted, recipients will still be notified that a sent message was tampered with, but that’s a small tradeoff considering what you get.

It’s a handy update, which will help with those particularly annoying auto-correct issues or avoiding the context of your message that can be misconstrued based on submitting the wrong word because you’re typing quickly. The 15-minute window is also an acceptable window, especially if you mean to catch any changes or do revisions. You can still go the traditional way – which is sending an explainer message to contextualize typos after.

The Wrap

This is a handy and potentially revolutionary update from WhatsApp. If you think about it, Meta made the right move in launching this function on WhatsApp, as opposed to any of its other messaging platforms. There’s fairly limited information on this since it’s a completely new project, but hopefully, usage data starts flooding in once the update goes live.

With more online interaction shifting to messaging, this could have some plus points for Meta and its apps. WhatsApp’s new editing update will be rolled out to users globally from today and will be available to all ‘in the coming weeks’.

Sources

https://bit.ly/3oqgLto