Popular social media application WhatsApp will soon be introducing a disappearing messages feature. WhatsApp has made progress on its upcoming “Delete Messages” feature, which has been present in recent beta updates for Android, WABetaInfo reports.

The feature, which was first detected by WABetaInfo in October, was originally known as “Disappearing Messages”.

When this feature is turned on for a chat, all messages sent by participants will be removed after a pre-defined interval.

In the most recent Android beta update – update 2.19.348 – WhatsApp has completed additional work on this feature and changed its name to “Delete Messages.”

Once the feature is made available on WhatsApp, users will be able to toggle it on or off for each chat or group via the contact info and group settings menus respectively.

However, only administrators will be able to enable this feature for groups.

The earlier version of this feature only offered the option of deleting messages after either five seconds or one hour.  However, in the latest beta update, WhatsApp has included the following options for the time delay until messages are deleted:

  • Off
  • 1 hour
  • 1 day
  • 1 week
  • 1 month
  • 1 year

The feature will reportedly also be compatible with the WhatsApp dark theme – which is also currently under development.

It is unclear when this new functionality will roll out to users, and the feature is not currently being tested on iOS.

Source: MyBroadband