WhatsApp has announced the release of an extremely awaited feature today: message editing. Mark Zuckerberg noted in his Facebook post that users are now able to edit messages within 15 minutes after messaging. If you’d like to modify a message you can hold and press on a message, then click on edit to change the message. Edited messages will be marked with the “edited” tag in front of the time stamp to indicate the changes. But, the app won’t keep any history of corrections. Other users won’t have the ability to view older versions of the edited messages.
“We’re happy to announce that users will be more in control of the content of your messages, including fixing misspellings or adding meaning to messages. In order to do this you must wait 15 minutes from making the call, you need to hold and tap on the message for a few seconds before selecting the option to edit on the main menu.” The company wrote in an article on its blog.
Up until now, users were required to erase a message completely or make an update by way of a separate message. In the past year, the chat app extended the time for deleting messages to 2 weeks (48 hours) to 60 hours.
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WhatsApp’s competitors such as Telegram as well as Signal have offered for a long time the option to modify messages. With iOS 16 Apple added the capability to edit and delete messages via iMessage. Additionally, Twitter added an editor button only for users who pay in the year before. While the timeframe to change the content of a tweet isn’t the same as Telegram’s 48-hour window, it’s superior to nothing.
I’ve experienced a number of messages that contain typos however the editing function allows me to quickly correct errors, rather than sending a new message. Corrections sent via email can be confusing for the person receiving it. Also, it can trigger unnecessary notifications. When you delete a text message, however, it does not completely disappear in the chat, which could be confusing. Instead, it’s replaced by a greyed-out note that states “This message has been deleted.”
