Remember how all of us begged for years for Twitter to let us edit our tweets? Well, WhatsApp must have been paying attention because it’s finally catching up.
In a blog post, the company announced that it is now rolling out the ability for users to edit their messages in WhatsApp. According to the announcement, users will now be able to make an edit to their message within 15 minutes of it originally being sent.
WhatsApp says that the feature is there for the “moments when you make a mistake or simply change your mind.” In order to edit a message, you’ll simply long-press on a sent message and choose Edit from the menu. The option to edit the message will show up for up to 15 minutes after you originally sent it.
According to WhatsApp, messages that are edited are shown an Edited badge but will not give users to see the history of what edits were made.
Edited messages will be marked as edited alongside them, so those you’re messaging are aware of the correction without showing edit history. As with all personal messages, media and calls, your messages and the edits you make are protected by end-to-end encryption.
Not being able to see the edit history definitely means that WhatsApp’s implementation of editing messages is more basic than other competitors like iMessage. When Apple brought message edits to iMessage, it made sure that users can tap on the edit badge and see all of the edits that were made to the message.
That’s handy if someone is messing around with you and tries to change their message after sending the initial one. So, it feels a little weird that you don’t get the same kind of benefit with WhatsApp. Hopefully, the company will be adding that feature in the future.
WhatsApp says that message editing is rolling out globally starting today, but that it won’t be available to all users until a few weeks from now. The announcement comes about a week after the company revealed its new chat lock feature that will put certain chats behind an additional security layer.
