WhatsApp is officially rolling a much-awaited feature, the ability to edit messages after they have been sent. The feature was first spotted in development almost a year ago and was made available in the beta programme of the web client earlier this month, but it has finally arrived to the mainstream platform for all users to experience.
Message editing allows you to modify a message that you have already sent, letting you fix any spelling or grammatical errors as well as adding context. Of course, this is not anything new as the feature has been present on rival messaging apps such as Telegram and iMessage for a while now.
Obviously, there is a time limit to how long after a message has been sent for you to be able to edit it. For WhatsApp, this has been set to a 15-minute window; iMessage also has a 15-minute period while Telegram’s is 48 hours.
With the official launch, it seems that the Meta-owned app really will not be adding a history log for edited messages, something that iMessage has in order to prevent manipulation. Edited WhatsApp messages will just have an “edited” tag marked to it, but you will not know what was changed.
Additionally, it seems that there is no limit to how many times you can amend a message as long it is within the 15-minute window. In contrast, iMessage only allows you to edit a message a total of five times.
To edit a message, you can find the feature when you long press a recently sent text. WhatsApp is rolling out the ability to all users globally but as always, it will be available gradually over the coming weeks so not everyone will be able to use it immediately. While you wait to get the feature, you can still delete messages up to two days if you need to make a correction.
(Source: WhatsApp)
