WhatsApp introduced a “delete for everyone” feature in October last year. The feature enabled users to delete messages that they had sent by mistake, however, they could only use this feature within seven minutes after the message was sent. If they went over the time limit they couldn’t delete the message. It turns out that WhatsApp has quietly increased the time limit to well over an hour.
WABetaInfo spotted that the latest version of WhatsApp that’s now rolling out has extended this time limit by quite a lot. Users will now have one hour, eight minutes, and 16 seconds to use the “delete for everyone” feature after sending a message by mistake.
No further information about this change has been provided by the Facebook-owned company and even the support page is mum on the details. No explanation has been offered for the very specific time limit as well, though it has been pointed out by many on Twitter that the time limit is equal to 2^12 which would explain this value.
Giving users more time to wipe conversations could allow for more temporary conversations on the world’s most popular cross-platform messaging service which doesn’t really offer a secret conversation feature like some of its rivals that creates a temporary conversation that’s not stored on either party’s device.