Facebook-owned popular instant messaging app WhatsApp rolled out the ‘Delete for Everyone‘ feature last year in October that allowed users to delete sent messages from the recipient’s phone. Initially, WhatsApp allowed users to delete messages from recipient’s phone that were no longer than seven minutes old. However, the company later increased this time limit to 1 hour, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds. Well now, to prevent misuse of this feature, WhatsApp has slightly modified the ‘Delete for Everyone’ feature.
According to a report by WABetaInfo, WhatsApp has slightly modified the ‘Delete for Everyone’ feature to add “protection against modded users”. For those unaware, even though WhatsApp doesn’t allow messages to be deleted from recipient’s end after 1 hour, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds, there are people who are able to delete messages that are weeks, months, and even years old using a modded version of WhatsApp. Hence, to deal with such users, WhatsApp has updated what’s called the “Recipient limit” for the ‘Delete for Everyone’ feature.
According to WABetaInfo, now whenever you delete a message using the ‘Delete for Everyone’ feature, the message will be deleted from the recipient’s end only if the request to delete the message has reached the recipient’s end within 13 hours, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds. If the delete request doesn’t reach the recipient within this time limit for whatever reason, that message won’t be deleted from the recipient’s phone.
In case you are getting confused, let us clarify that the time limit to delete message for everyone is still 1 hour, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds, but, the time limit for that delete request to reach the recipient’s end is now 13 hours, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds. What that means is that even if you delete a message for everyone within 1 hour, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds, it won’t be deleted from the recipient’s phone if the delete request doesn’t reach the recipient within 13 hours, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds.
