The 68-minute limit can be bypassed, and you can delete any message much later. We will tell you about the principles of the WhatsApp message deletion feature and will share a life hack that will help you delete a message even after 68 hours have passed since the message was sent.
How to delete sent messages on WhatsApp
If you got too emotional and wrote some stuff you shouldn’t have written, or made an unforgivably stupid spelling mistake in a word, don’t be sad! You can delete messages on WhatsApp regardless of whether they have been read or not.
The Internet Protocol
After you sent a message, you have 68 minutes to delete it. When this time passes, there will be no turning back (it only sounds frightening for those who won’t read the whole article through).
- To delete a message, tap and hold until a menu of options to manage the message appears. Click on the Bin icon that indicates the delete option.
- If 68 minutes haven’t passed yet, select “Delete for all”. Thank God you made it. If you were late, then later, only the “Delete for me” option will be visible. It will erase the message only from your chat, not from the chat of your interlocutor.
- Instead of a chat message, the alert “This message was deleted” will remain. We are looking forward to the moment when WhatsApp will change its mind and hide these shameful clues. The recipient will also see this notification, regardless of whether he/she has read the deleted message or not.
- In group chats, deletion works the same way.
Attention! If the person you are chatting with is offline, you cannot be so sure that he/she did not read the message, because your friends could have seen it on the smartphone’s lock screen. We wrote about it here.
The Internet Protocol
And now, let’s move on to the cherry on the cake, namely to our life hack.
Life hack: how to delete a message after 68 minutes have passed
Classically, you only have 68 minutes to delete a message for both sides. But you can trick this rule and delete even older messages if you carefully read our articles. You can find a lot of useful tips in them.
- To do this, open Settings on your gadget and turn airplane mode on. We showed how to do it here.
- If you are an iOS user, choose Date & Time in General settings. Android users have this option in the main settings menu.
- Turn off the automatic time detection, and then manually change the date and time for the period when you sent the message. This is the time machine on your smartphone.
- Open WhatsApp and delete the message following our instructions. Activate the automatic time setting again and only then turn the airplane mode off.
Congrats! You managed to avoid shame, and now you don’t have to turn red and come up with excuses.
