Meta, the parent company that owns the world's most popular instant messaging client, WhatsApp, seeks to make it a safe place that provides greater privacy and provide its users with new features to facilitate their communication experience with each other and give them more control over their accounts and the groups they manage. And recently, Wabetainfo, a website that specializes in monitoring and announcing new upcoming WhatsApp features before they are released to the users, announced a set of new features coming to WhatsApp in the future.
In the beta version 2.22.1.7 of the application, the site monitored indications of a useful feature -that WhatsApp working on- for group admins that enable them a more control the content published in their groups, by giving them the ability to delete any message sent by the group members.
This feature will make the life of group administrators easier, especially in groups that contain a lot of members, which some of them may exploit to post advertisements for products, fraudulent links, or any other materials or messages out of the group's topic.
When an admin deletes a message, WhatsApp will indicate to everyone that “This message has been deleted by the admin X”, where X is the name of the admin who deleted the message.
Earlier this month, WaBetaInfo announced also that Meta may also remove the current limits for the message-deleting feature, enabling users to delete any message they send in a conversation at any time they want.
Currently, this feature allows the user to delete the messages he has sent after a period of no more than 4096 seconds, which is equivalent to 68 minutes and 16 seconds, and he can choose between deleting the message either for himself only or for all users who are there.
The company also made another change, to restrict access to the Last Seen feature, where from now on no one will be able to see the date of the last time you were online on WhatsApp unless it was in your contacts list, or you had previously had a conversation with him, which will prevent Third-party apps to track your Last Seen statuses. In addition, WhatsApp added in its latest update a feature that everyone has been waiting for a long time, as users can preview voice messages before sending them.
Previously, there was no way to verify the content of a voice message that you recorded before sending it, so you had to send the voice message to the person being sent to, then listen to it, and in case there was an error in the message, you would have to delete it for everyone and record a new one, and this stressful.
Now, with this new update, you no longer have to worry, you can listen to the voice message before sending it, and if you don't like it, you can back out before sending it, and record a new one.
This is not all, the company has also improved the feature of self-disappearing messages, as WhatsApp allowed its users to turn on this feature for all their conversations with one click. A new option was added as well when creating a group chat that lets you turn it on for groups you create. This new feature is optional and does not change or delete any of your existing chats.
WhatsApp has also added two new periods besides the current 7-day option for messages to disappear: 24 hours and 90 days, which will give users better scaling at the time they choose to clear their messages automatically.
These new features will allow people to have more easy, safe, and effective communication with their relatives and families, especially in the circumstances of this global pandemic that has not yet ended, and regardless of the concerns raised about this application regarding privacy, WhatsApp remains an effective and secure messaging application that helps people to stay connected in this difficult time that the world is currently living in.
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