WhatsApp will now let you edit sent messages. The Meta-owned messaging app has begun testing this ability among a small group of beta users. A wider public rollout should follow in the coming weeks if everything goes as planned.
WhatsApp has been working on an editing feature for some time now. It rolled out the feature to beta users on the web a few days back. The latest beta update has brought it to the Android app as well. With this ability, you can easily correct any factual error or typo in a sent message without deleting the original message or resending a new one. Just make the necessary changes to the message and that’s it.
To edit a sent message, long press on it and tap on the vertical ellipses in the top right corner of the screen. You will find an Edit button under the existing Info and Copy options. Select Edit and WhatsApp will let you rewrite the message and send it again, replacing the original message. As you’d expect, the app will let everyone in the chat know that you have made changes to the message. A persistent “edited” label is attached to the message for everyone to see.
WhatsApp gives you a very short window to edit sent messages
According to WABetaInfo, which first reported the availability of this feature for beta users, WhatsApp lets you edit a message as many times as you want. There’s no limit to how many changes you can make after sending a message. However, the company has set a strict time limit. You can edit a message only within 15 minutes of first sending it. This is likely to avoid potential misuse of the feature. People could dubiously edit weeks-old messages.
That said, a 15-minute time limit may be a little too restricting. Telegram, which has had this ability for several years now, lets you edit sent messages up to a day later. Maybe WhatsApp should do something similar, or at least a few hours. It’s not always easy to notice one’s own mistakes immediately. The company originally offered a similar window for deleting sent messages. But that has now been raised to a whole two days, so there’s some hope.
As said earlier, this feature is still in beta. WhatsApp may change a few things before rolling out the Edit option to the public. If you want to try it out early, you can sign up for the beta program here, though there’s no guarantee you will get access to the feature. The latest beta version of the app also brings it to Wear OS watches. We will let you know when the Edit option arrives in the public version of WhatsApp.