WhatsApp Disappearing Messages Now Live in India: How to Use the New Feature on Android, iPhone

WhatsApp finally catches up to apps such as Snapchat and Telegram. Read on.

By Aman Rashid | Updated: 23 November 2020 12:30 IST

WhatsApp Disappearing Messages Now Live in India: How to Use the New Feature on Android, iPhone

Disappearing messages is a feature pioneered by Snapchat that’s now available on many chat platforms

Highlights

Disappearing messages in WhatsApp is now available for everyone
You need to install the latest version of WhatsApp to get the feature
You’ll need to individually enable disappearing messages for each chat

WhatsApp disappearing messages are now live in India on both Android and iOS. Earlier this month, WhatsApp had officially announced that it will be introducing disappearing Messages, a feature that automatically erases your WhatsApp messages after a certain period of time. Although this feature was already available across a number of different apps, it has now come to WhatsApp too. The new feature is now finally rolling out for everyone. The details of the new feature are already there on a FAQ page created by WhatsApp, and users can now enable this option to delete messages for individual or group chats after seven days. Follow this guide, as well tell you how to enable disappearing messages in WhatsApp.

WhatsApp: How to enable disappearing messages

Before you proceed, make sure that you've the latest version of WhatsApp installed on your smartphone. For Android users, that would be version 2.21.206.15 and for iPhone users, that would be version 2.21.121.4.

Once this is sorted, go ahead and follow these steps to enable disappearing messages in WhatsApp.

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Open a WhatsApp chat > tap Contact Info > scroll down to find the Disappearing Messages feature.
The feature is disabled by default. Tap Continue, followed by tapping On to enable this feature.
You'll have to enable this feature individually for each chat. Once you do, your messages will automatically be deleted after seven days.

You can't decide the duration before the messages disappear in a chat, which means the only option you have right now is seven days, at least for now. Competing apps like Telegram give users multiple options to choose from but WhatsApp has decided to start with just a single time setting.

Apart from this, it is also possible to store the disappearing messages before they are deleted, i.e. by copying these messages and storing them at a different location. The same applies for media files as well, one can always take a screenshot and save a photo before it gets deleted.

This is how you can enable disappearing messages in WhatsApp. For more tutorials, visit our How to section.

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