WhatsApp is an extremely popular social app that is used daily by more than a billion people all over the world. It’s a great app – comprehensive, it allows you to communicate via text, voice, or video, it supports sending videos and images through text and, as most all other communicating apps, allows users to create groups in which a bunch of people can have a collective conversation. The biggest problem, at least until today, was that messages sent by mistake to the wrong group or person could not be recalled for all recipients – only for the person who sent it. So misdirected messages, or messages containing errors, could still be seen by whoever they were sent to.

Not anymore. WhatsApp announced today that the app now has a new option: ‘delete for everyone’. by selecting this option, wayward messages will be removed for every intended recipient and instead be replaced with “This message was deleted”, which will be visible to all – senders and recipients alike. This is a huge improvement for WhatsApp, and one that was long overdue. The company finally decided to listen to user requests, which is a great thing. Unfortunately, users will need to stay on their toes, because they will only have seven minutes to delete messages – past that time, the messages will be staying for good. Still, most people realize their mistake fairly quickly, and seven minutes is better than none at all.

As of now, the new feature is still being rolled out so not everyone can use it yet. It’s also important to note that the feature will only work with the latest version of WhatsApp, so users who have not updated their app recently will not be able to use it, and those who have and use it will not be able to delete messages from older versions. So it might be a good idea to tell your friends and connections to upgrade to the latest version of WhatsApp so that all of you can take advantage of its new functionality. You can read more about the update on WhatsApp’s FAQ page.

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