Discovered in WhatsApp’s public beta, being able to recall and edit messages are not features that can be turned on — they are disabled by default, so they might not be ready for prime time. Even so, you can theoretically tap a message to then recall it, while you can edit a message through the overflow menu. It is unknown whether you have a certain amount of time to call back a message, but it will be nice to have these features for those prone to typos or for those times when you send a message to the wrong person.
Elsewhere, it appears as though WhatsApp will let you delete a status from the Status tab through a trash can icon in the action bar. Unfortunately, this feature is also disabled by default in the public beta, so folks might need to wait for a server-side update to get things rolling.
The upcoming features come as WhatsApp recently updated the iOS app version that includes the ability to queue messages, even when there is no Internet connection. The Android version has had that feature since 2016, so the update was more of a need to bring the iOS version to parity.
The news also come a few weeks after WhatsApp told Digital Trends that the security “backdoor” reported by The Guardian was deliberate. According to the company, this was to prevent “millions of messages from being lost,” with plenty of security researchers coming to WhatsApp’s defense and The Guardian altering its use of the word “backdoor.”
