14 DAY TRIAL // WhatsApp was, is, and will probably continue to be the preferred messaging apps for most mobile users out there, and while this won’t change in the short term, it doesn’t necessarily mean competitors aren’t trying to attract more and more users.
Both Telegram and Signal have benefitted from the WhatsApp exodus that started earlier this year and was caused by the controversial privacy update announced by Facebook.
And to make sure it’d take full advantage of users’ disappointment in WhatsApp, these services are focusing more and more on features that make a bigger difference between all messaging apps.
For example, Telegram has been offering for quite a while support for self-destructing messages as part of secret chats, and this is something that gained quite a lot of fans obsessed with their privacy.
WhatsApp disappearing messages
WhatsApp knew this was a must-have feature, so the company added support for disappearing messages earlier this year, though they work in a pretty different version than their sibling in Telegram. The good news is the Facebook-owned company is still trying to further refine the experience with this feature, so it’s now working on a new option that it somehow believes would come in handy.
It’s a 90-day limit for disappearing messages, which means that your conversation would be removed automatically some three months after taking place. WABetaInfo says this option is already being tested in WhatsApp on Android, so most likely, WhatsApp is very serious about it, though, for many, it doesn’t make much sense.
Disappearing messages should come with options that further enhance the privacy both in the short and in the long term, so deleting a conversation after three months more or less defeats this purpose.
It remains to be seen if users end up activating this option, but for now, everybody is stuck with the default seven-day default value anyway.