WhatsApp now lets you edit your messages

Messaging platforms such as Telegram, Signal, iMessage, and recently Twitter – with a subscription have been offering message editing capabilities on their apps for some time now.

Despite being the most popular and widely used messaging app with over 2 billion users worldwide, WhatsApp has pretty much been undecided about this helpful feature. Finally, WhatsApp users would be getting the long-awaited message editing feature, starting today. Better late than never, right?

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TechloyEmmanuel Oyedeji

In a blog post announcing the feature, WhatsApp says users would be able to correct a 'simple misspelling' – yeah, the ones that keep messing with your messages while you blame it on autocorrect. Users will also be able to 'add extra context' to an already sent message. Now, you no longer need to delete an entire message or send a separate correction to a sent message. And, hopefully, we would be seeing fewer of those annoying 'This message was deleted' greyed-out messages that show on chats when a sender deletes a message due to a spelling error.

But you would only have up to 15 minutes to edit the message after sending it, which seems to be a decent amount of time. To edit the message on WhatsApp, simply long-press on a sent message and choose ‘Edit’ from the menu, which will display as ‘edited’, so those you’re messaging are aware of the correction.

The WhatsApp edit feature has begun rolling out to users globally and will be available in the coming weeks. At the time of writing this post, the feature wasn't available on my device, so I'll update this post when I'm able to try the edit feature.