WhatsApp gives you up to two days to delete a message, instead of one hour - The...

WhatsApp gives you up to two days to delete a message, instead of one hour

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Sent a wildly inappropriate text meant for your boo to, I don’t know, your boss? Now you have some extra time to save face and delete it — well, if you’re using WhatsApp, at least.

WhatsApp users now have a little over two days after sending a message to delete it instead of just one hour, the company announced today.

To start using the new feature right now, open up the WhatsApp group or individual chat where you sent the message(s). Make sure to tap and hold the content you want to get rid of, click “Delete,” and then select either “Delete for everyone” or “Delete for me.”

Yet before you go off on a deleting spree, be aware there’s a (slight) catch: all recipients must be updated to the most recent version of WhatsApp in order for this to actually work — and you won’t actually receive a notification if the message didn’t delete.

Still, this could be a handy new feature that may help WhatsApp gain a slight advantage over Apple’s iMessage instant message service. Apple, after all, still doesn’t offer this capability and only will whenever the heck its new iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems are released, possibly this fall.

For now, however, the iOS 16 beta only gives users two minutes to pull the plug — and only so long as recipients have downloaded the beta version as well. Which, let’s face it, isn’t something you can count on.