- If you can’t find a specific message from your WhatsApp conversation with a friend or colleague after some time, they may have deleted it or have enabled Disappearing Messages.
- If someone has manually removed messages from the conversation, you can’t do anything about it.
- When Disappearing messages are enabled, text and media files sent and received will be automatically deleted for both parties after selected period.
Why Do WhatsApp Messages Disappear?
When someone randomly deletes a few messages from your conversation, you’ll see the “ This message was deleted ” placeholder. You can’t do anything about it unless that message is part of a backup. But the moment you restore that backup, the deleted message will disappear.
The other new way is the Disappearing Messages feature, which automatically deletes messages or media after activating the option. Again, there is no way to recover those deleted texts unless you’ve forwarded the messages to another chat with disappearing messages turned on or have taken screenshots of the conversation.
As WhatsApp puts it, some messages don’t need to be around forever . Hence, the introduction of Disappearing Messages. After turning on this feature, all the messages you send can be termed as Disappearing messages.
Things to Know About Disappearing Messages in WhatsApp
- You can’t recover your disappeared messages unless you have forwarded them to another chat. Save your media files to your device to avoid getting deleted.
- The duration of messages that you choose only affects new messages in the chat, not old messages that you received or sent previously.
- You must manually turn on the feature of Disappearing Messages. The feature will not turn on automatically.
- Anyone in your group chat can keep the disappearing messages to stop them from disappearing as long as the set duration time hasn’t passed.
How to Send Disappearing Messages on WhatsApp
First off, we should point out that this feature works on all supported devices and platforms. Follow the steps below to activate Disappearing Messages.
Step 1: Launch WhatsApp and open the chat to activate Disappearing Messages.
Step 2: Next, tap the contact name (or phone number) to open the Contact Info page.
Step 3: Tap Disappearing Messages > select the time duration .
When you return to the chat window, you’ll be notified that new messages you send after enabling Disappearing Messages will disappear from the chat depending on the duration selected. WhatsApp will notify the contact/receiver that you have enabled Disappearing messages for the conversation.
The same procedure applies to Android and iOS devices, WhatsApp Web, and the WhatsApp Desktop app .
Note: For group chats, only the group admin can enable or disable Disappearing Messages. All group members are notified when the feature is enabled or disabled.
How to Stop WhatsApp Messages From Disappearing
That’s the most important question, and it’s understandable to avoid such discomfort. Think of the Disappearing messages feature like a car with two drivers. So both parties in the chat (sender and receiver) are in the driving seat. For context, if Alex is texting Jennifer on WhatsApp and he enables Disappearing Messages, the feature will automatically be enabled for Jennifer, too.
Interestingly, if Jennifer would rather not have her messages disappear after the specified period, she can disable Disappearing messages from her end. She must go to the chat settings and set Disappearing messages to Off. Please look at the steps above and then select Off for the message timer.
To put this in perspective, if Alex enabled Disappearing messages at 7:00 PM and sent you a series of texts before you disabled Disappearing messages by, say, 8:00 PM, messages received (or sent) within the 1 hour will vanish after the selected duration. So, the only way to stop or prevent future messages from disappearing in WhatsApp is to turn off the Disappearing Messages option.
