Drunk texts, while almost a rite of passage for every mobile-phone-bearing millennial, are rarely a good thing for anyone involved.
Far too often you wake up realising you've ended up declaring your undying love for an ex you'd – in the cold light of day – rather swallow your own teeth than get back together with, or you've got extra sassy with your housemates in the group message about their unacceptable idea of living standards.
Mostly, you're left with a hangover and a great big sense of 'why couldn't I just keep my mouth shut?' the next day. Urgh.
So anyone who can relate to the above will be absolutely overjoyed with the Christmas miracle that is this next piece of news: WhatsApp is reportedly working on the creation of an 'unsend' button. Something we'd like to think is designed entirely to minimise the damage of your reckless drunk texting.
As Metro reports, reliable WhatsApp news account WABetaInfo tweeted a video which purports to show a hidden feature of a new beta version (not widely available to the public) of the instant messaging app where users can opt to 'revoke message' – i.e. recall it before the other person has read it.
REJOICE.
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What's not clear at this stage, however, is whether the unsend feature will only be available to messages that have been sent but not delivered, or whether unread messages that have been delivered or messages that have already been seen by the recipient will also be eligible to be deleted.
As well as the revoke message button, WABetaInfo's inside information also suggests the app might soon introduce an 'edit message' feature for when you've had time to reflect on how harsh/embarrassingly flirty/unnecessarily direct your first message actually was and want to go back in and change it. The dream.
It's likely, though, that if this edit message function does become available for widespread use, the message would be visibly listed as 'edited' in the same way an altered Instagram caption or Facebook status is when a user makes changes.
Thank you, WhatsApp, for introducing some post-drunk-messaging control into our lives as an early Christmas present. We always knew you were there for us. Let's just hope it gets rolled out on a wider scale soon; for all our sakes.
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