You Will Have 10 Minutes to Unsend a Message in Upcoming FacebookMessenger Feature

Facebook Messenger 4 is now rolling out

Facebook Messenger is one of the more popular messaging platforms out there, and sometimes a user might run into a situation where a sent message might not be the best possible text to send in that moment.

Unfortunately, the platform doesn’t support an “unsend” feature. Yet. We reported back in October that the company was indeed working on the feature, though, and that some lucky folks out there in the wild were already testing it ahead of a potential public launch. Unfortunately, at the time, it wasn’t known if the feature would actually see the light of day for the masses. But it looks like Facebook Messenger is gearing up for its arrival.

The official landing page for the Facebook Messenger app for iOS has the upcoming unsend feature listed under “coming soon”. It also goes into a bit of detail as to what Messenger users should expect out of the feature. Specifically, they will have up to 10 minutes to unsend that message they don’t want someone else to see:

“Coming soon: Remove a message from a chat thread after it’s been sent. If you accidentally send the wrong photo, incorrect information or message the wrong thread, you can easily correct it by removing the message within ten minutes of sending it.”

While 10 minutes might seem like awhile, compare that to WhatsApp (also owned by Facebook) and its 1 hour deadline to unsend a message and it seems pretty short! Still, 10 minutes should be a realistically long enough time to make a decision and either keep the sent message or delete it before the other person can see it (or just to delete it for posterity purposes).

Earlier this year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the company itself found itself in some hot water (some things never change?) when it was discovered some of the CEO’s messages sent in Messenger had been deleted from recipients’ inboxes.

That was seen as a pretty big issue considering Facebook Messenger doesn’t have an “unsend” feature built into it, readily available for general users. But a day after that all went down back in April and the company announced it would indeed be building a feature into Messenger, and that it would be available for all users. Since then, Facebook has been pretty quiet on the subject.

In related news, Facebook Messenger is also still rolling out that major redesign to its UI, which includes adding a dark mode, a more minimal design aesthetic with fewer tabs, and more. That was announced a little while ago, but Facebook is still rolling it out to users across the globe. If you don’t already have the new Facebook Messenger experience, you should get it “soon”.

[via The Verge; Facebook Messenger (iOS App Store)]

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