WhatsApp now lets you hold onto disappearing messages if the sender agrees
Today WhatsApp has officially unveiled its latest feature, and it’s a twist on the Disappearing Messages functionality which was first introduced in 2020. It’s called Keep in Chat, and basically allows you to hang onto texts you need for later, even if they’re of the disappearing type.
The way this works is that, once you decide to keep a specific disappearing item, the sender is notified, and has the ability to veto it. Once the sender says a message can’t be kept, that decision is final, and no one else can keep it either. The message will inevitably be deleted when the timer expires.
This is an interesting way to allow for saving of some disappearing messages without making the whole concept completely pointless. It’s not likely to get a huge amount of use – or rather, a huge amount of sender approvals, otherwise why wouldn’t they just send normal messages instead? – but it’s still definitely in the ‘nice to have’ category.
Saved messages will be noted with a bookmark icon and these will be available to you, organized by chat, in the Kept Messages folder. The Keep in Chat functionality is rolling out globally for all users “over the next few weeks”, WhatsApp says.
