You’re in luck if you want to be able to send someone a WhatsApp message on your iPhone and have it vanish once they’ve read it. It appears that WhatsApp is currently testing this feature with the goal of perhaps releasing it in the future.
At least that’s what a recent leak from WABetaInfo claims. According to WABetaInfo’s blog, WhatsApp is developing a new feature that will erase messages on iOS once they have been read. If you don’t want particular communications to remain, that can be an excellent strategy to safeguard your privacy.
WhatsApp already has disappearing messages, but their present version is far more constrained. You can currently configure messages to disappear after a certain amount of time—24 hours, seven days, or ninety days. However, because it doesn’t take into account whether the messages have been read before being erased, this is somewhat of a “brute force” solution.
That is altered by the latest update. You may now instruct WhatsApp to delete your texts after the recipient has viewed them, rather than only when a predetermined timeframe ends, by adding a “after reading” option to the message timer settings. This allows you greater freedom and guarantees that the recipient of your text message has an opportunity to read it before it disappears.
This modification adds “a new layer of privacy to disappearing messages,” according to WABetaInfo. Even if it is now necessary for users to have viewed the message you sent them, you may still choose how long WhatsApp waits—five minutes, an hour, or twelve hours—before deleting the texts. However, regardless of the setting you select, unopened messages will vanish after a day.
It’s interesting to note that the sender and recipient timers do not need to coincide. As WABetaInfo points out, if you set the timer for, say, five minutes, then that message will be deleted from your device after the time is up. But it will still be on the other person’s phone even if they don’t open it for a few hours. The five-minute clock starts when they open it.
WhatsApp began testing this longer time frame for disappearing messages in April 2026 but it was only available on Android phones back then. It’s now expanding to include iOS as well. It is being tested on both major operating systems , so it is likely to be released soon .
However, there is no information on when this feature might be released. There’s no info on the release date from WABetaInfo and WhatsApp has yet to make an official statement, so we will need to wait and see when it drops.
Whether you’re already using disappearing messages and want more control over them — or have never used these types of messages but are interested in ways they could protect your privacy — this feature could be a useful addition. More details on the official launch date to follow.
