At the beginning of the month, WhatsApp began beta testing a ‘view once’ feature, now it’s finally rolling it out. If you’re thinking to yourself, ‘didn’t we already have this?’ you’d be right. Sort of.
WhatsApp already had a ‘disappearing messages’ feature but that didn’t go down as well as you may have thought. If we’re honest, it’s more like an auto-delete button than anything else, something to clear out your chats if you’re that type of person.
To say it is limited would be putting it lightly. You can’t change the timeframe of how long the messages last, it’s stuck on 7 days despite the company previously planning on adding a 24-hour option (don’t know what happened to that). If you wanted to send sensitive info, be aware that there’s nothing stopping anyone from screenshotting or forwarding your sensitive info.
WhatsApp trying again with a new feature
New feature alert!
You can now send photos and videos that disappear after they’ve been opened via View Once on WhatsApp, giving you more control over your chats privacy! pic.twitter.com/Ig5BWbX1Ow
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) August 3, 2021
With this new ‘view once’ feature, the messaging company hopes to finally add a useful feature to its platform, by copying another company’s feature. Thanks, Snapchat!
Similar to Snapchat, users can send an image or video, which will not be saved to the recipient’s device after being opened and cannot be opened again. Slightly better than the disappearing messages, recipients will also not be able to forward, save, star, or share them.
WhatsApp will notify you with a read-receipt when someone opens a view once image on their mobile. If they use a different platform then all bets are off. It will also not notify you if someone takes a screenshot of the media or record the screen of their device.
Furthermore, unopened media will expire from the chat after 14 days of it being sent. You’ll need to enable view once on each media item you send and you can’t send more than one at a time.
Also, be warned, unopened media can be restored from a backup if the backup was made before the content expires. Why so many loopholes WhatsApp?
So, clearly, there’s still a lot of work to be done here if WhatsApp actually means to make this feature useful.