WhatsApp: sent the wrong message? Now you have 5 minutes to think again

Who hasn't written a message on impulse, perhaps a reply that was a bit too gruff? It has happened to us often.

At last WhatsApp, the world's most widely used messaging app, has decided to help the absent-minded and the impulsive by introducing a new feature called "Recall", which will let you delete a sent message within 5 minutes (including voice messages, videos, images and GIFs), as long as the recipient has not yet read it. If the relentless blue ticks appear instead, unfortunately the damage is done!

This type of feature is not exactly a brand-new idea in messaging: Gmail already introduced a similar one in 2015, called "Undo send", to give everyone the chance to fix a mistake, perhaps even a serious one.

The news comes from WABetaInfo, the blog of the app's beta testers, according to whom the feature is already present in the code of version 2.17.30+, but is inactive for the moment. As soon as it is stable and bug-free it will be ready to run on our smartphones, so let's get ready for the arrival of this important new feature, perhaps as early as the coming weeks.