How to unsend messages you've sent via Facebook and other apps

11-09-2018 • Popular Science

Unsend

Sadly, this approach will not help you unsend a message from your various messenger apps.

Pixabay

There are lots of reasons someone might want to un-send a message on one of the many messaging apps that currently populate your smartphone and computer. Maybe there's a typo in the message you just sent to a potential employer or you wanted to complain about a co-worker putting fish in the office microwave— and sent it to the wrong person. Just this week, Facebook recently introduced an upcoming feature that allows users a short window of time in which they can recall messages sent through Messenger. It's not the magical tool that lets you go in and nuke old messages from past conversations like Mark Zuckerberg reportedly enjoys, but it's a start.

Here's a quick guide to recalling messages on some of the most popular communication apps. Some are easier than others, and some are downright impossible.

Facebook Messenger

With the 191.0 release of Facebook Messenger in the Apple App Store, users will have a 10 minute window to recall what they sent. The feature comes just a few months after some controversy about whether Facebook was deleting messages from CEO Mark Zuckerberg from other people's inboxes. Until the update, you can delete a message you send on your own device, but the recipient's version of your conversation remains untouched.

If you unsend a message with the new feature, however, it will disappear from the recipient's feed, as long as you do it within that 10 minute window just after sending.

Facebook's other messaging service, Whatsapp was its first to allow unsending, but until recently, you had to blow-up your message within seven minutes of sending. The current rules, however, give users "about an hour" to delete their messages from everyone's feeds. The feature is called Delete for everyone and, while it will get rid of the original message that you want gone, it leaves a placeholder to indicate that a message was deleted. So, it's not a perfectly clean way of scraping away your ill-advised or accidental communications.