WhatsApp just won’t stop when it comes to making its Channels a hotspot for people wanting to keep up to date on a specific topic or company. Not only has it begun working on addingvoice messages and new sticker featuresin recent weeks, butindividual messages in Channels will have permalinksfor easier sharing. While most social media and messaging platforms have supported message editing for a good while now, WhatsApp had yet to implement that feature in Channels, but that’s now changed with the latest update.
Channels, which only justbegan rolling out to everyonein September, is a rapidly-growing point of concentration from Meta, the owner of WhatsApp. As of now, when companies or accounts post messages — which are actually called “updates” when inside Channels, but we’ll refer to them as messages for simplicity’s sake — they have up to 30 days to edit the content within the message. Messages that have been altered after the fact will have an indicator next to their timestamp to help users know when the message was edited. This, of course, prevents people from being able to change how messages after the fact are taken by others.
It’squite easy to edit messages. On Android, tap and hold on the Channel message (update) you want to edit. Once the three-dot menu appears, press that and select “Edit.” Write your new message, and then tap the checkmark. On a browser, it’s the same exact process, except instead of holding down on a message, you hover over the message to show a downwards-facing caret. “Edit” is located in the dropdown. It’s that easy.
In addition to the 30-day rule for editing messages, two more important notes are listed in the WhatsApp FAQs. First, when an account edits a channel message, the users of that channel will not get a notification that it was altered. Also, users cannot edit photos, videos or any other types of media or files. Basically, this update only allows the text content in messages to be edited.
It’s wild justhow many updates WhatsApp has rolled out to the publicthis October. The biggest update is probably the addition ofmulti-account usageon single installations of the app on Android. Account security has been overhauled, allowing forbiometrics like fingerprintsto be used to log in. In beta, evenmore text formatting optionsare being tested. With more updates surely being worked on, WhatsApp is already doing more than enough to keep its hold as the number one messaging app in the world.
