Secret Tips For WhatsApp

It’s the best and most popular messaging app but are you getting the most out of it? Jane Hoskyn reveals the latest expert tricks for mastering WhatsApp

- Jane Hoskyn

Unsend embarrassing messages

Don’t panic! WhatsApp now lets you ‘unsend’ accidentally dispatched messages. Long-press the message, tap the bin icon and select Delete For Everyone. This erases the offending text from your recipient’s screen as well as your own, whether or not it’s been read. The catch is that you can only unsend a message for up to an hour and your recipient will see ‘This message was deleted’, which may leave them feeling even more determined to find out what they missed.

Hide yourself and your blue ticks

WhatsApp encrypts your messages in transit, but it’s hardly a fortress of privacy. By default, it reveals when you’re online, what time you were last active and when you’ve read messages. To switch off these intrusions, open Settings via WhatsApp’s main menu then go to Account, Privacy. Tap ‘Last seen’, then Nobody (to hide the ‘online’ tag) and disable ‘Read receipts’ to stop the blue ticks.

Disabling blue ticks also prevents you from seeing when recipients read your messages, so you could keep them switched on and use this alternative trick instead: set your device to display full messages in notifications. On iOS, you could also get Siri to read them out and, in Chrome, you can use free extension WAToolkit to display notifications (see boxout, opposite). That way, you can read incoming messages without opening WhatsApp and triggering a read receipt.

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