WhatsApp for Android earlier this month got the new extended time for ‘Delete for Everyone’ from 7 minutes or 420 seconds to 4096 seconds which is about 68 minutes and 16 seconds. Now the company has rolled out the same for iOS. WhatsApp with V2.18.31 for iOS and Windows phone also gets the new 1 hour, 8 minutes and 16 seconds for deleting a message.
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Apart from just extending the “delete for Everyone” extension, WhatsApp has also implemented a new feature “Block revoke request” which when a user deletes a message for everyone, WhatsApp sends to the recipients a new message having the same ID of the message that the user wants to revoke. This wasn’t the case before, previously, when WhatsApp received this particular message contained the revoke request, the app checked if the ID of the message was present in the database: and if it was found, WhatsApp directly deleted it without checking any other important information.
The company now has tweaked this algorithm. It now checks the database having the same ID of the received revoke message request, it checks the data of the message saved in the database. It will now perform the operation if the date of the saved messages is less than 24 hours. This measure is to block modded WhatsApp APKs which allowed any user in the group to delete messages for anyone regardless of the date. Now WhatsApp will make sure that nobody can illegally delete messages for everyone.
According to Wabetainfo, the reason behind choosing 24 hours is to make sure that the recipient will surely receive the revoke request. However, users who are on modded unauthorized WhatsApp versions can still continue to delete messages for everyone within 24 hours.