Snapchat co-founder Reggie Brown came up with the concept of self-destructing or ephemeral messaging several years ago. However, it didn’t take long for Meta toimplement it on Instagramsome years ago and eventually bring it to WhatsApp in 2021, with the feature now being a staple of thebest messaging appson the market. Then, last year, the company unceremoniously removed this media sharing feature from WhatsApp’s desktop apps. But that looks all set to be reversed as view-once media is finally making a comeback across desktop-based applications, including WhatsApp Web.
As noted byWABetaInfo, the ability to send ephemeral images and videos has been slowly making a comeback onto some WhatsApp desktop apps over the past few weeks, with the rollout seemingly picking up pace now.
The screenshot below illustrates how media can be set to view once on WhatsApp for Windows, with the icon appearing within the image editor tool’s caption bar at the bottom. In addition to the Windows app, the view-once button has also been found on WhatsApp for macOS and WhatsApp beta for iPad, per WABetaInfo. The button’s placement could differ based on the platform you’re using, though.
WABetaInfo further says that WhatsApp Web has also recently picked up this handy privacy-oriented feature, and I can concur based on a quick check on my laptop. WhatsApp never really explained why it removed this ability from the web apps to begin with. It was always a bit of an annoyance for people who would frequently switch between mobile and desktop apps only to realize that one of the basic functionalities was broken on the larger screen.
Nevertheless, the fact that WhatsApp has finally changed course and returned ephemeral media sharing to the desktop apps is welcome news for users, even if it took up to a year to get it back. While the rollout appears to have commenced already, don’t lose hope if you may’t see it yet, with WABetaInfo saying it should become more widely available in the coming weeks.
Of course, this isn’t the only feature addition that WhatsApp is working on, as recent beta releases of the Android app have given us a good idea of what to expect in the future. For example,more details on the AI chatbot featurewere uncovered by WhatsApp beta for Android v2.23.24.26 last week, thanks to the appearance of a floating action bar (FAB) within the Chats tab.
But not all WhatsApp updates are good, asGoogle recently announcedthat chat/media backups “will soon start counting toward” the associated Google account’s storage allocation. There were early hintssuggesting this was on the cards, but it looks set to go into effect for beta testers by December this year and by early 2024 for the rest of the users on the stable channel.
