Another Whatsapp Bug lets you Delete Messages up to a Week Ago

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WhatsApp has been receiving a steady stream of new features this year, including business accounts, photo filters, and more. A feature that has been in testing since January of last year allowed the user to recall (basically delete) a message that had already been sent. This feature recently rolled out to WhatsApp users, and it’s supposed to have a restriction so that you can’t delete anything older than 7 minutes. We just showed you a method through which you can bypass this limitation and today we’re bringing you an alternative.

As we pointed out earlier this week, the original method required that you bring up the delete dialog prompt before the message was over 7 minutes old. As long as you kept that dialog prompt open, you could then delete the highlighted message after that time limit had expired. This could be useful for some people but it required you to keep that dialog prompt open the entire time. So while this was still a bug that let you bypass the limit, many people felt it wasn’t that useful.

However, a new method has been found from the same folks that brought it to our attention that first time. Android Jefe found a much easier way to delete messages that were older than 7 minutes, and it has been shown to work if the messages are up to a week old right now. It seems as if WhatsApp is using the timestamp of the message itself and then comparing it to the phone’s time. So if you’re willing to adjust the clock on your phone for a minute, then you can take advantage of this trick.

The process requires you to turn off WiFi and then force close the WhatsApp application. From here, you can go into the Settings of the device and adjust the clock. So for example you can go in and change the date to the day before you sent the message you want to delete. Once that is done, go ahead and open up the WhatsApp application and delete the message like you normally would. With that done, you are free to enable WiFi and as soon as your device connects to the internet again, the message on their end is deleted.