Toni Hobrecht
WhatsApp has officially unveiled its latest feature. Keep in Chat is reversing the functionality of disappearing messages, which were first introduced in 2020. This keeps the messages in the chat even if they were originally sent as disappearing messages.
The way it works is that if you try to keep a specific disappearing message, the sender will be notified and given the opportunity to veto it. Once the sender says a message cannot be kept, that decision is final. This means that no other chat participant can save the message and WhatsApp will inevitably delete the message when the timer expires.
This is an interesting way to save some disappearing messages without making the whole concept completely pointless. The new feature is not likely to see any major use, or rather a large amount of approval from the relevant senders. After all, why not just send a normal message instead? We book the new feature for us in the “nice to have” category.
Saved messages are marked with a bookmark icon and are then available in the “Kept Messages” folder, sorted by chat. The Keep In Chat feature will roll out to all users worldwide “over the next few weeks,” according to WhatsApp.
