WhatsApp is a fantastic personal messaging service that has certainly changed the way that many of us communicate. Allowing for far easier and secure communication with people through data, Whatsapp’s arrival essentially killed off SMS messaging. The biggest problem with WhatsApp though is that it saves everything you receive on your phone and ends up hogging internal storage space. After all, those memes and videos that all your aunties send you every morning add up eventually.
Facebook is going to make it a little easier for people who aren’t tech-savvy to manage the space that the app is taking up on their phones, and make it easier to delete all the unwanted content it holds onto. The new tool will be “rolling out to users worldwide this week,” says the Facebook-owned company.
WhatsApp does currently have a Storage Usage tool that sorts all the different chats by the amount of space they take up and lists the different types of messages, photos, GIFs, and videos in each chat which can eventually be deleted. However, this doesn’t always help people who want to have control of the exact content that they are deleting.
This new tool will provide thumbnails of trashable media, along with splitting up what has been forwarded many times or taking up more than 5MB space so you can better delete what you want, without fear of perhaps erasing something that you wanted to keep. The company is also testing out self-defeating messages that vanish after seven days to help with the problem.
I’ve always just gone into my OS’s file system and deleted what I wanted anyway, but for those people who are less tech-savvy, this is definitely a useful option for them. You can also set up WhatsApp to not automatically download certain videos and audio files so that when those aunties do send through their stuff, you don’t have to actually see it and take comfort it won’t take up any space on your phone.
How they respond when you don’t comment on what they shared is a problem that WhatsApp can’t solve
Last Updated: November 5, 2020
Yozzie
November 5, 2020 at 13:41
First thing you do with a new phone after installing whatsapp is setting the app to not save media to the phone storage.
Alien Emperor Trevor
November 5, 2020 at 15:30
This is why I can send you noods with confidence.
For the Emperor!
November 5, 2020 at 14:56
I clear chats often, starring what I would like to keep, and nuking the rest – media included. I mean, if I leave the Warhammer group for a few months there are thousands of images just clogging it all up.
Yozzie
November 5, 2020 at 15:01
Heresy!
MechMachine
November 5, 2020 at 15:57
This article is a gateway drug………haven’t you seen the Social Dilemma ?
Matt Lebano
November 5, 2020 at 20:13
WhatsApp collects all your messages and photos, don’t use this. Use the utopia ecosystem, where you can be completely anonymous and no one will hack you