WhatsApp is testing a new feature that promises to make unearthing text messages much faster – and less hassle. We’ve all had that teeth-grindingly frustrating moment when you’re trying to unearth an old message with an address, phone number, birthday or a group selfie sent a few months earlier. But that could soon be a thing of the past.
According to @WABetaInfo – a hugely influential Twitter account that unearths features in-development and shares details from the latest beta releases – WhatsApp is looking to add a new way to search through old messages.
As long as you know roughly when the text, voice message, video, document or photo was sent, WhatsApp’s new feature will let you immediately time-travel back to a specific day, month, or year.
Based on the latest beta, when you launch a search within a chat – you’ll get a Rolodex of dates to quickly cycle through. Of course, don’t get too excited quite yet. After all, Facebook-owned WhatsApp experiments with new features and functionality all the time – and not all of these make the cut for updates to Android and iOS users worldwide.
So there’s no guarantee this new date-search will make it to your smartphone. However, WhatsApp has clearly been trying to overhaul its search capabilities in the last few months. The world’s most popular messaging service treated iPhone owners to the ability to drill-down their search based on the type of file. The ability to narrow the search based on a date would be a very useful, complementary addition to the search functionality.
And that’s not the only trick WhatsApp has up its sleeve.
Another nifty feature purportedly coming soon is an improved storage management option. As it stands, WhatsApp cannot see how much memory on your Android handset or iPhone each chat is occupying. That makes it difficult to know which Group Chat to cull if you’re looking to save space.
Finally, a recent report from the beta files from WABetaInfo shows that users could soon have a separate tab to see large files on your phone and delete them with a quick tap. There’ll also be a dedicated tab for Forwarded files, so you can easily delete duplicates that you’ve sent around to family members or friends.