Facebook Messenger’s ‘Unsend’ Feature Starts Rolling Out on iOS and Android

We reported last week that Facebook will soon allow users to delete a sent message within 10 minutes after originally sending it and today, the feature has started rolled out to iOS and Android users, as reported by TechCrunch.

Commonly dubbed ‘unsend’, the new “Remove for Everyone” feature lets Messenger users remove their sent messages from the recipient’s inbox, just like WhatsApp. Doing so also leaves a “tombstone” indicating a message was deleted.

The source says Messenger users in Poland, Bolivia, Colombia and Lithuania are already seeing the option on iOS and Android apps. While the company plans to roll out the feature worldwide as soon as possible, a Facebook person has said that it may get delayed for some regions due to the holiday App Store update cut-off.

“The pros are that users want to be in control . . . and if you make a mistake you can correct it. There are a lot of legitimate use cases out there that we wanted to enable,” Facebook’s head of Messenger Stan Chudnovsky tells me in an exclusive interview.

“We need to make sure we don’t open up any new venues for bullying. We need to make sure people aren’t sending you bad messages and then removing them because if you report them and the messages aren’t there we can’t do anything.”

Facebook says it is working on more unsend features as well, such as the ability to preemptively set an expiration date for specific messages or entire threads.