Google Messages Will Soon Let You Delete Messages for Everyone

Not that long ago, sending a message was final. It didn’t matter if you had an embarrassing typo, or you sent a message to the wrong person: Once you tapped that “send” button, you were locked in, and whoever that message was sent to would have it as long as they wanted.

These days, however, we have the technology to save ourselves from such embarrassment. Many chat apps now have options to retrieve a message after it was sent, whether by editing the message to fix a mistake, or the ability to delete a message from everyone in the chat. It doesn’t guarantee that the people who received the message didn’t see it, but it does remove that message from view. If they didn’t catch it, they never will.

Plenty of chat apps have this delete option today, from WhatsApp to iMessage. But one notable exception has been Google Messages. If you send a message you didn’t mean to send, you can edit it for up to 15 minutes, but you can’t undo it. Luckily, that’s beginning to change. 9to5Google originally spotted the ability to delete messages from everyone back in February. Now, it appears to be rolling out, slowly but surely.

To get specific, RCS, the messaging protocol that Google Messages now defaults to, has had this option since last July’s “Universal Profile 2.7” update, which allowed users to “Edit, Recall and Delete [messages] that they sent earlier for themselves and the message recipient.”

How “Delete for everyone” works in Google Messages

When the feature hits your Google Messages app, you’ll now have two options when you delete a message. You’ll have the “Delete for me” option, which behaves the same as deleting a message always has: it’ll delete on your end, but not for anyone else. However, there’s also now “Delete for everyone,” which will delete the message for all users running a compatible version of Google Messages.