WhatsApp is internally testing a View Once feature for regular text messages, extending a privacy capability that has until now been limited exclusively to photos and videos. The feature allows a sender to mark a text message as viewable only once by the recipient, after which the message disappears automatically without leaving a trace in the conversation. Testing began on Android earlier in June 2026 and has since expanded to iOS as well, though the feature has not yet reached the public beta programme and remains available only to WhatsApp developers conducting internal testing.
The mechanism for sending a View Once text message is straightforward: users long-press the Send button rather than tapping it normally, which triggers an option to send the message as a view-once text. Once the recipient opens the message and reads it, the content disappears and cannot be retrieved, viewed again, or forwarded. The feature works across both one-to-one private conversations and group chats, giving it broad practical utility, though it will not be available on WhatsApp Channels, which function more like broadcast platforms rather than private communication channels and therefore operate under a different set of content rules.
WhatsApp first introduced View Once for photos and videos in 2021, allowing users to share sensitive visual content that would self-destruct after being opened, addressing a privacy need that had long been met by Snapchat and, in a different form, by Instagram’s disappearing messages. Extending the same capability to text messages fills a gap in the original feature set, recognising that sensitive information in text form, such as passwords, one-time codes, private addresses, or confidential instructions, carries the same risk of being screenshot, forwarded, or stored as visual content does. The View Once text feature addresses this by making the content transient by design rather than relying on trust or manual deletion by the recipient.
It is important to note that the View Once text message feature is distinct from another WhatsApp capability discovered in development in May 2026, which allows users to set messages to expire after a specific predetermined time period. View Once is fundamentally different in that the disappearance is triggered by the act of reading rather than by the passage of time, meaning the message persists until opened rather than disappearing after a set interval regardless of whether it has been seen. The combination of both features, when they eventually reach stable releases, will give WhatsApp users a more complete toolkit for managing the ephemeral nature of sensitive communications in the world’s most widely used messaging application.
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