Is WhatsApp 'Delete for everyone' feature effective? Maybe not

The Next Web notes that quoted messages in chats continued to show in quotes even after they were wiped. It said that this is not a bug and is a part of the feature. The message will disappear if a user sends a message and deletes it from the group or individual chat within seven minutes.

However, if within these seven minutes, that message is quoted then the original message will successfully disappear but the deleted text continues to show in the recipient's quote.

There is no mention of how the feature works in cases of quotes in the WhatsApp's FAQ. The researchers claimed to discover other shortcomings in WhatsApp's implementation of deleted messages.

One particular flaw discovered by Spanish tech blog AndroidJefe - it was possible to recover deleted messages from the Android notification history.

Relying on third-party apps, users could browse the notification log to read purged texts," the report said. This approach could only recover deleted messages that were read or interacted with.