Deleting messages has been one of the most requested features by the instant message app users. Let’s face it, it is very common to send a message to someone by mistake. Who has ever sent a love message to your girlfriend and it ends up on your sister-in-law’s WhatsApp? Maybe we don’t need to be so extreme, but you get what we mean. I am sure you already know how the feature for deleting messages works, but in case you don’t, we will explain it to you. To delete a message in WhatsApp, you simply press and hold the message, it is worth mentioning that you can only delete messages after a short period of time and it is not compatible with messages in group chats.
We have already seen how easy it is to delete a message in WhatsApp, but is it possible for someone to see the content of a message that has just been deleted? Yes, it is entirely possible and we will explain how to do this in the following paragraphs.
Recovering deleted messages is based on the basic way that app notifications work in Android. As you may have noticed, whenever an app sends you a notification, it is always displayed in the taskbar. Therefore, if there is an app that can keep track of the notifications you receive, it would be completely possible to read any message, even if it has been deleted.
Fortunately, there are a few applications that perform this function. But let’s start by explaining a way to retrieve messages without having to install anything. To do this we will add the «notification log» widget to our home screen. Adding a widget is quite simple, just press and hold on a blank space on the home screen until the option to add widgets appears, select «notification log», and from this widget we can see all the notifications that the system has received.
Browsing through all the notifications until we find the deleted message in which we are interested in can be a tedious and annoying task, so let’s explore other ways to recover deleted WhatsApp messages.
Recovering deleted messages with apps
In the Google Play Store there are several apps that can be used to recover messages from the messaging app. Among the most prominent are WAMR and WhatsRemoved+. The operation and features of both apps are very similar, so let’s take a look at the former.
WAMR is a free app that not only allows us to recover deleted WhatsApp messages, but also keeps track of your contacts’ connection times, notifies us when someone is online, and also allows us to download the statuses uploaded by our contacts. Another interesting feature is the ability to recover photo or video files.
On the other hand, WAMR has a number of limitations. This app and all similar apps will not work properly if you have silent notifications. These apps will also not work if they delete a message while you have WhatsApp open.
Is it possible to prevent people from reading our deleted messages?
It is quite difficult, if not impossible, to prevent our contacts from retrieving a deleted message. As we have just seen, these notification management apps are quite effective at what they do, so there aren’t many options unless you are lucky and your contacts don’t have one installed.
You might think that using any other messaging app would solve the problem. You would be wrong. Since these types of apps are based on saving incoming notifications and then comparing them to deleted ones, they are virtually impossible to overcome. Whether you delete a message in Telegram, on a Facebook chat, or any other messaging app, there is always a chance that the message can be recovered.
