WhatsApp: WhatsApp users, you may not get ‘vacation mode’ – Times of India

Vacation mode — a feature that WhatsApp has allegedly been working on since 2018 — has now been shelved, claims a report by WABetaInfo.
As per a tweet by WABetaInfo, the popular instant messaging app has abandoned the development of ‘vacation mode’, a feature that had been reportedly in works on both iOS and Android platforms for some months.

To recall, this feature was spotted first in October 2018. Using this feature, WhatsApp users could have been able to mute archived chats so that they remain archived until the user unmutes them.
Right now, what happens is that archived chat automatically get unarchived whenever there is a new message sent to someone by the person who had archived chat. Therefore vacation mode would have allowed users to keep those archived chats in that section only as long as the chat was on mute.
Meanwhile, the Facebook-owned app has been said to be working on ‘expiring messages’ feature too. A recent report by WABetaInfo claimed that whenever this feature is rolled out, users will be able to turn it on or off in individual chats. However, for group chats, the option will be available only to the admins.
If expiring messages feature is turned on and at any time a media file is shared then that file
will expire from the chat too. However, it may get saved to the phone of the sender and receiver depending on their media settings on WhatsApp.
Further, enabling the expiring message feature will not affect a user’s previously exchanged messages when the feature was disabled. This means that all previous messages will continue to appear on the chat even if the feature is enabled and will apply to only the messages that are exchanged after the feature is enabled.