**Overhaul after 7 years since 2018**
Kakao carried out an update on KakaoTalk on the 12th, expanding the time frame to delete already sent messages from “within 5 minutes of sending” to “within 24 hours.” Additionally, it has been changed so that it is no longer possible to know who deleted the message.
According to Kakao on the 13th, these updates to KakaoTalk were conducted the previous day. This marks the first overhaul of the message deletion feature since its introduction in August 2018.
Kakao first introduced the message deletion feature in August 2018 to rectify senders’ mistakes. Initially, any message, be it text, image, video, or emoji, could be deleted within 5 minutes of sending, regardless of whether the recipient had read it or not.
By pressing and holding the sent message bubble and selecting ‘delete,’ the phrase “This message has been deleted” would appear in the chat windows of both the sender and the recipient. However, since it was marked in the sender’s message bubble, it was possible to identify who deleted the message.
With this update, Kakao changed the format of deleted messages from ‘bubble format’ to a ‘feed notation’ method, making it impossible to pinpoint the individual who deleted the message.
Through regular updates this year, Kakao is introducing various convenience features. In February, it introduced a speech bubble tag function that allows users to use ‘chat with myself’ as a memo pad, and in March, it increased the number of images that can be sent at once from 30 to 120. It also added a feature that allows users to search for only a specific friend’s messages in a chat room.