If you’ve checked your iPhone storage only to find that WhatsApp is quietly squatting on several gigabytes, the platform is now testing a smarter way to clean up chats and reclaim some space.
According to the latest WABetaInfo report, the Meta-owned instant messaging platform is developing a new feature called the “Advanced chat clearing tool,” which lets users delete selected items, such as starred messages or media files, with ease, while also providing an estimate of how much storage they’ll free up.
Why clearing WhatsApp chats has been frustrating until now
Until now, the platform has allowed users to either delete everything in a chat or keep it intact. However, once the feature arrives on WhatsApp for iOS (and eventually on Android), it will let users delete photos, videos, GIFs, voice notes, documents, or other files within a chat independently, while keeping the messages intact.
The feature builds on the app’s existing “Manage Storage” section and allows more granular control over the data users want to delete, especially on lower-end iPhones with 64GB or 128GB storage.
If you’re someone who gets the “iPhone Storage Almost Full” error quite often, this WhatsApp update could help you save a few gigabytes of space that would otherwise be taken up by random GIF forwards, videos, and large files you only needed once.
So, you should be able to delete a 500MB video document sent to a family WhatsApp group without deleting the entire conversation history, or remove a 100MB research paper sent by a fellow student or colleague. Moreover, you can clear space in a controlled, targeted way, which should result in fewer backups on cloud storage platforms as well.
Currently, the advanced storage cleaning tool is only available to iOS WhatsApp beta testers. However, the platform has a history of rolling out successful features to the stable channel within weeks or months of testing. Down the line, WhatsApp could also release a similar feature for Android.