WhatsApp will soon introduce a feature that users search for messages by date. As reported by popular WABetaInfo, the “Search message by date” feature will make it easier for users to quickly search for messages shared on a specific date within their conversations.
WABetaInfo reported WhatsApp has plans to release the new feature for the web client in the future. It will a calendar button which will allow you to open a date picker panel (see image below). On tapping a particular day, you can see messages shared on that date.
This would replace the stress of manually scrolling chats to remind a colleague of a conversation you once had about a project you both are working on. Apart from helping users find relevant information, the search-based feature will help users stay better organised with the messages shared in the past.
However, a potential issue that might come up (if this feature is released to mobile) would be to access messages for a specific date if they were restored after installing a new device. Retrieving backed up messages hasn’t been effective as conversations with some contacts only show “Waiting for this message. This may take a while.”
WhatsApp explained in a support page that this is due to end-to-end encryption, and can happen if you or the person “recently reinstalled WhatsApp or are on an older version.”
The Instant-messaging service has been sluggish to release key features to the platform. Despite that most of the updates have been Telegram-styled, there are major functionalities like the potential ‘search-based’ feature that seems to be taking forever for the company to introduce. For example the option to schedule message automatically to go out on the set date.
One good practice about Meta though, is the ability to release features based on user feedbacks, and so I won’t be surprised if WhatsApp gets a “Schedule Message” feature in a later update.
