WhatsApp schedule messages in beta could curb after-hours pings

Scheduling is built into the send button. Type your message as usual, then press and hold send instead of tapping it. A panel opens with a date and time picker. Choose when you want it delivered and confirm with the green button, which shows the exact delivery time before you commit.

A few details from the beta builds:

• You can schedule as little as 10 minutes ahead or as far as two weeks out.
• Scheduled messages can contain text, links, photos or videos, and they stay end-to-end encrypted, meaning only you and the recipients can read them.
• The message goes out at the chosen time even if your phone is offline or the app is closed.
• It works in one-to-one chats and in groups.

After you schedule something, a note appears in the chat that only you can see. Pending messages sit in their own section of the chat info or group info screen, where you can review them or delete them before they send.

The feature is basic for now. Each scheduled message can carry just one photo or one video. If you want to send a batch of holiday pictures at a set time, you would have to schedule each one on its own, or simply send them normally.

Groups have a quirk too. A scheduled message only goes to people who were already in the group when you set it up. Someone who joins afterward will not get it, even if they join well before the delivery time. It is also unclear whether scheduling will work in WhatsApp Channels, the one-way broadcast feeds.

WhatsApp has not explained exactly how it stores messages on its servers until they are due. What it has kept is encryption, so the content is meant to stay private along the way.

Here is the part that matters most for workplaces. Nothing on a delivered message says it was scheduled. The recipient sees an ordinary message with the delivery time. And if the sender deletes a scheduled message before it goes out, the recipient gets no notice at all.

That is handy if you want to send a thought while it is fresh without waking someone up. But it also shifts the visible timestamp, not the actual work. A manager who writes at eleven at night and schedules it for the morning still worked at eleven; the chat history will just suggest otherwise.

In much of Europe, contacting staff outside working hours is regulated. France gave workers at firms with more than 50 employees a right to ignore after-hours email in 2017. Italy passed a similar law that year, Spain and Belgium followed in 2018, and Ireland, Greece and Portugal acted in 2021, with Belgium adding more rules in 2022 and Slovakia in 2024. Portugal goes furthest, limiting contact outside working hours to emergencies, with fines for employers who break the rules.

The European Parliament asked for an EU-wide right to disconnect in 2021, but that law is still being drafted, so protections vary country by country. WhatsApp has around 500 million monthly users in Europe, where it carries much more workplace chat than it typically does in the US.

For readers in the US, UK and Canada, the practical upshot is simpler. Scheduling lets you send a reminder to a friend in another time zone at a sensible hour, line up a birthday message the night before, or queue a customer follow-up for business hours. Small businesses that run on WhatsApp could find it especially useful.

There is no public release date yet. The feature first showed up for a limited group of Android beta testers in October, and WhatsApp started testing it with selected iPhone beta testers less than two weeks later. You cannot switch it on yourself; WhatsApp turns it on for chosen accounts.

Testing on both Android and iOS at the same time usually means a feature is getting close, and the original reports pointed to wider beta access within weeks. Meta has not commented publicly on timing. Mark Zuckerberg has said WhatsApp has more than 3 billion monthly users worldwide, so even a gradual rollout will take a while to reach everyone.

Until then, keep the app updated so the feature appears as soon as WhatsApp switches it on for your account.

Scheduling is one of several recent changes aimed at people who run their working lives through WhatsApp. The app has begun rolling out usernames, so you can connect with someone without handing over your phone number. WhatsApp Web can now make voice and video calls straight from the browser and move a call between devices. Accounts can also be registered directly on an iPad, and group chats and account security have both had upgrades. Put together, these moves make WhatsApp look less like a simple texting app and more like a rival to workplace chat tools.