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How to see the editing history of a WhatsApp message: three ways to know what a text said before it was edited

WhatsApp is activating these days one of its most important innovations of recent times: the editing of messages. This means that someone can change the text of a message sent to you within 15 minutes of being sent. WhatsApp doesn’t show you what was in the message before, but there are ways to find out.

We tell you three ways you have to know what a WhatsApp message said before it was edited. All of them work today, although as time passes it is possible that some stop working. Take advantage of them, with caution, while they last.

From notification history

An old ally in similar situations, such as knowing what a deleted WhatsApp message says, is the Android notification history. It’s something like a record of all the notifications that have come to you on the mobile and it is present, in a changing way, in Android mobiles from Android 11.

By changeable we mean that it is present in some Android phones and not in others, and in some it is active by default and in others we are going to have to activate it so that it begins to save the notifications that arrive to us, so it will not serve us retroactively.

Confused

Although it’s a bit confusing, you can see the original message and the latest edit in the notification history

What you need to do is, with the notification history active, open the notification history and check the messages that have arrived, in search of messages that appear there and are not in the chat. Only the first and most recent editions will appear, so if the message was edited several times, you won’t know what it said in the intermediate editions.

The notification history changes its location from one layer of Android to another, but you should find it in the notification settings. If your mobile does not have it, you can do something similar with applications that save notifications, such as Notification History.

With an old version of WhatsApp

Not updating to the latest version of WhatsApp has its advantages due to the way in which its engineers have developed the message editing function. Each new edition is sent as a message and then it is the WhatsApp client that is responsible for replacing the old text with the new one in the chat.

In old versions of WhatsApp that were not yet ready for message editing or that do not have them active yet, the edited messages do not appear. Instead, you get the original message and a notice in the chat that “you received an edited message. You can view it if you have the latest version of WhatsApp.”

Original

Each edit to a message is sent as a new message, which WhatsApp manages to replace the old one. Older versions of WhatsApp don’t “know” this

This enables you to see what a message initially said, before it was edited, but you won’t be able to what it said after editing. It also has the downside that WhatsApp versions expire and there comes a point where the application will stop opening unless you update to a more recent version or use tools like WaTweaker, with root.

with WAMR

The best option to know both what the edited messages and the deleted messages say is WAMR, an application that is based to read WhatsApp notifications and see what has changed.

To do so, you need to install WAMR, open the app and grant it all the permissions it asks for, including access to notifications, and ask it to monitor WhatsApp. Since then will keep a sharp eye out for message notifications of WhatsApp that change.

recovered

The great advantage of WAMR over the notification history is that it shows us everything a lot more ordered and in chronological order, with a style similar to WhatsApp. In addition, we will see all the edits that have been made to the message.

WAMR is the best solution though it gets a bit messy if you have several pending messages to read, because in these cases WhatsApp sends a group notification that confuses the application. While WhatsApp doesn’t include an edit history, and we doubt it does, it’s the most reliable thing you have at your disposal.

Image | Clker-Free-Vector-Images on Pixabay

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