Round Four of Developer Betas Brings Changes to “Unsend” and Edit in iMessage

28 JULY 2022 - The fourth betas of iOS/iPadOS/tvOS 16, macOS 13, and watchOS 9 are out to developers. The Mac Observer says the latest seeds come three-weeks after the previous builds - the longest wait between such builds since iOS 7 in 2013.

That said, there is a pretty sizable change in the fourth-betas around iMessage. At WWDC, Apple announced a couple of new features for its messaging service: The ability to edit messages, as well as the ability to “unsend” messages up to 15-minutes after the initial send. Within days, advocates for victims of domestic violence argued that both new features as announced could be detrimental to such victims. Now, a piece from 9 to 5 Mac says the fourth betas shorten the length of time a message can be unsent from 15-minutes to two-minutes. They also limit the number of times a message can be edited to five, and - perhaps most importantly - 9 to 5 Mac says “each of the edits is logged and visible to both the sender and the receiver of the iMessage.”

While “Apple has not directly addressed that topic,” the report says the “changes are clearly targeted at those concerns.”