For years, WhatsApp users have relied on third-party workarounds and clunky automation tools to send messages at predetermined times. That era appears to be drawing to a close. According to recent reporting, WhatsApp is actively developing a native scheduled messages feature — a capability that competing platforms have offered for some time and that WhatsApp’s more than two billion users have long requested.
The development, first spotted in beta builds of the app, signals a meaningful shift in how Meta’s flagship messaging platform approaches productivity and user convenience. While the feature remains under development and has not yet been rolled out to the general public, its presence in testing builds suggests that WhatsApp engineers are making serious progress toward a public release.
What the Beta Code Reveals About Scheduled Messaging
As reported by 9to5Mac, evidence of the scheduled messages feature has surfaced in recent WhatsApp beta versions. The feature appears to allow users to compose a message and select a specific date and time for it to be delivered automatically. This would work in both individual and group conversations, giving users granular control over when their communications land in recipients’ inboxes.
The interface, based on early screenshots from beta testers, reportedly integrates directly into the existing message composition bar. Users would tap an additional option — likely accessible through the attachment or send-button menu — to set a delivery schedule. The design philosophy seems consistent with WhatsApp’s broader approach: minimal visual clutter, with powerful functionality tucked just beneath the surface. WABetaInfo, the well-known WhatsApp beta tracking outlet, has been among the first to document these interface elements in detail, noting that the feature has appeared in both Android and iOS beta builds.
Why It Took WhatsApp So Long
The question many industry observers are asking is straightforward: why has it taken WhatsApp this long to build scheduled messaging? Telegram, its closest global competitor, has offered the feature since 2019. Slack, Microsoft Teams, and even Gmail have long allowed users to queue messages for later delivery. WhatsApp’s delay is notable given Meta’s vast engineering resources and the feature’s relatively straightforward technical requirements.
Part of the answer lies in WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption architecture. Unlike server-side scheduling — where a platform’s servers hold a message and release it at the appointed time — WhatsApp’s encryption model means that messages are encrypted on the sender’s device and can only be decrypted by the recipient. Implementing scheduled messages within this framework requires the sender’s device to handle the scheduling locally, ensuring the message is encrypted and transmitted at the correct time without any server-side intermediary holding plaintext content. This is a non-trivial engineering challenge, particularly when accounting for scenarios where a user’s phone might be offline, powered down, or disconnected from the internet at the scheduled send time.
The Business Case for Scheduled Messages
Beyond individual users, the feature carries significant implications for WhatsApp Business, the platform’s commercial messaging tool used by millions of small and medium-sized enterprises worldwide. Business owners in different time zones have long struggled with the timing of customer communications. A bakery in São Paulo wanting to send a promotional message to customers at 7 a.m. local time, or a consultancy in Mumbai scheduling follow-ups for London business hours, would benefit enormously from native scheduling.
Meta has been aggressively expanding WhatsApp’s business capabilities in recent years, introducing catalogs, payment integration, and AI-powered customer service tools. Scheduled messaging fits neatly into this commercial strategy. According to Meta’s most recent earnings disclosures, WhatsApp Business now serves more than 200 million monthly active users, and the company has identified business messaging as a key revenue growth vector. Giving these users scheduling tools could increase engagement and, critically, reduce the reliance on third-party scheduling services that sometimes require users to grant extensive permissions to their WhatsApp accounts — a practice that has raised security concerns.
How Competitors Have Handled the Feature
Telegram’s implementation of scheduled messages offers a useful comparison point. On Telegram, users can long-press the send button to access scheduling options, choosing a specific date and time down to the minute. The messages are stored on Telegram’s cloud servers and delivered at the appointed time, a simpler technical proposition given that Telegram does not use end-to-end encryption by default in regular chats. Telegram also allows users to send “silent messages” that arrive without triggering a notification — a related but distinct feature that WhatsApp has not yet replicated.
Google Messages, the default SMS and RCS app on many Android devices, added scheduled messaging in 2021. Apple’s iMessage introduced a similar “Send Later” feature with iOS 18 in 2024, allowing iPhone users to schedule iMessages for future delivery. The addition to iMessage was widely covered by technology publications and was seen as Apple responding to user demand that had been building for years. WhatsApp’s move follows this broader industry trend, though the encrypted messaging context adds layers of complexity that neither Google Messages nor iMessage must contend with in the same way.
Privacy and Encryption Considerations
WhatsApp’s commitment to end-to-end encryption — a feature it rolled out globally in 2016 using the Signal Protocol — means that any scheduled message implementation must keep the message content on the user’s device until it is sent. This has direct implications for reliability. If a user schedules a message for 3 a.m. but their phone has died by then, the message presumably would not be sent until the device comes back online. How WhatsApp handles these edge cases will be a telling indicator of the feature’s maturity.
Privacy advocates have generally praised WhatsApp’s encryption model, even as it has drawn criticism from law enforcement agencies worldwide who argue it hampers criminal investigations. The scheduled messages feature, if implemented client-side as expected, would not weaken this encryption in any way. The message would simply be composed, stored locally in encrypted form, and transmitted through the same secure channel at the designated time. This stands in contrast to some third-party scheduling tools that have required users to provide their WhatsApp credentials to external servers — a practice that fundamentally undermines the platform’s security guarantees.
What Remains Unknown
Several key questions remain unanswered as the feature progresses through development. First, it is unclear whether scheduled messages will be available across all conversation types — including communities, channels, and status updates — or limited to standard individual and group chats. Second, the question of editing or canceling a scheduled message before it sends has not been fully addressed in the beta builds examined so far. Telegram, for its part, allows users to view, edit, and delete scheduled messages before their delivery time, setting a high bar for WhatsApp to match.
There is also the matter of platform parity. WhatsApp operates across Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and the web. Whether scheduled messages will function identically across all these platforms at launch — or whether some will receive the feature ahead of others — remains to be seen. Historically, WhatsApp has staggered feature rollouts, with Android often receiving new capabilities before iOS, and desktop clients lagging further behind. Given that the scheduling logic must reside on the device itself, the web and desktop versions may face additional technical hurdles, since they rely on a connection to the user’s phone (or, more recently, Meta’s multi-device architecture) to function.
A Feature That Reflects WhatsApp’s Broader Evolution
The development of scheduled messages is emblematic of a broader pattern at WhatsApp: the gradual, sometimes painfully slow addition of features that users have demanded for years. The app was famously minimalist at its founding, with co-creator Jan Koum resisting the addition of features he considered bloat. Since Meta’s $19 billion acquisition in 2014 and Koum’s departure in 2018, that philosophy has shifted considerably. Recent years have brought message editing, voice message transcription, HD photo sharing, screen sharing in video calls, and AI chatbot integration.
Each of these additions has been carefully calibrated to avoid alienating WhatsApp’s massive user base, many of whom are in emerging markets with older devices and limited bandwidth. Scheduled messages, as a text-based feature with minimal data overhead, fits well within these constraints. It adds genuine utility without requiring significant additional resources from the user’s device or network connection.
For now, WhatsApp users eager to try scheduled messaging will need to wait for the feature to graduate from beta testing to a stable release. Based on WhatsApp’s typical development timeline, that could happen within the coming months — though the company has been known to keep features in testing for extended periods before pulling the trigger on a wide release. What seems clear is that the feature is no longer a matter of if, but when. And for the billions of people who rely on WhatsApp as their primary communication tool, that timeline cannot come soon enough.