Waiting for message
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WhatsApp has become an essential tool in our lives, to the point of being one of the most frequently opened applications throughout the day, both from our mobile phone and from our computer if we use WhatsApp Web. But also, it is an inexhaustible source of news, something boosted by the updates that its developers offer us every so often.
From the arrival of GIFs to a new functionality called WhatsApp Status that would come to compete with Snapchat and Instagram Stories, but what has been attracting users' attention lately is a strange message that appears in chats.
"Waiting for message. This can take time." What does it mean?
Perhaps on some occasion the following message has appeared in one of our chats: “Waiting for the message. This may take time.” No doubt, no matter how long we wait, nothing will appear and we will be left a little puzzled wondering what is happening. Although there is no cause for alarm, the explanation is not worrisome.
From the official WhatsApp website they explain what is happening, and in their FAQ we can see what it means that we find this message The explanation comes through the end-to-end encryption, which would prevent that message from reaching us. As they report from the messaging application, “you may have to wait a while to receive the message someone sent you because your mobile phone needs to be online to be able to encrypt the message This usually occurs when the person you are chatting with reinstalled WhatsApp recently”.
Interestingly, the solution they provide to solve this is a bit orthodox. They invite us to speed up the process by directly contacting the person we were talking to and ask them to open WhatsApp on their phone Really, since incidentally we ask them this we can also ask them what they wanted to tell us.
What is end-to-end encryption?
From WhatsApp always they have been concerned about the security and privacy of the messages from their application, for this reason they have encrypted them from end to end end the conversations in one of the latest versions of the app.
That is to say, both our text messages, photos, videos, audios, documents and even calls have absolute protection for that we can be calm.Of course, this encryption works when we and the people we write to use the latest versions of WhatsApp.
What end-to-end encryption does is make sure that those messages and documents can only be seen by the people who send them and the people who receive them. Only we and the recipient will be able to decrypt the message, something that not even the WhatsApp company itself could do. Of course, in the latest versions it is activated by default, there is no way to deactivate it
