WhatsApp has stopped developing this long-awaited feature

WhatsApp's ‘Vacation Mode’ that has been in development for months may have been scrapped altogether.

WhatsApp stops working on vacation mode. (Bloomberg)

If you've been following WhatsApp updates, you probably heard of a feature called ‘Vacation Mode' being tested. This feature has been in development since 2018 for WhatsApp's Android and iOS apps. It lets you mute archived chats so that they remain hidden as they're supposed to. It's been almost two years since we got to know about WhatsApp's Vacation Mode and it's still not here. Now it appears that WhatsApp has altogether stopped working on this feature.

According to WABetaInfo who discovered this Vacation Mode, WhatsApp has “abandoned” this feature. WABetaInfo tweeted that this was a feature under development but WhatsApp isn't working on it anymore. Vacation Mode has been in testing but even public beta users couldn't access it. If rolled out then it would be available as “Ignore archived chats” on the app. This feature would be visible in the notifications section of WhatsApp.

Vacation mode was a feature under development for iOS and Android some months ago.

The development has been abandoned. 😔 pic.twitter.com/SzFhhYr0dr

— WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) August 12, 2020

This feature essentially lets you ignore archived chats completely. At present what happens is if you archive a chat, it goes down to the bottom. But whenever there's a new message in that archive chat it brings it back up on top. This sort of makes the feature useless for people who wish to keep archive chats hidden. 

WhatsApp's archived chats feature is however different from muting chats as those remain in the same order. When you mute a chat on WhatsApp, it appears chronologically and doesn't drop to the bottom like archived chats. WhatsApp is also working on letting users mute chats forever by removing the current one year limit.

WhatsApp regularly tests new features and usually takes months before rolling them out to users. With Vacation Mode it's not a surprise that WhatsApp may have stopped working on it since it was still in testing. We're not sure if WhatsApp plans to bring it back in the future.