Introduction
The Signal app offers more security features than just automatic end-to-end encryption for your communications. As an added precaution, you can turn on disappearing messages in any of your conversations to ensure that messages you send don’t hang around any longer than they need to. You can set messages to disappear between a period of five seconds and one week. Examples of all instructions in the steps can be seen in the YouTube video below.
Steps to Send Disappearing Messages on Signal on iPhone, iPad or Android
- Launch the Signal app and then open the conversation where you want to send disappearing messages.
- Tap the person or group name associated with the conversation at the top of the conversation window. A Chat Settings window is shown.
- Tap to enable “Disappearing Messages.” A slider is shown directly beneath Disappearing Messages.
- Use the slider to set any messages you send in this chat to disappear somewhere between five seconds and one week. Disappearing messages will automatically be turned on in this specific conversation. You can confirm the feature is turned on by checking for the timer icon that will now appear in your chat header. Additionally, users in the chat will receive a notification that you turned on disappearing messages.
You can turn off disappearing messages in the Signal app at any time by navigating back to the Chat Settings window and toggling off Disappearing Messages.