WhatsApp will soon let you leave groups “silently”

(Pocket-lint) – One of the consistent parts of the WhatsApp experience over the last decade or so has been the stomach-churning fear of knowing that leaving a group is a very public act – your departure has always been announced to the whole chat when you enact it.

That’s reportedly set to change, after a beta feature was uncovered that makes it look a lot like you’ll soon be able to leave a group in a way that will only notify the administrators, rather than everyone in the chat.

It might not sound like a seismic tweak, and in many ways it’s minor, but after plenty of years using WhatsApp we’re in dozens of chats that we no longer participate in but can’t quite bring ourselves to leave in an ostentatious manner.

The news comes via a screenshot of the dialogue box that might pop up when you try to leave, which now says “Only you and group admins will be notified that you left the group”.

It was discovered by WABetaInfo but isn’t yet in testing by actual users – this means there’s no real timeline on when it might come to actual users, and there’s still a healthy chance that it doesn’t actually make it to release for a host of possible reasons.